Gary is a designer of models, mainly British aircraft, who posts frequently on the Paper Modelers Forum, and makes his designs freely available there. He made this design in response to a challenge - his response was this thread.
The Henderson Motorcycle Company was founded in 1911 in Detroit by the brothers William and Tom Henderson. They made a series of motorcycle models from 1911 to 1917, characterised by low-slung four-cylinder inline engines mounted longitudinally, and a long wheelbase to accommodate them. In 1917 the Hendersons sold the company to the Excelsior Motor Mfg. & Supply Co. of Chicago. They stayed with the company briefly, but left in 1919 (Tom) and 1920 (William). A succession of further designs ensued, culminating in the "Streamline" of 1929, in two models, the KJ and the uprated "Special" KL from 1930. However, these only lasted until 1931, when the business was abruptly shut down by the owner.
Despite the name, the "Streamline" was not really streamlined in the usual sense, beyond having rather more rounded mudguards and fuel tank than previous models. However, a 1930 example was bought by Orley Ray Courtney, a sheet-metal worker who then worked at the Oldsmobile Motor Works in Lansing, Michigan. He decided to produce an Art Deco-style fully-enclosed body for the motorcycle, inspired by the Chrysler Airflow motor car. This was finished in 1935, but never taken beyond this prototype stage.
The model comes as a PDF file containing 8 bitmap pages of parts, plus a page of assembly drawings. It was developed as a Pepakura model, and Gary made available the Pepakura file for a (mostly) untextured version in his design thread. This was invaluable, both for understanding the parts configuration and to produce a vector PDF file which I could feed into Inkscape where I needed to make changes for the sake of buildability. The model was designed from undimensioned drawings and photographs, so is not to a precise scale. Gary estimated roughly 1:9, so I printed at 64% to achieve 1:14.
|
|
|
|
|
|