Making the Cowl

Small though it might be, the cowl is one of the most visible pieces of the NSD and one of the hardest to make. Other parts are curved but the cowl has compound curves and it has both negative and positive detailing which makes the mold design very complex.

I started off by trying to build one using foam and modeling clay, using the 'spare' dome as a base.

I decided that no end of tweaking was going to work. I could only ever get it looking right from one angle at a time. And this might well be the reason the cowls on the screen used props are actually a bit wonky. I decided to make a model of the cowl in Solidworks and use that to make templates.

The base of the cowl was fine so I just needed to cut out the protruding bit.

This time, the result is a lot better.

The part would 'lock' in a one part mold so the mold is a two parter. This was a mistake. It would have been much easier to do a three part with the front as one piece. This would have allowed me to make the name plate recess as a positive detail on the mold rather than trying to get a recess right on the plug.