Overview
The SR-71's chines, blended fuselage, and engine nacelles are continuous compound surfaces — exactly the geometry that's hardest to capture with subtractive machining. The challenge was reducing the airframe to a form that reads instantly as a Blackbird while remaining producible with available tooling and setups.
Execution
I modeled the simplified airframe in CAD, programmed the toolpaths in MasterCAM, and milled the airframe from aluminum plate on a 3-axis CNC using a fixture-plate setup. After release from the stock, the part was deburred and hand-polished, and mounted on a display stand.
