Rick Sternbach reports:

I had lunch with one of the fellows from Penwall Industries that built the Saturn V in Rancho Cucamonga for USSRC, and came away with a few interesting facts. First off, they had a total of 13 weeks from being given a go for the project to completion, so they admitted they had to hustle and may not have gotten everything perfect (especially the paint details, which we discussed some months ago). The LES motor was 10" bigger in diameter because it was either get a worker into the tube to change out the anti-collision light on top, or hire a crane every time. Guess which idea won. :)   The F-1s are fiberglas; a truck carrying them from California to Alabama smacked into a bridge (the driver took an unauthorized shortcut) and crunched one, so they had to quick make a new one and ship it.

The guy I spoke with brought along photos of the steel work and skin panels; the inner structure was big steel beams and octagonal braces. The skins were made in 1/8 sections of metal and fiberglas, mostly prepainted, stacked on a flatbed truck, and moved to Alabama. The engineering took up, IIRC, about 1/3 of their prep time, and then they blasted along with fabrication. I remember seeing the A12 crew out at the facility in CA on a TV news report a few days before Pete Conrad's death; they all looked pretty impressed at the construction effort. It was wild to see the F-1s in a raw fiberglas and sanded primer state.

BTW, the same fabrication outfit did the big Star Trek models for the ST Experience in Las Vegas, and I'm very happy about how Voyager turned out!