Revell 1:600 U.S.S. Enterprise (Deep Space 9/Smithsonian 1991 version)
1April 2, 2023April 2nd, 2023 - The traditional box shot, which honestly I had to tweak a bit because the direct light from outside washed everything out. I've had this in the stash for a while, but now is the time. Following my last project, which was an Enterprise Refit, I thought let's stay with the Enterprise and use this kit as a stepping stone to either the Galileo shuttlecraft (for which I have ordered an interior kit that will probably take years to get here from the US), or to the 'normal' AMT Constitution class kit. And yes, I will be lighting this one, but using softer wire this time. 😄
2April 2, 2023April 2nd, 2023 - Everything washed and clean! A sprue for each saucer half...
3April 2, 2023April 2nd, 2023 - ... a sprue for the four nacelle halves and nacelle detailing (top), plus a sprue for the hull halves and more detail parts...
4April 2, 2023April 2nd, 2023 - ... deflector dish, bridge dome, impulse engines, plus the gigantic three-part display base...
5April 2, 2023April 2nd, 2023 - ... and finally, a sprue full of clear parts - windows, Bussard collectors, and so on.
6April 2, 2023April 2nd, 2023 - I also have this, the Green Strawberry PE kit for this model. It includes better nacelle and pylon details, a better impulse engine, a bridge, and a shuttlebay. Honestly, I think I am going to skip the shuttlebay, which involves cutting out some parts of the hull interior and looks super fiddly and awkward. Plus, I am going to light this one up, and... ech. Too much. I know my limits. 😄
7April 3, 2023April 3rd, 2023 - Yesterday (the 3rd), I spent some more time studying the instructions. The manual is a beautiful thing - glossy, full colour, and insanely detailed. Anyway, I clipped the sprues into smaller sets of things that I wanted to prime already, and things not. I also started gluing the PE parts into place.
After studying the Greenstrawberry instruction sheet (and having earlier decided to skip the shuttlebay), I started with the easiest bit - the impulse engine detailing. The part glues *onto* the oval rim shape there, instead of *into* that oval shape. I will drill out the appropriate holes to let engine light out later.
I then started gluing the detailed parts onto the nacelle fins, but immediately got into a mess and decided that the parts as tooled were detailed enough without me making an unholy mess of them for really, not that much extra difference. 😄
8April 3, 2023April 3rd, 2023 - I then started putting the bridge module together, but both the captain's chairs (they give you two, because seriously those things are microscopic), went flying off into space at different points. I mean, wow, I was flabbergasted by how fiddly the folding and gluing was there. So, in the end, I abandoned that too. 😄 Yeah, yeah, so sue me. 😄 Hey, at least I got a nice impulse deck going on. 😄
In this photo you can see (if you squint a bit) the difference between the Citadel Grey Seer primer on the top nacelle set, and the bare plastic on the inside of the bottom pair. I love that Grey Seer, it goes down so smooth and makes such a nice surface for the acrylic.
9April 3, 2023April 3rd, 2023 - Engineering hull halves with a small Bluetooth laptop mouse for size comparison. (The mouse mat is larger than usual too).
10April 3, 2023April 3rd, 2023 - The rest of the parts that I decided to prime already. Clockwise from top left: nacelle details and a Bussard base (the hole accommodates an LED if you want to light it); impulse engines and that 'spine' piece atop the impulse deck, plus the fantail doors for the shuttlebay; one part of the three-part deflector dish assembly, which doubles as a twist-lock entrance for use with the official lighting kit; two little dagger-shaped pieces that hold the ship to the stand; a whole mess of nacelle details; more nacelle details, with the deflector 'spike', another Bussard cap, and the little plate that fits over the pylons when you glue them into the hull; the pylons; pylon inner pieces, and the deflector dish and the third piece of that whole unit.
11April 4, 2023April 4th, 2023 - More pictures of painted things! Three more, for today's work. It may seem boring, but the whole painting phase in this build is something that I'm doing differently than usual, and so I'm interested to see how this goes. (And so far, so good!).
Basically, instead of priming and then painting the main hull colour, then masking everything and painting the details, I'm priming > details > mask the painted details > spray the main hull colour. A small change, but maybe significant?
The other paint-related factor here is with the 80 million clear parts for the windows, and the fact that I need to light-block and diffuse the interior. I'm dithering a bit with this, because I don't know whether to glue the windows in, then mask them (all 80 million of them), then block and diffuse, orrrrr... block and diffuse and glue the windows in, risking there being a lesser bond because of gluing to the paint. I'm pretty sure that I'll have to paint and diffuse first, or else there is a risk of light leaks around all those millions of windows. *sigh*
Here you can see how I've further broken down the sprues by colour and organized them into groups. There are 4 or 5 shades of white, grey, and silver listed in the manual, including the hull colour which is itself a mixture. However, I don't like the very dark grey that they want you to use on, for example, the rear caps of the nacelles, so I've modulated the palette down a bit from there.
12April 4, 2023April 4th, 2023 - Anyway! Surprise, surprise - I dipped back into the PE pack for the Bussard collector 'spikes'. (Just visible in the middle two domes). Another fiddly job that I managed to clumsily bodge together. Purists and more scrupulous modellers would be horrified to see how badly I handled that, and the little blob of CA glue that ran down into the dome. 😄 But! With both those interior domes -- as well as the larger, smoother domes that fit over them to create some depth -- sprayed with Tamiya TS-92 (Metallic Orange), aaaaaand the backplate through which the LED will poke painted Tamiya TS-21 (Gold), I think it will look okay. Sort of swirly and mysterious in a non-canonical way. 😄
13April 4, 2023April 4th, 2023 - Final picture today. I spray in the garage, leave the parts there for a few hours, then bring them in to the house once the smell has died down a bit. Then I leave them for 20+ hours before I work with them again...
14April 6, 2023April 5th, 2023 - More detail painting today. It took me a couple of days to mask up the nacelles finally. I decided to tape them together and spray the detail parts as one piece, as they would be if it was all glued together. This business of spraying and then masking the details before then laying down the overall hull colour is an interesting way of doing things, and I'm enjoying it I have to say. I suppose I mean that I'm less uptight about overspray on the details, because now I *can* overspray a bit, if necessary (as here on those dark ends of the nacelles), because afterwards I'm going to cover it all up with the hull colour anyway.
Speaking of hull colours, here you can get a glimpse of the Tamiya AS-20 Insignia White (US Navy) that I picked out. It's a slightly off-white colour, like snow that's a little bit wet and so slightly transparent. I've got it on the pylon pieces, but not the nacelle tubes -- that's still primer. (There's a better, more contrasty picture of the AS-20 in a moment).
15April 6, 2023April 6th, 2023 - I finally bit the bullet and started light-blocking the interior parts. Got my brand-new can of Vallejo Black primer, warmed it up, shook it up, started spraying - uh-oh! Silver! 😄 I looked at the can again. Sure enough, the metal 'dome' between the top of the cylinder and the plastic nozzle was... silver. I know, I know. But those Vallejo primer cans only show their colour on that dome part - there is literally no text, colour swatch, or any kind of indicator on the entire giant-ass can other than that dome part. Anyway, not complaining, I did laugh. Compared to the acrylic Humbrol metallic silver that I use for light diffusion though, it is a flatter, more metallic-looking silver.
Anyway, lacking the time and money to order or go out and get an actual can of black primer, I let the silver dry and then sprayed everything with the rest of a can of Tamiya TS-29 Semi Gloss Black. Which looks okay, but I haven't tested it yet. We'll see.
16April 6, 2023April 7th, 2023 - Back to the deets. This kit has 117 pieces. Minus 5 pieces for the stand, 2 saucer halves, and 2 engineering hull halves, literally every other piece of kit is either a window or something nacelle-related. 😄 Seriously, I thought I knew this ship inside out but I never realised how much stuff is stuck to the nacelles before I started making this kit. 😄
Anyway, the pylon parts down the middle are AS-20 hull colour, as well as the two end caps. The round gold discs, which are part of the Bussard collector assemblies, are TS-21 Gold. The Bussard caps (with the dodgy PE parts glued in), and the deflector dish assembly, are all TS-92 Metallic Orange. And the little boxes and pipes and the impulse engine are all either AS-26 (Light Ghost Grey) or AS-7 Neutral Gray (USAAF).
17April 6, 2023April 7th, 2023 - I did a bit more gluing today too - the nacelle end caps and in the background, the entire deflector dish assembly. Note that with the nacelle end caps, there is one correct way to attach them. The bubble parts have small pins at 12 and 6 o'clock, and the big scoopy part has matching holes and a recessed circle shape for the caps to fit snugly in and look more like they are something larger that is poking out of the nacelle tube. Well, because of the funny, curved, scoopy shape, if you plug 'em in the wrong way around, it will look like the mother of all puttying jobs, but in fact when attached the correct way around, they fit perfectly. 🙂
18April 12, 2023April 11th, 2023 - No work for the last few days because of the Easter weekend, but Tuesday I'm back with a vengeance! I feel as though this project is quickly coming together, even with the extra work with the lighting. Having painted lots of the detailed parts and the nacelle details (had to do one of them twice because I made a mistake with the masking), and primed and painted the hull and saucer pieces and also light blocked them, I need to start doing some lighting work.
So! I had another crack at putting together a 3mm diode with a resistor. All my pre-wired diodes are 5mm, which is too big for the Bussard collectors, but I do have a bunch of 3 mm diodes with separate resistors. I had tried putting them together before at some point, but never got it right. This time, I figured it out! The long pin on a diode is the positive pole, and while it doesn't matter for my purposes which pole I solder the resistor to, I put it on the positive pole anyway. The first time it didn't work, but then the second time I put the resistor itself on the opposite way. And bingo!
19April 12, 2023April 11th, 2023 - This is for whoever needs or wants it, and mostly for me so I don't mess this up again! 😄
20April 12, 2023April 11th, 2023 - So, I made two of these, one for each nacelle. Pictured here are the discs that hold the 'official' kit bulbs. Now, I was going to poke the LEDs in wire-first from the front (the smooth, gold-painted side), but having put the wires and resistors and everything together, they wouldn't fit. And the little holding tube thing on the back of the discs is about 3mm itself. Sooo, I Dremeled the buggers off. Inset photo you can see the smooth, cut-down discs. (Note how the metallic gold paint shines so differently depending on the angle -- nice isn't it?). 😄
21April 12, 2023April 11th, 2023 - I hot-glued the (yellow) LEDs into the discs, and also cut two lengths of wire, stripped the ends, and tinned them. (Looks like one of those anatomical diagrams of eyeballs with optic nerves). 😄
A note about the wires here. I'm using this new, thick, speaker wire instead of the solid-core wire that betrayed me with the Enterprise Refit. It's great - already joined, so I just split it a few centimeters and strip the ends. However, it's still too thick to poke into the holes into my breadboard testing unit (3 photos back). So I decided to use short pieces of the solid-core wire to create the wired diodes, which I will then solder to the flexible, multi-strand speaker wire.
22April 12, 2023April 11th, 2023 - Whilst I had all the gear out, I finally drilled out the impulse engines -- two pairs of holes and (I couldn't resist it!) the centre hole too. I mean, if I'm going this far, I may as well go a step further. Call me a rebel, call me a fool, I don't care, I want lights! LIGHTS! AhahahAHahahHAhAHhahaAAaaa!! *cough* Sorry.
23April 12, 2023April 12th, 2023 - This morning I sprayed the silver diffusion layer into the saucer halves and engineering halves. I taped the holes in the saucer halves, but didn't have time to tape the window holes in the engy hull, and -- loe and behold -- some silver paint dribbled out and made a small gloopy mess on the outside. I'll need to sand it down when it's dry and touch up with the AS-20, but okay.
24April 13, 2023April 13th, 2023 - Again I got that feeling that I'm dithering when I could be more decisive. I think mostly just because I've had to do a few re-paints of the hull pieces, and waiting for the big bits to dry and be usable can get a bit frustrating I suppose. 😄 Anyway! Speaking of re-paints, the Bussard collector saga continues!
The super-gluing of the PE parts into the inner Bussard domes was, as I think I mentioned earlier, a bit messy and imperfect. I was not crazy about how the PE parts looked bc I couldn't get them in properly, and there were a couple of streaks and blobs of CA glue in there, aaaand... yuk. But, I also thought they looked a bit swirly and mysterious, like in the show.
But today I decided not to compromise, so I pulled out the PE bits and got the ol' Hybrid Nail Polish Remover (choc full of acetone!) and cleaned away the CA glue and blobby paint marks. Then I rinsed them in warm water, dried them nicely, and repainted them. But! I must have been a bit overzealous with the paint, because I left them to dry open-side up, and when I checked on them a couple of hours later, the paint had pooled up into a dark blob at the bottom. Sooo, I turned them all over, dome-side up, and *carefully* sprayed them again. I wedged them into this bit of plastic-foam packaging I found in the garage, and after a quick test this evening, the light looks good. Phew!
25April 13, 2023April 13th, 2023 - What to do with a set of nicely painted Bussard collectors? Glue them into the nacelles of course! That meant soldering on the extension wires, which I did first of all. One set of negative wires really did *not* want to be soldered together, so, fingers crossed. I think they'll be okay, but eh. Everything is glued together now and I can't easily test the connection, with my chonky speaker wires. Maybe tomorrow I'll have a go. But the nacellles are both now wired for lighting, and glued together. Details are painted. Next I will mask the details and paint them the hull colour, then stick on the 80 million other bits and pieces that go on these things.
Anyway, inset photo is a bit of electronics fun for you lighting fans. 😄
26April 13, 2023April 13th, 2023 - Last bit of business for today, so that I'm ready with the pylons when the nacelles are all painted and detailed. Each pylon has a single-block window and a paired window. They push in quite firmly, so I just ran some Tamiya Thin around the edges. All four windows are dark, so I tried cheating and using a black permanent marker pen to black out the reverse of the windows, but that didn't work. So I did it properly and painted the buggers with the Vallejo Black figure paint.
27April 14, 2023April 14th, 2023 - Bouyed by my success with the pylon windows, and still waiting for at least the evening when a good 24 hours will have passed for the nacelle glue to dry, today I pressed on with the saucer windows. I'd been worrying about how to do this for a while, because I'm always stressing about having paint-free surfaces to glue to. I could have easily glued the windows in first and then carefully masked them - but there would still be some bare plastic around the actual extruded parts of the windows that fit through the window holes. And so, I decided ultimately to take no chances with light leaks and of course fully primed, blocked and diffused the interiors.
The Tamiya Thin happily ate some of the Humbrol Silver diffusion layer but did not really harm the Vallejo Black Primer, so that's good. I also used Revell Contacta Pro for a lot of the windows and that had an even lighter effect on the silver paint. All told, the job turned out pretty well. Both glues also sucked themselves in, between the hull plastic and the window plastic, so all I was doing was pressing the clear parts into their holes and gluing around the edges.
Note also that a couple of window pieces have the wrong numbers in the instructions. For example, part 21 (one of the tiny orange dot windows) is actually 116, which is the twin of 115.
28April 14, 2023April 14th, 2023 - Except, of course, there had to be a little bit of window drama! 😄 Which is -- can you guess? -- I had already lost one window piece! I know, I know. Well, I took it off the sprue a couple of weeks ago to do a test fit (first mistake), and then put it somewhere *really* safe (second and biggest mistake). Anyway, ech, "nobody's fault but mine", as Robert Plant likes to sing. Fortunately, I had a plan. I taped over the empty window holes on the outside...
29April 14, 2023April 14th, 2023 - ... and then squeezed out some Formula 560, a.k.a. "canopy glue". This is what I did my big Reliant windows with, and it works really well. Definitely recommend this stuff for making windows in holes, or just doing what it was designed to do - attach clear parts without leaving visible glue marks. (Hey, wait a second...) 😄
30April 14, 2023April 14th, 2023 - From the outside, tape removed. There are a couple of tiny pin-pricks in a couple of the windows where air bubbles had formed, so I've subsequently put another thin layer on top, just to be sure.
31April 14, 2023April 14th, 2023 - As you can see, from a normal viewing distance and lit up, the difference is not noticeable.
32April 14, 2023April 14th, 2023 - That's the top half of the saucer. Either side of the bridge dome you can see two tiny orange dots. (Trust me, they're orange). Those are also windows, believe it or not. Although I brush-painted them along with the navigation lights (using the trusty Vallejo figure paints), a bit of orange rubbed off. So, I got a tiny piece of solid-core wire, dipped it into the cap of the orange paint bottle, and literally poked the paint back onto those two tiny dots. 😄
33April 16, 2023April 16th, 2023 - Yesterday (the 15th), I masked and painted the nacelles. They're now drying on a pair of kebab skewers jammed into a piece of foam insulation. So with the nacelles on the go again, and the pylons ready to assemble, today I turned my attention to the engineering hull. But before I started sticking all those windows in (none missing this time!), I thought I'd better start looking at the stand (finally).
My original plan was a plug and a switch -- the same small, oval, black plastic switch that I rescued from the Enterprise Refit after the wiring in there broke. But the base for this kit is way too slim to accommodate anything by itself. However, the vertical stand is quite wide and spacious towards the bottom and at the back (it's the same kind of triangular shape as the star-shaped Enterprise emblem). It's enough to comfortably fit the DC plug, and could maaaaaybe fit the switch too, but I suddenly thought eh, why bother with the switch?
34April 16, 2023April 16th, 2023 - So, I began by taping the hull together and taping the vertical stand together, then lining everything up, eyeballing it, making a red pencil mark (didn't have a normal pencil handy), and finally Dremeling an oblong hole in the base of the ship, and in the top of the stand. Here you can see a short piece of speaker wire that I used to test the holes!
The other thing you can see, which looks rather strange, is the DC plug sticking out the wrong way around. 😄 My plan is to have the body of the plug inside the stand, and the actual pluggy bit sticking out. So I stuck the pluggy bit into the hole that I Dremeled there to make sure it fits. And it does! 😄
35April 16, 2023April 16th, 2023 - Window time! I mostly used the Revell Contacta for the hull windows. It seems a bit less aggressive on the paint. Anyway, the first side took ages - 2 whole episodes of Frasier. 😄 The second side, I knew what I was doing, there were less pieces, and so that only took one Frasier. 😄 Here you can see where I've 'turned out the lights' with black paint. I painted out the first two or three windows according to the instructions, but then I thought, eh, we could have some fun here, and I started to imagine what all the rooms were behind those windows, and how some people are working in them, and some not. 😄 Actually it always fascinated me, watching TOS, how some windows were dark. Made the ship seem much more realistic, and lived in, and somehow friendly and inviting.
36April 16, 2023April 16th, 2023 - Anyway, here you can see the end result. Maybe did a few too many on the neck, but eh. Each side has a different pattern of on and off lights, so that should add some variety. On most of the later, 24th-century ships there are so many windows that the effect often gets lost, I think. But on the Constitution class, it's quite evident who's doing what, where.
37April 16, 2023April 17th, 2023 - I did lots of things today, starting with the saucer. First of all, I cut up some of this great plasticy paper that I got from some old packaging. It's like oven baking paper, but thicker and, as I said, more plasticy. I taped little squares over the four "windows" (acc. to E.A.S.) in the upper saucer half, and over the bridge dome and planetary sensor array dome in the lower saucer half. Then I blobbed some hot glue across one edge of each piece of tape to permanently attach the diffusion squares.
38April 16, 2023April 17th, 2023 - Next, I measured out some 'warm' LED tape, and fiddled around checking that it would fit and so on. I found that even a small bit of tape in the middle there lit up all the windows beautifully. (Even without a folded-back piece shining into the middle 'pit', those lower and upper lights lit up beautifully). Although, the light looked a little too bluey, which I suppose is an effect of the metallic silver diffusion coat. Anyway, no matter, it looks good.
39April 16, 2023April 17th, 2023 - Here you can kind of see. You can also see that I realized that I could just jam the chonky, tinned speaker wires into the DC socket and test everything that way.
40April 16, 2023April 17th, 2023 - So, I glued the lid on. To my surprise, there's a quite wicked gap around part of the front there. When the clips come off I'll putty the gap and then give a quick spray.
41April 16, 2023April 17th, 2023 - Saucer done, I finished up the nacelles. In a nutshell, I removed all the masking tape, glued the 'exhaust' caps on to the rear of the nacelles, stuck all the other doo-dads and pipes and things on, and then, finally, the exterior Bussard collector domes. Before I stuck the domes on, I dipped an earbud into the XXXX-strength acetone nail polish remover and swirled it around inside the domes to remove the thick blobs of dry paint in there (see picture 24). I discovered that you can actually even be a bit artistic, in the way you leave a kind of swirly trail in there. No more photos of the nacelles or Bussards because frankly I forgot. 😄 I always imagined that this would be a major 'moment' in the build, but with everything already painted it just all went together so smoothly and quickly, it was done before I knew it! And there we have the result - two beautiful engines!
42April 16, 2023April 17th, 2023 - Final thing today. When I get close to being able to put completed sub-assemblies together and have to start thinking about decals and varnishes and so on, I sit down and plan out the last steps and put them in a numbered task list that I print out and use to guide me through the last part of the build. So I did that, and it made me focus on how I'm going to get the nacelles and pylon all put together, decalled and varnished.
To do that, I need to make more holes in the base of the main pylon structure, and to do that, I needed to see how it looks when put together. So, one rubber band and a couple of small pencil marks later, and I'm ready to drill. Maybe tomorrow. We'll see.
43April 18, 2023April 19th, 2023 - Whilst I had the two hull halves rubber-banded together, I thought I'd try dry-fitting the deflector dish. Interestingly, given the reputation that this kit has for being well tooled and a good fit, I had a real problem fitting it in. There are three protuberances around the opening in the hull, at 3, 6, and 9 o'clock. What it feels like, and looks like, is that the protuberances are designed to kind of 'grab' the deflector dish unit, so that once it's in there, even un-glued, it could never fall out. That's because this is where you access the battery when you install the official lighting kit. And it does feel good and secure once it's in there, but the problem is that being rigid plastic without any flexibility, you can't t push it in without splitting the seams on the hull a bit.
That's my sense of it anyway. So for better or for worse, I glued it into place in one side of the hull. We'll see if that comes back to haunt me later I suppose. 😄
44April 17, 2023April 18th, 2023 - Gloss coat on the nacelles, and post-puttying paint touch-up on the saucer. I had thought earlier today that I'm finally done painting this bloody saucer, buuut, the masking tape on the windows and so on left sharp lines that I failed to sand smoothly without roughing up the rest of the paint! *sigh* So, I will have to wait a bit to get some more hull paint and touch it up *again*. 😄 But I can carry on with the rest of it until then. 🙂
45April 18, 2023April 19th, 2023 - The other thing I did today is drill the holes in the pylon pieces through which to feed the nacelle wires. Here you can see how it all looks unglued, with a couple pieces of test wire. The fit is not bad. With glue it should be fine. But I am considering patching in a solid-core 'bridge' from the top of the pylons down into the hull. idk, let's see what transpires at the moment that I sit down to do all that. 🙂
46April 18, 2023April 19th, 2023 - Another view of the drilled holes. I lined up all three drill holes to be behind the windows in the pylons, which take up space inside that interior pylon space. With thinner wire, that may not be an issue given that all the windows are dark, but with this thicker speaker wire, it works better.
47April 22, 2023April 23rd, 2023 - The weekend! I made my semi-traditional trip to the two big modelling shops in town today, looking for more Tamiya AS-20 Insignia White so that I can do the final final final touch-ups on the saucer, buuut, the one store that I thought should have it was in fact sold out! (in my excitement I misinterpreted the traffic light availability system on their site). However, I did manage to get some more Tamiya TS-29 Semi Gloss Black, so I finished spraying the black coat on the stand. Tomorrow I'll bang out the gold and bingo.
On a side note, today I also went to the post office and picked up my Galileo Shuttle interior parts pack, all the way from HDA Modelworx in Texas! I think Galileo will be my summer project.
48April 25, 2023April 24th, 2023 - So, whilst I've been in a holding pattern with the rest of the ship, waiting for the paint, I've been working on the stand. Here I'm test-fitting the DC socket in the stand. The thing here is to notice the gap on the narrow side of the wedge. This is as close as I can get those edges together, and to get it even this close I had to slice some of the extra black plastic off the plug, and glue it down sideways. That's why I then decided to glue the two halves together and then press the stand into the base, to help keep the shape. But first...
49April 25, 2023April 25th, 2023 - ...I hot-glued the plug in (using a small blob of the legendary poster-tack to hold it in place), and attached a good length of wire. Here you can see the wire poking out of the hole I cut in the top of the stand.
50April 25, 2023April 25th, 2023 - Gold paint went down nice and smooth the day before, and here's the whole thing assembled. The gap at the front I filled with a couple of lines of Vallejo Acrylic Putty, then re-sprayed the black. Today I also touched up the black star symbol too.
51April 25, 2023April 25th, 2023 - And finally, I hot glued the stand into the base, even though it's naturally a nice tight fit. No more stand pictures until it's finished (gloss-decal-gloss)! 😄
52April 27, 2023April 27th, 2023 - And here it is, the finished display stand! Citadel Grey Primer, Tamiya Semi Gloss Black, and Tamiya Metallic Gold, plus some 3 mm speaker wire and a 12v DC socket! The fun detail here is the dedication plaque decal -- I have cemented my choice of naming this ship Constellation. A very TAS-like Constellation, captained by the redoubtable William Windom, before he went totally bonkers. The implication of Kirk's words when he praises Matt Decker before the mission, and when he eulogizes him afterwards, is that he was a Kirk-like Starfleet legend himself, even a hero of Kirk's. So let's imagine that he didn't have all that aggro with the Doomsday Machine, and in some alternate, TAS-looking universe, is still a living legend there. And as a bonus, I now have a nice Enterprise dedication plaque decal for my next TOS-era Enterprise! (The 50th anniversary kit is sitting on my shelf as we speak!). 😄
53April 29, 2023April 28th, 2023 - Back on track!! I got paid earlier this week and immediately ordered a can of AS-20 from an online marketplace (my modelling shops still didn't have any!). That arrived today, so I masked up the saucer and gave the rough spots another coat this morning.
This evening I took the saucer and stuck the final pieces on - the impulse engines and that 'rib' piece that travels from the impulse engines towards the bridge. A few days go though (in the middle of all that stand-building activity), I also took the Dremel and made a slot in the saucer about as wide as the holes in the impulse deck, through which to let the impulse engine light. (Top Left). But how to colour it? I had thought about sticking a piece of plastic or gel in there, but it would be too fiddly. Instead, I hit upon the ol' 'canopy glue', Formula 560. I filled up the slot (Top Right), let it dry nice and clear (Bottom Right), then painted it orange with some of the usual Vallejo figure paint (Bottom Left). "Sunburst Orange" or something like that.
54April 29, 2023April 28th, 2023 - I also stuck the shuttlebay doors into one half of the secondary hull. At the top of the door piece there is a tiny rectangular hole (visible in the right picture), into which you glue a tiny rectangular window. To get that flippin' window into place, I stuck a blob of poster-tack into the door (which also helps with light blocking), and pushed the rectangular window into it (left picture). I then nudged it into place with some tweezers and kissed it with Tamiya Extra Thin. Much easier than trying to wedge it in manually. Anyway, I now have only one clear part left on the sprue, and that's the little dome window that also sits above the shuttlebay doors. 😄
55April 29, 2023April 28th, 2023 - Final thing tonight - wired up the saucer and nacelles for a bit of a lighting test and light leak test. Here we see the saucer with the orange-painted impulse engines, and the green- and red-painted running lights, which I think look really good. Leaks are not too bad on the upper saucer and rim.
56April 29, 2023April 28th, 2023 - The lower saucer has more spots, possibly because the LED tape is glued to it. I think also that some of the leaks around the window clear parts might be the result of the glue eating a layer of paint there. I was expecting some fuzziness around the windows, but it turned out better than I had thought it would.
57April 29, 2023April 28th, 2023 - The two nacelles have some quite intense light leak there! Not sure what I'll do about that tbh. Will have to noodle on it a bit. Most probably I will try to mix as similar a shade as possible to the Tamiya sprays there, by using the Vallejo acrylic figure paints, and touch those places up. Hmm.
I also want to point something out here for those of you who also one day make this kit. You can see those three dark grey blocks behind the orange Bussard collector dome. Notice how the one on the right is not level with the other two - there's a gap at the bottom. That is because under the blocks are two pegs, and in the nacelle part are two holes (for each block, of course). But despite appearing totally symmetrical, they are not! The pegs are designed to fit only one way, so be careful when you fit the blocks. Dry fit first, and then make sure that you put down and pick up those blocks the same way when you glue them! 😄
58April 29, 2023April 29th, 2023 - Fortune smiled one me today - it's Saturday! And that means a run into town for some other, regular errands, and a nice side trip to my favourite model shop on the way home. 😄 The solution to the nacelle light-leak fixing problem came into my head last night as I sat staring at the leaks. I was reluctant to mess around mixing paints and brushing them on because the colours would never match and the job would look bad. But I did not fancy fiddling around with masking tape trying to mask the nacelles either. But then I wondered, what if I had some of that masking paper, or masking sheets, whatever they're called. Perhaps it would somehow be more helpful? In the shop (still no more AS-20 by the way!), I bought a pack of 5 sheets of this Tamiya masking paper. And wow! I am in LOVE! 😄 It's thinner than the Tamiya tape or Scotch Blue tape that I use, almost like onion skin, but still with that good plasticy feel. And printed with a grid of 1 mm squares! Here you can see how I managed to much more precisely mask the windows again on the bottom of the saucer.
59April 29, 2023April 29th, 2023 - And here you can see how I swaddled my two engine-babies up with thick green craft paper and a bunch of precision-cut Tamiya masking paper. Being able to measure and cut to 1 mm precision is a complete game changer. I mean it, this stuff is brilliant! There will only be one small sacrifice with this approach, and that is that the sides of the three 'blocks' will get hull colour, as will the two patches of stripey banding between them. However, those two stripey parts I *can* colour-match pretty well using the figure paints, and they're seriously tucked away anyway. The sides of the blocks don't concern me too much either, because they were somehow a little bit scratched and gluey anyway, so this will in fact be an improvement. I just now sprayed them, so we'll have a look at them tomorrow. (Those are pencil marks between the blocks, just to remind me where exactly the leaks are!)
60April 29, 2023April 29th, 2023 - Here's the saucer again, still with the Tamiya paper masking and a couple blobs of poster-tack on the nav lights. As you can see, the light leaks have been fixed. Yay! *Somewhere in space, Mr. Scott nods his approval*
61April 30, 2023April 30th, 2023 - Small but significant steps today! First, I signed off on the saucer repaints -- at laaaaast! Ye gods, was that saucer driving me crazy! I think I've kind of hit up against one of the limitations of spraying with cans, in how thick that paint comes out. I can do more, thinner layers by holding the can further away, but this wastes a lot of paint and time. It's only really an issue when you peel off any masking tape and then you see the outline of the tape embossed into the paint.
Next, I added some acrylic putty to the tiny seems between the three nacelle 'blocks' and the nacelle tubes, which only repainting and close scrutiny really revealed to me (but which should probably have been obvious in terms of their potential to leak). I then sprayed those parts again.
Finally, I glossed the top of the saucer with the ol' Tamiya TS-13, then after a few hours flipped it over and glossed the bottom, as well as the pylon inners and the two halves of the engineering hull. Next will be some tiny amount of weathering. I'm getting closer! 😄
62May 1, 2023May 2nd, 2023 - With the gloss dry on everything, and the light-leak re-paint on the nacelles dry, I took the 'bandages' off the patients and tested them again. Fixed! However, the little beads of putty and the hull-coloured sides of those three blocks are more noticeable than I had anticipated. So, I decided to get the Vallejo Black Wash out and just do a little touch up around those areas. This worked out rather well, to my dirt-obsessed eye anyway. And since I had everything on the go, I did the rest of the washes too. Meaning, the notorious engraved lines on the nacelles and engineering hull.
At first, I was blobbing the wash into those lines and then rubbing a cotton bud left-right across the lines, all up and down their length. This worked quite well so I did the same thing on the starboard half of the hull, but this was using up a lot of cotton buds. So, on the port side I blobbed all the lines at once, and then just rubbed the whole thing down immediately with a clean, soft cloth. That looked really good, so I did the same thing on the top of the saucer, rubbing the wash off from the centre out to the edge, in quarters. Finally, for the bottom of the saucer, I evolved my technique again by simply blobbing out a drop of wash from the plastic bottle into each quarter of the saucers, and then rubbing it down with the cloth. This worked really, really well, and depending how things look tomorrow in the light of day (it's about 2 am now), I might just do the hull and saucer again. (Note the blob of poster-tack on the nacelle fin bottom-left; I accidentally broke it off! Now it's glued again, and the poster-tack keeps it at the right angle while drying).
63May 3, 2023May 3rd-4th, 2023 - Last night (the third) and this morning (the 4th) I whipped out the warm water, tweezers, knife, and Micro Sol. Decal time! It seems to me, subjectively speaking at least, that there are not as many decals in this kit as I had in the last few. The red-striped 'penant' decals, the reg numbers and ship names and the pylon inners make up most of the work. If you just did those ones and left it there, you'd be fine.
Here you can see how you have to slice up those long nacelle penants into three, so that you can slip in the Constellation registry numbers (1071) as I did (or Potemkin if you fancy), in place of the default Enterprise numbers (1701). Obviously, the final results are not perfectly straight (lol), but not too bad either. Part of the reason for that is that...
64May 3, 2023May 3rd-4th, 2023 - The problem with decaling this kit is that the ship parts are basically totally smooth compared to the movie-era ships, with all their tiles and aztecing and hull plating and whatnot. This fact, plus their roundness and being covered in TS-13 Gloss, meant that the decals really wanted to slip and slide. 😄 It was great fun for the decals, but not so much for me. 😄 Ultimately though, the only decal that 'moved' and then dried is a small yellow square on the bridge dome.
65May 3, 2023May 3rd-4th, 2023 - Now, if you want to carry on with the decals, there are 50,000 tiny little ones, mostly extra windows, lit and unlit, plus these little numbers that go along both sides of the ship. I decided to add the little numbers, because they look quite cool there imo.
66May 3, 2023May 3rd-4th, 2023 - Here you can see the pylon inner decals, wet and wrinkly from the Micro Sol. As close as I looked, I could not tell if they were one long strip or four blocks per strip. Turns out they were individual blocks! Still, the modern Italian-made Polar Lights decals are super thick and juicy and a real pleasure to work with, so I just soaked each strip and slid them off the paper one after the other.
67May 3, 2023May 3rd-4th, 2023 - Speaking of the quality of the decals, I had only one problem, which I'd never had before. Again, the name and number in this photo are wet and wrinkly from the Micro Sol. But the top of the first "L" in "CONSTELLATION" is actually broken. That's because it just would not come off the paper, and by the time I determined this fact, the whole rest of the name was floating. Sooo, I had no choice really but to break it off.
Happily though, I fixed it later after everything was dry. First, I took an upright part of an "L" from "POTEMKIN", but because of the font scaling, that upright part was a hair too thick, and it looked odd. Very noticeable. So I studied the decals on the sheet, and determined that the "I" in "ENTERPRISE" was the same thickness, so I snipped that out and laid it on top. Looks good! Everything has a gloss protective coat on top now, except for the lower saucer half, and so tomorrow I'll matt varnish the hull and nacelles with Tamiya TS-80.
68May 6, 2023May 5th, 2023 - Lots of progress today! We are definitely "in the endgame now". 😄 The matt varnish is all dry now, so first of all I tackled the nacelle subassembly. I began by threading the wires of one nacelle through the hole I'd cut in the pylon inner, and then down through the bigger hole I cut in the middle of the 'V' shaped pylon piece. I then glued the inner piece to the main piece with the Revell Contacta and clamped them together, with some thin card wrapped around the parts to stop the clamps from damaging the decals and so on. Along the exposed seam I brushed some Tamiya Extra Thin.
69May 6, 2023May 5th, 2023 - Because the wire inside the nacelle from the 3 mm LED is quite long, and doubles back from about half way along the tube, there is plenty of flexibility in the wire, and so I could then very easily glue the top of the pylon into the actual nacelle. The slack in the wire helped here, but I have to give massive credit to Revell for creating a really nice, tight, well-engineered fit there. And not "tight" like awkward and difficult, but like perfect and snug. Revell Contacta again, and Extra Thin along the seems. About two hours later, gently, I glued up the second nacelle too.
70May 6, 2023May 5th, 2023 - Now, with my mind on the wiring there was one more looming job that I had not attended to yet, and that is the lighting of the engineering/secondary hull. So I snipped off a strip of 6 warm LEDs and laid them along the bottom of the hull. A quick and rough test showed that the position was good enough to light up the windows, but perhaps less so right at the tail by the shuttlebay, and almost nothing in the neck.
So, to fix the neck, I worked out that I need to shine some light UP into it. Sooo, I took the two roundish frame pieces that you mount into the hull, if you buy the official lighting kit for this one. The circuit board and battery and so on fit into them, or something like that. Anyway, I glued in the fore piece, just behind the deflector dish. But the second piece (picture here), would take up too much precious space in the middle/rear of the hull, where the wiring has to meet and get soldered into a massive bundle.
That piece also has a vertical spar in the middle, probably to stop the battery going in too deep. So I snipped the spar off, then also snipped the whole thing corner to corner. The plan is to rest a single 'chunk' of 3 LEDs across the top of those frame pieces and have that shine up into the neck...
71May 6, 2023May 5th, 2023 - ...like this! Things to see in this picture:
- The new wire! Which, once stripped, revealed itself as solid-core wire... again! Oh well.
- Three holes along the bottom edge of the hull. The left and right holes are for the stand mounting posts, and the middle hole is where the stand trunk wires come out.
- The blob of poster tack at the back. I still need to shove 90g of weight in there somehow.
- The snot-coloured hot glue holding the LED tape down everywhere. The reason for the green shade is that I stuck a green pencil into the back of my glue gun a while ago, to shove the short end of the glue stick down a bit, and then forgot about it and left it on. 😄 Since then -- green glue!
And, of course, the neck lights and hull lights.
72May 6, 2023May 5th, 2023 - Here's the same thing, but sitting on the stand. (This works really really well, because the mounting posts fit very well into the slots, and the curve of the stand top really cradles the hull). So, you can see the stand wires poking up and to the left, toward the deflector dish. The two hull light strips have already been soldered together to create one pair of wires that can then connect to the main trunk from the stand.
The final thing I did was to just line everything up and trim down all the wires so that all meet roughly in the same place, then tin the wires again. I like tinning the wires because apart from the practical reasons of protection and conductivity, I remember my dad explaining to me about soldering and tinning wires when I was a little kid. For whatever weird reason, I've never forgotten that. 😄
Next stop is basically to let the nacelles have at least a full 24 hours to dry, and then I suppose glue the whole bloody thing together! I'm not quite sure how I'm going to solder everything and then glue it all together at the same time, but I'll think of something I suppose.
73May 6, 2023May 6th, 2023 - It's Saturday today, which means more free time than usual, which means... final assembly!
I have set up in the kitchen, on top of the stove (or kitchen range, for those of you over in the States), because it has an extractor hood over it which is great at sucking away the fumes from the soldering. I've got a tea towel swaddled around the stand to protect it from solder drips, and the saucer and nacelles resting in their logical places.
This morning I decided to CA glue the lit part of the hull to the stand already, and build the rest of the ship on the stand. Let's see how that works out for me... 😄
74May 6, 2023May 6th, 2023 - The first thing I did is tape a pile of DVDs together, on which to rest the saucer at approximately the right height when I come to solder it in. The second thing I did was to solder the 'main trunk' coming out of the stand, to the two pieces of hull tape. And this time, I kept the 12v DC plug handy and tested the lights after every operation. I then soldered the saucer to the main bundle, and here we see the result - saucer and engineering hull lit up like a Christmas tree!
75May 6, 2023May 6th, 2023 - Before I soldered the nacelles to the main bundle, I had to fiddle around a bit with the DVDs and masking tape. (That's the cheap painters' paper tape, from the DIY store). The wires from the nacelle were the perfect length, so no problems there really. Where I *did* have a problem is with the saucer wires, which, when I trimmed all the wires down the other day, I unfortunately left still too long. The thing is, I did not really see this until they were soldered into the main bundle. They use the speaker wire, which is flexible but thick, so not *that* flexible. More on this in a bit.
76May 6, 2023May 6th, 2023 - Anyway, I then soldered the nacelles to the main bundle, and again, here's the result - all lights working! I feel at this point that I might be able to dispel the broken soldering curse that I put on myself with the previous build, of the Enterprise refit. Phew!
77May 6, 2023May 6th, 2023 - Here's a close up of the soldering. The green protective heat-shrink tubing I ended up cutting off, because I couldn't then properly move it into place. I think the heat from the soldering iron had started to shrink it a bit near the join. But, no worries, because...
78May 6, 2023May 6th, 2023 - ...hot glue, baby! Or 'hot snot' as I now call it (sorry). 😄 Each join -- the positive wires and the negative wires -- got its own carefully blobbed-out gob of hot glue to protect and insulate it, which is just as well because my joins are horrifying. 😄
Here you can also see this too-long saucer wire. The danger from this wire is that in shoving it down into the neck, it will put pressure on the solders and break them, which is more or less what happened with my Enterprise refit when I was gluing the nacelles in. Anyway, you can see too my solution, which was to put a little bend in the wire and tape it up good and tight. It was a bit too much at first, so I sliced the tape join a tiny bit in order to bend it in a bit more.
79May 6, 2023May 6th, 2023 - With all solders in place and wire management sorted as best as possible, it was time to glue the other half of the hull in place. And here, the real problems began. 😄 The curve of the top of the stand made it hard to get the hull halves to line up. The fantail doors also somehow were blocking correct alignment of the halves. Eventually though, I got the back half to fit well enough and squeezed out some Revell Contacta, and then Tamiya Extra Thin'd the seams. I'm willing to live with a little mess as long as it makes everything stronger.
The front and the neck then came together, and I glued and taped them, and then glued the saucer on, and then the nacelle-pylon assembly. Which, it turns out, does not really grip to anything, or perhaps rather the weight and length of the nacelles makes the whole thing want to jump up out of its nest. However, when you glue the hatch on over that, boom, security!
Sooo, what I've found over the last.... 8-9 months of my return to modelling, is that mistakes are like dominoes. You make one small mistake early on, or a compromise of some kind, and later on in the build it can come back to haunt you with larger consequences. In this build, I think that my decision to make and wire the stand as a complete sub-assembly was probably the first mistake. The second mistake, which was a result of that, was gluing the first part of the hull to the stand. Having said that, I still think it was a good idea, and it did make the soldering 10,000 times easier.
80May 6, 2023May 6th, 2023 - In retrospect, I think that with lighting this kit yourself (I mean, not using the official lighting kit), the thing to do is obviously *not* build the stand until you've soldered and glued shut the entire ship, leaving a long main trunk bundle sticking out the bottom, which you then connect into your stand and glue that together.
Doing it the way that I did it means that: 1) the main seam stem-to-stern on the engineering hull, including the neck, is not that well joined. It is actually a quite tricky fit anyway, because around the front of the ship, in that big circular part that fits over the deflector dish assembly, you almost need to force the second hull half in. It's very strange. And I mean, that's just the dry fit test, without lights or stands or anything, just out of the box. It's not even like the usual small amount of pressure that you sometimes apply to well-fitting parts, or in a snap-fit kit, but really quite a lot of brute forcing. Anyway. 2), the three big, colourful decals that go underneath the ship have to be foresaken. Honestly, I'm not too bothered about that because on the stand they're mostly hidden anyway. With a metal tube and dome base, you would notice their absence, but with this more decorative stand, not so much.
Anyway, that's it for the build (I hope!) The patient is resting peacefully on piles of DVDs. Next up - beauty shots! 🙂
81May 7, 2023May 7th, 2023 - Beauty shots! Well, as beautiful as I can make them with a blue towel for a backdrop. I really need to sort something better out for these kinds of pics. Anyway, I think that you can't really take a bad picture of this ship, because its design is so fundamentally beautiful and perfect. A lot of people venerate the refit Enterprise as the perfect ship, but for me it's the OG TOS Enterprise that brings a tear to my eye.
82May 7, 2023May 7th, 2023 - It's so much fun photographing her too, because every angle looks like something from the TV show. 😄 Here, you can imagine her in orbit around an orange planet...
83May 7, 2023May 7th, 2023 - The reason why the USS Constellation has similar numbers to the Enterprise is that in the original episode, they used an AMT model kit to create the Constellation model. This was the first time that Trek production used a commercially available model on screen (a fine tradition carried on through all subsequent series). As such, there were only four numbers available on the decal sheet - "1701", Enterprise's numbers. So they simply jumbled them up a bit to make the new registry number.
Having said all that, there is one thing I do not understand about this story, and that is how they were able to make a whole new name using new letters, but couldn't make new numbers too. Odd, but I'm sure there's a good explanation.
84May 7, 2023May 7th, 2023 - Head on, the orange-painted yellow LEDs seem to really show their true colour. Or it's the poor light I took the photos in.
85May 7, 2023May 7th, 2023 - As I said with my refit Enterprise, this is one of my favourite angles on the ship. The nacelles create natural sight lines to the vanishing point.
86May 7, 2023May 7th, 2023 - I know the saucer looks wonky in this pic, but I swear it's an illusion or something. 😄
87May 7, 2023May 7th, 2023 - She's going to sit on my shelf by my desk and bask in my adoring gaze for a while. I will make a Galileo shuttlecraft next, and then display the pair of them in the living room on their own TOS-specific shelf. 🙂
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16 2 April 2023, 15:41
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This is the notorious Revell Enterprise that's covered in gridlines - it even has gridlines where no gridline has gone before! 😄 I'm going to light this one too, so lots of black and silver inside and a switch and socket in the base.
So basically, this is a kit of Kirk's Enterprise that is based on the model that Greg Jein designed and built for the 50th anniversary Trek episode (which looks like he based it on the Smithsonian restoration of the time, which had all the gridlines, as well as the TAS Enterprise with the pendulous lower saucer half), which fell to Deep Space Nine to pull off. Long story short, the DS9 gang went back in time to Kirk's Enterprise and were CG'd into original footage of the episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." And so the anniversary episode was called "Trials and Tribble-ations." 😄
In the episode they needed new shots and angles on the exterior of the ship, so they got Greg Jein to build a new model. And for some reason, probably a complex legal one but I have no idea really, he had to make his Enterprise model subtly different. So one thing he did was to emphasize the legendary and also notorious pencil grid lines on the saucer, and then added some to the engineering hull and pylons too. There are some other subtle differences in the shapes of the thing too.
And so here we are today! The way I understand it is that for their European market, Revell apparently could only license this 'weird' Enterprise design from the anniversary episode. Everyone who sees it hates it, but when they build it, they do all agree that the tooling and precision is fantastic, and that it fits together superbly well. The kit is also designed to be lit up, for which you can buy an optional lighting kit, or do what I'm going to do and jam loads of cheap LED tape inside it.
