1/350 TOS Enterprise WIP.

danimalmagic · September 5, 2016

Hi all a bit of a change for me, i did build one of these a few years ago, I will be lighting it using the Polar Lights lighting kit. When i did the first one I never did an in depth WIP so for those who like a little Sci-Fi here we go.

Man Cave date 29082016, 4 week mission to boldly go where many other modellers have gone before.

A bit of school bus nostalgia from back in the day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE

I started with the dish halves, any parts that are going to be lighted need to be light sealed from the inside. No difficulties here just a base coat of matt black.

Once dried I have applied a second coat of Tamiya Aluminium this further aids light sealing and also helps increase reflectivity inside the model.

The same has been done for all lighted parts.

To further amplify the lighting effect inside I now apply some aluminium foil to any of the large areas within the dish, the polished finish will massively increase the lighting effect. You do not need to cover every square inch with foil as we have the silver base coat for any awkward areas.

With that done I marked the position of the parts that make up the various windows.

Then removed the foil from those areas so that the part can be securely fixed in place.

Window parts all fixed in place, the top half of the saucer is not an issue as all the parts are fitted externally and can be done at the end.

Next step is the fitting of the Polar Lights Lighting Kit, there are many good points with this kit and it is well thought out but you cannot trust the LED strip connectors to stay in place, I found this out the hard way on the 1st one I built.
Basically I had to split the saucer and hard solder the connections, I am not even taking the risk this time so every connection will be properly soldered.

As i am not lighting the nacelles this gives us some spare LED strip, I have used 3 more on the centre of the lower dish, these will direct more light up and under the bridge to increase the illumination effect. Anywhere that the LED strip will come into contact with the foil has to be insulated, I have simply glued in some rubber pads and fixed the LED to them.

The next thing to do is paint the impulse engine LED red and then create a shield to stop the red light bleeding into the rest of the dish.

Quick test.

A test of the completed dish lighting.

The last thing to do before sealing up the dish is to further light seal the impulse engine cover, I have filled any voids and painted black and silver again. The gap at the front will be sealed when the top of the dish is sitting on it.

The bridge was also painted, the bridge it small to say the least but from past experience you can get a good effect once completed, windows left cleat at this point.

Next I have added various colours to the underside of the bridge controls the idea being that apply small pin picks etc to the top surface that will allow light to penetrate through making the panels illuminated with various buttons etc. All areas I do not want light coming through are painted black.

Next the decals are applied to the clear parts to represent the various screens, these need further painting as I only want light coming though the screen area.

Bridge fitted in position, very difficult to get good images but it looks far better by eye.

The plan for next week will be to aluminium foil the lower hull and neck and get the lighting fitted I will also close up the saucer section and fill the seam in preparation to painting. I am sure there will be plenty of other things to do but I will cover that next week.

Thanks for looking.

Danny

celt · September 10, 2016

Thats well tidy. :popcorn:

Madmonk · September 10, 2016

Great start, will be watching with interest.

prowler0000 · September 11, 2016

Yup, I'm in too!

danimalmagic · September 12, 2016

Hi all, another busy week with the bulk of the niggly jobs done, I started off with getting the dish glued together and this was left firmly clamped for 24 hours.

While that was curing I moved on to foiling and lighting the neck.

Next up was masking the hanger bay ready for painting, quite a lengthy job on its own.

Hanger bay has an initial coat of black for light seepage and the then was coated with white to give a level base and then the topcoats are applied.

Decals on.

With that done I could assemble ready for lighting.

Lighting in place are and the shuttle bay is ready, this needs to be as neat as possible as fitting the bay is beyond tight.

This is the initial fit of the shuttle bay and as you can see the two halves are nowhere near close to fitting.

The only way to fit the bay is to remove material from the inside so a bit of careful work with the Dremmel was required along with a fair few test fits. I had glued in the windows prior to this operation.

Next the area was hand sanded and the area light sealed with black and silver making sure to mask the windows.

The two halves now close up nicely with no stress on the shuttle bay lighting.

Next I removed the seam from the two halves of the dish, I used a liquid filler here, it took a couple of applications and a bit of sanding but removing the join is a must. The black line is a mixture of the glue and black paint residue after sanding, there is no seam left.

Dish lighting check.

Next the nacelles were assembled and again the seam is filled with liquid filler, the seams are not too bad here so preparing for paint should be quite straight forward.

The next job was foiling the lower fuselage and adding the lights, again all hard soldered with each LED strip being fixed to a piece of rubber to make sure it is electrically insulated to Aluminium foil.

The last thing to do for the week was the base for the shuttle deck, this is actually a transparent part but needs to be masked so that the coloured areas can be illuminated from behind.

That is pretty well all the hard stuff done now so the plan for this week is to get all the main sub-assemblies glued together and get them painted.
I also want to do the machining to the nacelle Bussards to reduce the noise form the motors, I will come to that in more detail next week.

Thanks for looking.

Danny.

prowler0000 · September 12, 2016

danimalmagic · September 19, 2016

Hi all, I started the week with making up the lighting for the fuselage and fitting ready to glue the halves together, once complete the necessary lighting test.

With that done the halves could be glued together, once done it was left for 24hrs and I then filled the join seam, this took a few goes to get it right.

The same thing was done to the nacelles, the seams here took a little more effort.

In between coats of filler and rubbing down I moved on to making the corrections to the Bussard spinner motors. One of the disappointing things about these are the noise they make. The motor vibration resonates right through the plastic and the into the Bussard as a whole and this amplifies it even more as follows.
Ahh it is at this point I realise you can not link quick time video (MOV) via Photobucket.
Basically the motor has a small deduction gearbox on the end and it makes a lot of noise which kind off detracts from the finished model.
I started off by machining the spinners, these wobble on all axis, I have machined so at least the back of them runs true and it will also give us some clearance as they rub, should stop the squeaking.

Next up were the motors, I was going to open the hole out and then fit the motors using silicon mastic hoping this would create a little dampening of the vibration. While discussing that with the customer he mentioned a video he had seen and the use of Velcro. Using Velcro really is a good idea and should hold the motor firmly on centre and hopefully reduce the vibration.

Next I machined the larger clearance hole for the motors.

Motor fitted and is a nice snug fit, I thought I would need to mechanically fix it in some way but it is fine as it is.

I then took a small amount of material off the outer diameter to give us some more clearance and hopefully reduce vibration a bit more.

The coloured reflectors for the Bussards were shortened before fitting, this should ensure the spinner does not rub on them, cut at 45 degree so they sit as far down as possible on the LED.

Mounting plate sprayed silver to aid lighting.

I have also opened up the hole in the lamp holder just to make sure there is no rubbing here either.

Finally as the spinner passes through the PCB I have carefully opened out he hole to make sure there is clearance.

In between all this I have sprayed of the sub parts ready for fitting, some still require further masking and additional paint.

Light test of fuselage and shuttle bay.

Lastly for the week was masking all the windows, I had hoped to get it all done but yesterday but it is quite a lengthy job so I will continue today. The last time I did this I used a liquid mask and it worked well but took forever to remove the liquid mask after as it get drawn into the recesses of the window.
This time I am using masking tape, time consuming but it should be a better result in the end.

Next phase is to get the masking done so i can spray and start adding the decals, not sure if it will be done this week but we will see.

Thanks for looking.

Danny

prowler0000 · September 19, 2016

Looking forward to the next update, Danny!

danimalmagic · September 20, 2016

On 19/09/2016 at 11:25 AM, prowler0000 said:

Looking forward to the next update, Danny!

Flat out this week to try and get here finished, paint on today, just decalling which is a mission on its own then final assembly.

Thanks for looking.

Danny

danimalmagic · September 25, 2016

After masking all the windows it was just the painting and decalling left to do, the masking was well worth the time and proved much more effective than using a liquid mask.

Thanks for looking.

Danny

Next up was the decals, you have to be pretty careful with the Polar Lights decals as they are very thick and prone to silvering even with a few coats of Future applied first.
Even then you still need plenty of Microset to get them right, the weathering decals even more so.

The weathering decals for the dish come in large triangular segments and are very easy to damage so lots of soapy water and more microset.

To aid driving the air bubbles out i had to employ a small paint roller, the underside of the suacer is the worse part.

Lastly the shuttle.

This just left the final assembly.