Saucer Lighting & Lessons Learned
I learned a very important lesson while tackling all the lighting on the inside of the saucer. Simpler is better. Or I guess I should say, simpler is easier at least, especially when it comes to circuitry.
Because of all the foil tape I put inside the saucer to insulate all the wires and reflect the light around the ship, I spent a good two days tracking down short after short even after making sure to hot glue any exposed connections and heat shrink everything I could. In the end I got it all sorted out, but to do so I ended up removing a good bit of the tape that I spent hours putting down in the first place.
So for future models…I’ll definitely be more sparing when it comes to that.
The other thing I’m learning about while assembling this part of the model is the head ache of removing seams. I still haven’t found a fool proof way of doing this, and I’m not totally sold on all the putty and sanding work that it takes to get everything nice and clean.
Those frustrations aside though, every part of this build has been a learning experience and each new piece I’ve tackled has gotten better and better. So I’m confident I’ll be able to sort it all out and will be really happy in the end. But man….building a Starship sure isn’t easy!
VIP Room (aka…the Snakehole Lounge)
After I’m all done with the saucer, my wife will be decaling it while I move on to the finishing up the other warp nacelle, assembling and wiring the secondary hull and torpedo bay, finishing up the arboretum, and getting the lighting in the rest of the ship all in place.
I’m actually starting to run out of 5mm white LEDs though, so I’m playing around with the idea of using a couple spare oversized super bright 10mm LEDs I have lying around for the neck piece and the rest of the ship. So we’ll see how that works out. I’ve seen the results other modelers have gotten from them and they look really nice. So we’ll see!
Next stop…torpedo bay, neck assembly, and more lighting!
(maybe even some hangar bay action!)
Glad to see you finally plucked up the courage to get started on this beast Doug!
I too was a bit concerned about the aluminum tape shorting things out (well, I will be when I evenually get round to tackling my big E), and have been experimenting with a second layer of tape (insulating this time) on top of the aluminum tape in the areas at risk – might be worth a try?
Going to be building the new PL TOS Enterprise? : )
Nice work so far btw.
Bernie
Hey Bernie! Thanks for the comment!
Ya the foil tape is pretty tricky. It reflects light amazingly and insulates your wires really well but if things get packed tightly, you’ll definitely start see some shorts like I was finding in my saucer. A trick I used was just using the wax paper from the backside of foil tape to kind of “sandwich” the problem areas. It’s a pretty simple trick but it took quite a few times tearing off the misbehaving foil tape to figure that one out, haha.
And ya I can’t wait for the 1/350 TOS Enterprise to get out into the wild. Did you sign up for the 1701 club too? It really looks amazing, especially because of the included lights and motors. No more headaches from Arduino coding! haha. Thanks again for all your help on that too btw!