Saucer Painting, Neck Assembly, Secondary Fuselage Lighting…
Ok, I did a little more than just get the neck together and paint the saucer.
What can I say? I just got on a roll!
My soldering gun was all heated up and my trigger finger was itching for more spray painting. So I just figured, why not get the entire secondary fuselage, neck, and port nacelle all wired up as well? Oh and while I was at it…my wife and I had some fun with the old decal sheet too. 🙂
Saucer section (pre-paint). Just to show you how far we’ve come in a weeks time!
Look at all those nasty seams on the edge of the saucer. Time to say bye-bye thanks to some heavy sanding!
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
Like I said in the video, the real motivation here to get so much done is that it looks like we’ll be having our kid one week early. And that means I won’t have much desire, or free time, to play around with this monster of a model afterwards. At least not for a while. So I wanted to get as much done, if not ALL of it finally painted and assembled, before hand. That way I can just spend time with the new kid, and work on the Enterprise at my leisure. Place a decal here, paint a big here. Just take it easy.
Because after all the final assembly and decal work is done, all that’s really left to do is wire up the Arduino and get the base switches all working. Which really isn’t going to be much of a chore. So we’ll see if we make the deadline!
The way I like to think of it is that the Enterprise has been called out on an emergency and needs to leave dry dock, ASAP. Somehow that makes my list of “to-do’s” for this model seem much more manageable when the fate of the galaxy is at stake, haha.
Anyways, next up I’m going to be FINALLY finishing up the Arboretum and getting that installed, getting the port nacelle all decaled and the arm attached so I can attach for of the engines to the secondary fuselage, seal up that sucker and putty all the joints for light leak, painting that all up and then…attaching the saucer / deflector dish to the hull and get this puppy all together so I can do final paint and decals and get the Enterprise’s systems all powered up!
Wow, ok. That is a much longer list written out than how it looked in my head, haha. Looks like I have some work to do. Scotty…we’re going to need some pizza. NOW.
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!