Polar Lights 1:3200 D'Deridex class Romulan Warbird

January 6th, 2024 - I've been planning this build for a while now, and when I finished the warped Excelsior back in December I made my green paint choices and ordered some cans: Tamiya AS-9 Dark Green (RAF) for the body, and Tamiya AS-30 Dark Green 2 (RAF) for the contrasting, inset parts. The paint scheme for this ship is pretty simple really: two shades of green for the body, a light or bright green for the nacelle clear parts, and whatever other colours you want to use. For example, for the feather pattern on the wings, which aren't decorated in the show, but look really nice painted.  

January 6th, 2024 - Okay, so, one hot water and dish soap bath later, let's look at the sprues. First of all, one bag with two big concave parts. The body of the ship is a sort of clam shape, with upper and lower halves, and here we have the interior clam halves. 

January 6th, 2024 - Next bag has the head and neck and nacelles, and the two halves of the tail. Without lighting, you could probably build this thing in a day. Some reviewers on YouTube have mentioned that there is quite a lot of filing and puttying of seam lines to do, but apart from that, assembly is quite basic.

You can also see the clear parts sprue, which came in its own bag. And of course, there is also the traditional small dome base and solid rod, just to make things more difficult with the wiring. *rolls eyes* 

January 6th, 2024 - Third bag -- convex parts, or in other words, the external-facing clam shell halves. 

January 6th, 2024 - Decals! A small sheet of basically millions of white dots for the windows. I think I will apply them to the bare plastic and use them as a drilling guide. 

January 7th, 2024 - 99% of the decals are windows, and 99% of the windows go on the head and neck, and the little tail part, so the first thing I do is clip those 4 parts off the sprue.  

January 7th, 2024 - There is quite a bit of sanding to do from the forehead to the chin - just some light flashing here and there. The sprue connection under the chin is quite thick and needs lots of filing down. A slightly rounded file is good here because this is a curvy piece. 😄

The tail parts look almost symmetrical, but the key difference is that the shortest indented stripe faces down, and sits on the widest 'side' of the part. Hard to explain but easier to spot once you've seen it. 

January 7th, 2024 - With the parts prepped, I had a look at the decals. At first I thought it would be harder to find the individual decals, but cunningly, the entire sheet is divided pretty neatly down the middle into left-side and right-side decals! Good job, AMT/PL! 

January 7th, 2024 - It took me about an hour to do all of one side of the 'face' and tail. Afterwards, I had maaaybe 3 or 4 window decals left over. There is also one really long window strip that runs along the upper neck joint, which is designed to go on after assembly, because it is so long. I left that one off because I'm only using these decals as a rough guide. One thing I realized almost immediately after placing the very first decal (lol) was that I don't think that I have the skill, patience, or Dremel bits to drill every single window accurately. Therefore, totally 100% accurate decal placement is not necessary. Just making my best effort to place the decals correctly is enough.

This was a huge relief and made things a lot easier. If I was applying these on a finished, unlit model, I would be a bit more nervous about it. For example, there are quite a few very small window clusters of like, 3-6 dots, and some of them overlap ridged areas -- see that area between the neck joints, to the rear of the part (behind the ear). Ideally, they need to be cut down and also given some Micro Sol or other similar decal fixative.

There are also 2-3 decals that are not shown on the box guide, and one that is transposed, i.e. the R decal on the guide should be the L decal. This is the one that you can see on the left-side 'face' part in the photo here. What happens there is that a few of those stripe-shaped window lines have a built-in curve that wraps around onto the 'nose' of the part, and because the left-side part is with the right-side decals, the curved part curves UP instead of down and around. So watch out for that! 😄 

January 9th, 2024 - Finished up the window decals on the head and tail today. At some point I realized that it would be quite easy to just match up that very long upper neck decal with the head part, and slice in just right the place. That's because there's an oblong lump over which you can just lay the head part and cut. 

January 9th, 2024 - I knew pretty much right away that I wouldn't be drilling every single hole in these decals, but I still think that they will be very helpful in making lots of the window holes. I've also wondered about the very random nature of the windows. My guess is that they thought that the crazy blob-like patterns would not really be visible on TV back in the day -- shockingly, the D'Deridex-class Warbird's first appearance was May 1988, in the final episode of TNG season 1, "The Neutral Zone". 1988! If you ask me, it's quite a timeless design that still looks modern today. 

January 14th, 2024 - So, at some point in the past I had a little trouble taking the lid off, because I had forgotten that it slides off, rather than opening on a hinge. And of course, all the bits jumped around and got mixed up. (Predictable, really 😄 ). Anyway, this was the moment of truth, at the moment of having to choose a bit and put it in the Dremel and start drilling! First, I experimented with (possibly) a 0.035 mm bit. Very, very tiny. Too tiny, I think, because I could easily see the layers and layers of paint and lacquer filling in such tiny holes. (I also experimented with using a manual 'twist' drill, but I do not have the patience for that, plus my twist drill is quite cheap and feeble). 😄 

January 14th, 2024 - So, I took what was (possibly) a 0.075 bit, and started on the tail pieces. Flat, easy to secure in case I need two hands to hold the Dremel (on the front parts, I do), and maybe less visible. (Not really, but the principle is sound). 😄  

January 14th, 2024 - Now then, with the very tiny drill bits, you absolutely *can* drill in line with the decals. But again, I think those holes would be too small to be practical. Maybe you could make them work, but you'd have to spend a lot of time and care building and painting to preserve them, and I'm already getting old. 😄 At this point, I've lightly scraped off the scrappy bits and rinsed the parts under hot water. The decals are still there though, and I suspect that this may be a problem. We'll see. Micro Set might help, apparently, although I already Micro Sol'd them on, sooo, eh.  

January 14th, 2024 - Technical matters. Something I remembered only *after* I'd started drilling (obviously), is that the plastic soon builds up on the bit, and as you dunk the bit into the pieces each time, the accumulated plastic causes the hole to 1) have a small divot, or indent on the surface, and 2) eventually become wider. It's quite interesting to look at, artistic even. 

January 14th, 2024 - On larger drill bits, you can cut and scrape the plastic off with your knife, but on these tiny ones -- not really. So, I had an idea. Because I was working on the kitchen table, I thought about melting off the plastic build-up with a small flame.... 

January 14th, 2024 - The results were quite good! The only thing is, I needed to stop and do this every ten holes or so. Anyway, I managed to do both tail pieces and one side of the front before I started to hallucinate tiny holes on everything. 

January 18th, 2024 - Fast forward a few days to today, and I drilled out the second half of the front too. I actually took quite a lot of photos of the drilling of the front parts, but to save you from getting too bored of it, we can boil everything down to this one photo. On the left is the part I drilled a few days ago. I ended up having two sizes of holes on it -- larger holes all over except in two places: all across the large, smooth, curved front of the part, and inside the large 'L' shaped part. If you look closely you can just about see this on that left part. However, I took that photo today, and so I already drilled out some of those tiny holes to make them a bit larger.

The part on the right has mostly larger holes all over, although I did aim to replicate the small and large pattern of the left part. Ultimately though, I was thinking about the paint filling up the holes and having to endlessly clean them out again. Plus, I'm going to fill everything up with Formula 560 (canopy glue) to diffuse the light, so that might further impact light visibility. 

January 18th, 2024 - So, I'm happy with my larger holes (lol), but they do raise an interesting point in my mind about scale, or the illusion of scale. The studio model, with its millions of tiny, crazy holes, helps to make the Warbird look absolutely huge. The upper neck structure alone seems to have several decks, and that's the narrowest part of the whole ship. In my version of the thing, this sense of incredible scale and density might be slightly diminished. But I can live with that if it doesn't mean spending months messing around with all these flippin' holes. xD 

January 21st, 2024 - Light-blocking the interior is the next big step, so I took everything off the sprues today in order to mask my glueable edges. Once I had carefully sliced the large hull parts off the sprue with my knife, and filed down the contact points, I put everything together for a test fit. The fit is not too bad, but not great either. On the lower halves, at the front where the big square part is, there's a huge gap that you could drive a bus through.

The other thing is, because these four hull pieces are basically all curves, there is no lip, rim, or edge where they hold on to each other in the usual way. As such, masking would be, I think too fiddly and liable to causing light leaks. So, I've decided to do a new thing (yay!) -- I will try liquid masking fluid. 

January 21st, 2024 - I've always wanted to try this, being as fussy as I am about my glueable surfaces, and this is a great opportunity. Unfortunately I'm a week to ten days away from my January paycheque, so after a little research, I will try using simple PVA glue. In this case, a good quality domestic brand.  

January 21st, 2024 - Of course, I'm not going to just splooge it out all over my lovely Warbird kit, so here is our test sample. The bottle says 5 minutes to dry, and 12 hours to reach full strength. It is now almost 23.00 here anyway, so we will have another look at it in the morning... 

January 22nd, 2024 - Here's the test piece now, at about 8.30. Nice and dry. The question is, does it peel off nicely and does the plastic feel weird or sticky or compromised afterwards? 

January 22nd, 2024 - Yes, it peels off nicely! No, the plastic seems unharmed! This is great news. So, this week shall be the week of masking and light blocking! *starts shaking cans* 

January 23rd, 2024 - After a couple of false starts thanks to last minute doubts and cold feet, I finally squeezed out a line of wood glue all around where the inner (convex) parts will attach to these outer, concave parts. This was an exercise in eyeballing, really, and the end result is, if I'm lucky, about 80-90% accurate. For the inner halves, I decided just to mask their edges with the usual 3mm Tamiya tape.

In fact, I had a kind of revelation today, thanks to the YouTube video of this build by Dan's Model Universe (an excellent reference, I highly recommend it). As some of you might have realised already, there is in fact no need to light block all of the interior of these hull halves. This is because in all these four big pieces, there is only one small area that has windows: the upper neck support, which is part of the upper interior hull half. If you don't drill that part, then there's zero light blocking to do. 😄

But because I like to make my life unreasonably harder, I have of course drilled out that strut. As such, I'll have to light block in that 'spine' area anyway, and then I decided also to block the wing tips, where the nacelles attach, just because. 😄  

January 23rd, 2024 - Back to the PVA masking for a moment. On those upper hull halves, I found that squeezing from the plastic glue bottle produced a good-sized bead of about 2-3mm width anyway, just like the masking tape. So to mask the more detailed, fiddly head halves, I had the idea of putting some glue into a plastic syringe. This was left over from some old bottle of cough syrup that the kids had once had. 

January 23rd, 2024 - The end result is a bit mixed. Yes, I got a nice slim line on the thinner edges of the head halves. But, it was more prone to dripping down into the interior of the parts, which required a noble sacrifice by about ten good cotton ear buds to clean up. 😄 I can foresee this being a little fiddly with the light blocking in places, but okay. 

January 23rd, 2024 - Finally, a small but very important thing that I did today was to actually work out the wiring for this thing (thank again to Dan's Model Universe on YouTube). This led to me creating a logical and more detailed set of steps than the tiny leaflet that came with the kit. xD

In short, I need to drill out three holes: one on each nacelle support tab and one close to the hole for the stand (I just can't find any hollow tubes in my DIY shops, so I'm happy to run the wires out of another hole and maybe wrap them around the stand). Then, into the bottom half of the lower hull half, fix in 5 sets of wires - head, neck, two nacelles, and one main trunk down to the power socket. Then I'm going to glue the two lower halves together, sand, putty, and paint. Then paint and glue the nacelles with their LED strips.  

January 23rd, 2024 - Aaaand then do the upper hull halves, assemble the entire body and engines, and then finally do the head, in which the LED tape will curve around a little bit and run up into the upper neck strut.

Doing it all in this way will add another first-time thing for me: gluing a subassembly together and THEN painting it. I have always painted individual parts and then glued them into subassemblies, and kind of wrestled with that a bit sometimes. I think sometimes it's a good idea, and other times, like now when there are lots of rough edges and gaps to fill, it makes more sense to glue as much as you can first. See, I'm learning! 😄 

January 25th, 2024 - Okay, I've done lightblocking and drilling. Here we see the head parts, with a coat of Citadel Chaos Black primer, and then a coat of the good old Humbrol Metallic Silver (same can that I've had since I started!). The top part still has the PVA wood glue masking around the rim. Compare that to the bottom part, from which I just peeled it off (which is so satisfying lol). A couple of small spots that I need to touch up with a brush, but otherwise the masking is good. 

January 25th, 2024 - I also opened up the long neck part of the upper hull halves, to allow a few LEDs for that long neck part to be fed through from the head. 

January 25th, 2024 - On the other end of the LED tape that I put in the neck, I am going to extend the wires a little and plant one diode facing down, into the tail section, through this rather nasty looking slot in the tail part. (I forgot to make a hole in the bottom tab though, so I'll open this one up a bit more when I do that).

I often find that as much planning and sketching as I might do, when the moment of truth arrives and I'm about to cut, glue, paint, or whatever, the whole plan can change in an instant. And so as I was looking at all the parts today, I realized that because of the fact that the lower neck part is not open at the end, and is too tight to realistically open up (at least, in my opinion and at my ability level), all the wires in the head will have to come through the upper neck, into the upper hull, and down and through the tail part. *sigh*

In that instant, it all became a bit more tricky, and now I'm wondering how to proceed again. 😄 It's going to be a combination of wiring and gluing at more or less the same time I think, kind of like what I did gluing the nacelles onto the Reliant hull. Anyway, we'll see. Maybe it won't be so crazy. 

January 25th, 2024 - Finally, I made a really clumsy, embarrassing-looking hole in the lower hull part near the stand hole, to feed the wires through to the power. I think that next I will prime and paint the nacelles, then start laying in the wiring and see how far I can get towards being fully wired and able to glue the hull parts. I am definitely going to need to putty the joins, so yes, I'd rather do that unpainted and primed. Hmm. 

January 27th, 2024 - Okay so, all four hull parts have had their tail sections light blocked with black and metallic silver. I also got paid today, and so I ordered another can of my overall hull colour (Tamiya AS-9 Dark Green (RAF)), as well as a can of Tamiya TS-22 Light Green, which looks like a really bright lime colour, for the transparent nacelle parts. 

January 28th, 2024 - Here are the head halves with two coats of Vallejo Black acrylic dabbed on to the light-leaky parts. The reason why they're upside down is that with the first application, the bulk of the paint rolled down into the curve of the parts, so that the black paint was thinnest right at the edge. Like this, upright, the black paint stays near the edge. 

January 28th, 2024 - As Elton John likes to sing, "Saturday, Saturday!" And so it's Saturday today, and I had some extra time - enough time to start the whole wiring circus. I began by preparing the main trunk and passing it through the second hole in the base. Then, I had a look at the tail part. And as usual, after all the planning and drawing and eyeballing, when it comes to the moment of truth and I'm right there with the tools and the parts, everything changes. 😄

Here we see my 'warm' LED tape (which has the transparent rubber cover over the diodes). What I discovered is that a single 'block' of 3 diodes is still small enough to fit neatly inside. What we also see is that instead of the thick, solid-core wire that I usually use (which is prone to snapping under duress), I've used slim, flexible, brown and blue wrapping wire (also solid core). To strip the ends and expose the wire, I had to VERY gently slice the plastic off with the knife. It took a couple of tries, but it was okay. In fact, I'm not even sure that it's necessary to use the wrapping wire, but, this leads me to the next change in plans: wired like this, the wires can go down into the lower hull, so they don't need to be connected up through the upper neck. But that made me realise that I'd still have to run the head and neck wires down through the tail anyway, so space becomes a bit of a premium. I'll have a look tomorrow and see what happens. It also occurs to me that I could run the head wires through a nacelle, but, eh, the fit might be a bit tight. 

January 28th, 2024 - The next thing I did is prepare the nacelles. Again, single blocks of 3 diodes, which are more than enough at 12v. In fact, I even tried to cover up the first diode, although it's not terribly effective. What that is is yellow electricians tape covering the solders, because I've run out of the green heat-shrink tube. (The tape is just there to keep all the pieces together; there's no glue yet of course. 

January 28th, 2024 - One more thing, because I find it interesting myself -- here is my little pair of wire strippers. I've had these for years but I couldn't find them until now. And happily, they fit my regular, solid-core wires perfectly! Not only do they save me a lot of time, but they also reduce the amount of stress on the wires before they're even put to use. Highly recommend!

I've also put my usual, thick wires next to the wrapping wires so you can see the difference. This wrapping wire is ridiculously thin, but still seems to carry 12 volts very nicely. 

January 29th, 2024 - Now we begin the 3-day wiring saga. 😄 First attempt: as we can see here, the nacelle wires (and the tail wire) are faaar tooo shooort. Funny thing is, when I eyeballed the lengths compared to the body before I cut the wires, they looked great! At first I sliced off the big blue heat-shrink tube, because I thought I could regain a few mm from there, and I did, but it wasn't enough. Anyway, I also realized that having the nacelle strips already soldered on is a mistake too, because I need to poke the wires up through the holes I made in the nacelle tabs first too. 😄 Oh well.  

January 30th, 2024 - Second attempt: using the proper wire cutters makes the whole process super fast, so that was a big help. Anyway, I recycled the main trunk wire and put the nacelle wires into a box for future use. It doesn't hurt to have a few LED strips wired up and ready to go. You can see that basically the trunk and the two sets of nacelle wires are the usual big, solid-core wire, and the tail > neck wire is a huge long length of the wrapping wire. This should make it less obtrusive passing it up through the tail part and into the neck. 

January 31st, 2024 - Third attempt: Finally, everything is long enough. 😄 The trunk wire is the same as before, but everything else is new and looong. Looong! All the positive wires soldered together, all the negative wires soldered together, each bundle protected, and protection on top of them too. 

January 31st, 2024 - Here we are, 3 days later (lol), with everything temporarily taped into place. One last note: I used a yellow wire for the positive on the tail, for fun, but also to make it stand out from the nacelle wires.

*sigh of relief* Next step, glue this sandwich together I suppose, and then have another look at the plans. 

January 31st, 2024 - Later that day... Sandwich time! As usual, Revell Contacta around the edges, and Tamiya Extra Thin over the matching seams (of which there are... few). 😄 

February 2nd, 2024 - Putty time! When I got all the stuff out and prepared for the job, I found that I'd run out of the Vallejo Plastic Putty that I usually use! Like the Micro Sol though, it had lasted me a long long time. Fortunately I still have lots of Tamiya Putty White, which I try to avoid really because it's much more sticky and weird and hard to handle. But, I was going to use it on the front seams anyway. So, on it went! Tomorrow I'll sand it down smooth. I might also prime the tail parts and nacelle halves today too, we'll see. 

February 3rd, 2024 - Okay, so today was priming day. This was the first pass. Later on I primed the reverse side (and took care of those left-over black lines along the outer edges). It's been a long time since I used the white primer, but my goal here is to allow some bleed through where the green is maybe thinner, to give it that kind of worn look you see in pictures of the studio model. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going for any kind major accuracy here (as usual), but I like how that looks. Reminds me of stretched canvas over wooden biplane wings or something, like the superstructure is pushing through the hull plating. 

February 3rd, 2024 - Also, here is the crazy Tamiya TS-22 Light Green on the reverse of the clear parts. A more accurate colour would be something more lemony-limey, but I like this. Interesting note here: the four parts at the bottom of the sprue, that look like eyes and eyebrows (lol), are not used in the instructions! I haven't had a good look at the parts yet to try and find any similar shapes, but I will do. 

February 4th, 2024 - The first green paint is doooown! Before that, I spent the day touching up the putty and sanding on the lower hull half, and eventually re-primed those parts.

So, more thoughts on the overall assembly process, which lead me to the green painting today. Namely, I'm going to build this ship *more* like a sandwich than I thought: lower hull painted and detailed; nacelle LEDs attached to their wires, mounted inside the nacelle parts and the lit nacelles attached to the lower hull, and then the inside (lower) half of the upper hull glued on to the nacelles and tail. Doing this means that the nacelles and tail are lit and secured in place, and having the bottom half of the 'lid' in place means I can work on lighting the neck and head at leisure. Once the neck and head are wired together, the top half of the upper hull and the head can be attached more or less together. This eases my mind quite a lot, because I can visualize it much more easily and just feel like it's going to work.

This week ahead - more painting, basically. 😄  

February 5th, 2024 - Today I fixed the clear parts into the nacelles. They clip into the nacelle halves from the inside, and the long parts have a definite front and back - the two box shapes go to the rear. Those long parts also clip in nice and tight, but of course I slapped on some Tamiya Extra Thin around the edges. The short, wedge-shaped parts do not clip in at all, so you just have to line them up and blob on some glue to keep them there. 

February 5th, 2024 - I also did some more painting - the Citadel Bone White primer on the two lower hull halves, and the first application of Tamiya AS-9 Dark Green (RAF)! I always feel like when you start painting the big pieces, it's kind of a milestone, so have a glass of virtual champagne on me! 

February 5th, 2024 - Here's a closer look. As you can see, that Dark Green RAF shade is very Spitfire-like - to my eyes, it has a little bit of an olive tone to it, which I quite like. You can also see how the paint, being a little thinner on all the edges and details, allows some of the white primer underneath to add some highlights. Probably won't be too noticeable inside, but it bodes well for what I want to see on top too, on that big, broad, muscular Romulan back! 😄 

February 6th, 2024 - Okay, everything is green now. 😄 Including the head, and accounting for a handful of touch-up sprays, I ended up using 150 ml of Tamiya spray paint, or one and a half of those small 100 ml cans. 

February 6th, 2024 - I also 'windowed' the tail section using the Formula 560 Canopy glue. I hadn't used this since... maybe the big Reliant, a couple of years ago? Anyway, the glue had dried in the nozzle, so I had to clean it out with a pin, but then it was fine. This stuff is quite thin and runny, and easy to spread around with a little bit of plastic or something. It fills up the holes nicely without dripping through and making a mess. 

February 6th, 2024 - Here are the head parts. I'm not going to window them until I've done the second shade on the indented parts - something I forgot about in my excitement to do the tail parts today. But I can do something there with a bit of a wash, so that's okay.

That's the next step I think, then - masking and then painting those indents with the Tamiya AS-30 Dark Green 2 (RAF). Upper hull 'wing' detailing - can start thinking about that now too. 

February 7th, 2024 - Masked for detail spraying! I sat down to do this today and as soon as I got the tape ready and got my face down there, I realized just how fiddly this was going to be. I did the left part first (left in this photo), which gave me a hunch in my back and took about half an hour. The right side gave me a crick in my neck and eye strain, but only took about 20 minutes.

On that right side, I also found a couple of big blobs of paint in the right-angle space between the back of the head and the top of the lower neck joint. I sliced them off with the knife and they went down to the bare plastic too. Sooo, I will spray there again with the dark green this time, and then reverse the mask and paint them the light green afterwards.

At some point in the last few days - I suppose when the paint had dried and I did a quick test fit - I also noticed about a cm-and-a-half-long 'dent' in the top, flat part of the neck where I'd maybe shaved a bit too heavily. You'll see, I'll have to putty and paint that too.
 

February 8th, 2024 - This morning I sprayed the Dark Green 2 on to the head parts, and then spent the rest of the day, off and on, masking up the hull pieces.

There are lots of 'feathers' on the hull parts, so if you want to paint them you have some small choices to make about where you stop painting them, like, what kind of pattern you create with your other colours.

One note about the spiny part on the top exterior part, on the left there: I put a line of 3mm Tamiya masking tape over those knobbly parts. (They look to me like escape pod hatches, so that's what I'm going with). I wasn't going to try and mask them accurately, because as you can see, they have slightly rounded edges. But I decided to make a little slice between each one, and at some point I accidentally nudged the tape as I sliced it, and it kind of opened up a tiny bit, to show some of the gap between the hatches. Sooo, I got a thin rounded file and gently pushed all those sliced bits in a bit, and that will be, I think, just enough to give the hatches some shape when painted too. 

February 8th, 2024 - As I was thinking about this, I came up with a bit of reasoning for why I'm painting parts of the hull a secondary colour. So, my head canon is that, at least on the 'wing feathers', these darker parts are a 24th-century Romulan version of the 'hard back' parts you see on the Enterprise Refit.  

February 8th, 2024 - For the surprisingly many other detailed parts of the hull pieces, particularly the spine and hatches on the upper exterior side and the big, boxy, shuttlebay part at the front of the lower interior part, I'm going to just use washes and some detail painting.

Sooo, hull parts detailed tomorrow (Friday) and dry on Saturday, so the weekend for washes and detailing. Tomorrow we can take the bandages off the patient's head and work on the head parts a bit. 

February 12th, 2024 - Alright then. Before we get to the fully painted hull parts, a quick look at the remaining decals. If you discount the left-over window decals - in fact, if you discount *all* of the window decals, there are only 4 other decals in this kit. 2 Romulan Star Empire logos: one for the nose, one for the tail; and two 'detail panel' decals, one for the exterior of each nacelle.

The reason I was scoping out the decals (this was yesterday), is because all the paint is dry and so I was thinking about decals and about whether or not to gloss first for 4 such tiny decals. That made me realize that I could just do a quick blob on the nose, tail, and nacelles without having to gloss the whole thing. Big savings on the Tamiya TS-13! 😄

I ended up glossing over a bit more of the hull parts, because of wanting to do a black wash, which is what I finally did this morning, just to pick out the details. Still, I managed to use just the last, I dunno, 10-15 ml of the can, so that was good. I then sprayed Tamiya TS-80 matt varnish over everything, because again - no decals, really. 

February 12th, 2024 - Finally, the painted, washed, and matt-coated hull pieces! Here we can see some different things going on, not all of them happy. 😄 First of all, the head pieces, which came out really well. I'm pleased with them, because the varnish brought the contrast between the two greens *up* a bit, and it now looks pretty much how I envisioned it.

The wash on the hull pieces is not too apparent in these pictures, but it looks much better than I usually make it look. 😄 We can also see that nice (imo) two-tone green effect. Again, the main colour is Tamiya AS-9 Dark Green (RAF), and the 'feathers' and recessed panels are Tamiya AS-30 Dark Green 2 (RAF).

But then there is a third thing, which is that on the upper and lower hull parts, there is kind of a faded-out thing. It's like a white dusting that looks most like the paint somehow did not stick. The odd thing is, during and just after painting, the paint was a solid coat without any blemishes, and so this dusting effect slowly manifested over a couple of days of painting, spraying, and sitting around. I think that I'm about to do a quick touch up on those parts anyway, so we'll see what happens next! 

February 13th, 2024 - So, that's exactly what I did. Masked up the light green parts first and sprayed the dark green 'feathers' again, and then when that was dry, taped the dark green parts and sprayed the light green edges again. I also applied more black wash to the recessed panels again. Everything looks much, much better. I can't believe I was going to laze past that little repair job! Patience, as always, wins the day! 😄

Anyway, once we're 24-hours-dry here, it's nacelle time! 

February 15th, 2024 - It's just gone midnight on Friday now, but all of this was finally dry, I think, Thursday morning. Anyway, now I know what caused that weird 'white spray' effect (which we can still see a tiny bit of here, despite the second layer of green that I put on everything).

And the answer is.... it's the Tamiya TS-80 Matt varnish *eating* the green paint. Or at least, some combination of the two things having a bad reaction. Now, this shouldn't happen. But I think the reason why it did is that the TS-80 was the last 1 or 2 thirds of the can, and maybe being a little older it had somehow changed a bit, and decided that nice, new paint was what it wanted to munch.

Anyway, what do we see here? Apart from that new but less heavily eaten paint effect (which, honestly, I'm fine with it now), I did something a bit mad. I got a black and a brown crayon from my kids' art supplies, and made a kind of 'rust ring' around the outside edge there. That was inspired by a line of 'eaten paint' all around that outside edge, and I just wanted to mask it somehow without doing a third re-spray. Anyway, it's not pro-level weathering, but I think it looks pretty neat. And it has definitely inspired me to look into crayon/pencil weathering techniques. But seriously, it's time to put this thing together at last!  

February 17th, 2024 - Right then, first order of business is to 'frost' the nacelles. I started by cutting some of this plasticy, papery stuff that you usually find wrapping up TVs and monitor screens, and hot-gluing it in to place. It wasn't really enough to diffuse the light because there is maybe 1-2 mm gap between the diode and the clear part, so I stuck two layers of Tamiya 6 mm tape on top too. That still wasn't great, but it was better, so I went with it. 

February 17th, 2024 - Then I snipped the wing wires short and stripped them using my awesome little wire strippers. xD 

February 17th, 2024 - Theeen, I balanced the whole thing up against the side of a cabinet, taped the wing wires down, and then lined up the LED strip precisely with the exposed ends. A bit of poster-tack to hold that in place, and I was free to make the solders. I have found on this project that just securely taping and blobbing everything into place is the best way. I mean, I find it easier than using the traditional Mr. Hands thing anyway. 

February 17th, 2024 - A close-up of the blobbing part of the process, with the solder applied. 😄 

February 17th, 2024 - My original plan was to glue the outside-facing nacelle halves onto the wings, glue the LED strips into them, and then glue the inside-facing nacelle halves (with the clear parts) onto them.

aaaaaahahahahahahahahahahaha no no no. I could see right away that would never work for a few reasons, but mainly because only the interior-facing halves have the slot, that fits onto the tab on the wing. But because the wires are so short right there, and because they're stiff wires, the LED strips stay where I put them. (You can see that in the foreground).

So, what I did was apply glue to one nacelle half, apply glue all over the wing and tab area, then press the nacelles halves together over the LED strip, and once they were lined up (there are 2 holes and pins to help), jam the whole thing down onto the tab. 

February 17th, 2024 - So I did that twice. It got a bit messy with the glue, and then painting on some Tamiya Extra Thin around the wing-nacelle join of course ate some of the green paint. But at this point, I was not worried because I know that I can patiently clean that up right at the end. What was more important right now was the fact that, once I had both nacelles glued on, it became immediately obvious that without the 'lid' being glued into place too, there was a really good chance that they would dry wonky. At funny angles. Not hugely so, but enough to make a proper fit with the upper hull very difficult. Yikes! 

February 17th, 2024 - I felt the clock ticking now. To get the lower-half of the upper hull in place, I would have to attach the tail first. Okay, but the fam were starting to get hungry and I was on dinner duty this evening! 😄

Fortunately, soldering the tail lights and gluing the tail in place was quick and easy. The tail parts are nice and thick and chunky, and I could glue one of them in right away to help line up the LED strip there, pass through the thinner head wire, and then glue the second half into place around the wires. 

February 17th, 2024 - With that done, I glued the lower half of the upper hull onto the nacelles and tail. There are wicked gaps between the nacelles and wings, and the whole thing is supposed to be smooth, sooo, even more reason for painting and puttying later. *sigh* Fun! 

February 17th, 2024 - The final final thing I did today was glue the tiny, triangular clear parts onto the front of the nacelles, between the two pointy parts. A small but significant detail. I'm a bit frightened of looking at this all again once it's dry and secure, without the grips and the tape, because I'm going to see glue and gaps and streaky paint everywhere, but oh well. 😄

Two notes on today's work:
1) I forgot to add tape to the inside of the second nacelle, to diffuse the light there.
2) To my surprise, 3 diodes is not enough to evenly light the nacelles, given that the shortness and stiffness of the wire forces them much more to one end of the nacelles. At that point I should have de-soldered (unsoldered)?) the tape, because I hadn't glued the nacelles together yet. But I didn't think of that. My thinking was kind of stuck in a forwards gear, sooo, eh. As usual, I think that most people who see this finished and lit up will not even know anything is wrong though. (I mean my family and friends of course - Scalemates and other modelers will know everything at a glance 😉 😄  

February 18th, 2024 - I woke up this morning thinking that this could be Head Day, but when I started to think about it I realized that I haven't yet done the windows in the head! So first of all, I put the tiniest bit I have into the Dremel, and at the lowest speed I just cleaned up some of the holes that had become clogged or whatever by all the paint and varnish and so on. You can see the little particles there on the cloth. 

February 18th, 2024 - Next, I taped over the holes on the outside, to give the Formula 560 glue something to sit in if it leaked through too much. And in my excitement I made a mistake by not pressing down the tape as well as I could (for some ridiculous fear of harming the paint finish, even though it's protected by the matt varnish) *rolly eyes*

Luckily though, all that meant was that I had to peel off a few messy bits of clear, rubbery glue this evening. I still think this is a good idea, but if you're going to do that, make sure to press down the tape nicely. 

February 18th, 2024 - There it is - a thick layer, which I then spread around a bit and mopped up so that it didn't get too crazy in there. 

February 18th, 2024 - A few hours later. 

February 18th, 2024 - About 8 hours later.

I also took the tape off the main hull and had another look at all the joins there, and a look at light leaks. The light leaks are not so bad - the rear part of the upper side of the nacelles a tiny bit, and inside where the hull parts don't sit completely flush with the nacelles. And on the port side the gap is quite big. Buuut, the head still fits correctly, so that's good.  

February 19th, 2024 - Today a small window of opportunity opened up, in which I could do some drilling, so I got the base ready. Here you can see three things: the small hole near the rod for the wires; a horrendous gap that is half full of poster tack, and the actual hole with the DC plug sticking out.

The horror hole happened because although I located the right spot to accommodate the size of the plug inside, I failed to think about how big the hole would need to be in relation to the gentle curve of the dome base itself. Eventually I realized my error and found that placing the plug nearly level with the base of the base (heh) would necessitate a much smaller hole.  

February 19th, 2024 - The poster tack is just there to make a smoother surface over which to stick a sticker from my Star Trek Sticker Book (ISBN 0-671-01472-2), a trick that I devised a few models ago for something else with a messy hole in the base.

Here you can see how I've clumsily coloured it in with a permanent marker. At some point, I will maybe paint it black too, but I'm not too bothered by it really. The Romulan stickers look good, so that's enough for now. 

February 24th, 2024 - Finally got some time to do the rest of the wiring today. I had imagined that this would involve also attaching the head, but eventually I realized that the upper-upper hull part needs to be cemented in place first. But anyway, there were no mistakes or unpleasant surprises today, so let's get on with it! First of all, checking the existing wiring still works. Yup!

You can also see where I've used Vallejo Acrylic Putty to fix the light leaks. Typically messy of course *sigh*. I've sanded it down smooth and will paint again when all assembly is complete. 

February 26th, 2024 - I then measured out the super-thin tail wire and enough LED tape to fit the neck. However, the tape is a little too wide to sit flat in the neck trench. This is the 'Cold' light LED tape, and it has a rubber cover on it. So, I stripped that off (very easy), and then used nail scissors to trim both sides of the tape. Very carefully, of course. Never the less, as you can see, something didn't work out right 😄 

February 26th, 2024 - No problem! I snipped that length off and did it all again, this time snipping a bit more conservatively, and it worked out fine. Phew! What I did then is measure out a suitable length for the head, cut a few centimetres of the super-thin wire, and joined the head tape to the neck tape. The wire is thin enough that I can fold it a bit to make everything sit in place. Here you can see the finished soldering. 

February 26th, 2024 - And here we see what I call the Through Test - where I test the connections from the end of the very last piece of tape. The power runs through the rest of the model no problem. I then did a To Test, where I plug in the main trunk wires and check that the power goes all the way through to the head tape. Also yup! 

February 26th, 2024 - Here we see the neck tape pushed neatly down into the neck trench, with a couple of blobs of hot glue for security and insulation (although I had already insulated with some Tamiya tape). 

February 26th, 2024 - I then glued the upper-upper hull part on and clamped it down. I guess the next step is to put the head together, and then glue it on. 

February 27th, 2024 - Today is Head Attachment Day - Part 1 😄 I began by peeling off the masking tape where the upper hull tried to meet the tops of the nacelles. I can't honestly believe it took me so long to remember about masking before you putty, to minimize the mess. (Compare the masked top gap, with the un-masked lower gap). Oh well, better late than never I suppose. 

February 27th, 2024 - Anyway - the head. I began by sanding off the layers of paint on the inside and outside of the neck joins. Not sure why I hadn't had them masked all along, but okay. 

February 27th, 2024 - The next thing I did was to gently peel off the rubber facing from my cold LED tape, and then even more gently put a couple of slight bends in it. I was fiddling around a bit, lining up the tape inside one half of the head. A dry fit and electrical test of the two halves with the bent tape inside but unsecured, just flapping around, lit up all of the windows beautifully. 

February 27th, 2024 - Even so, I decided to secure the tape. First with a little bit of new poster-tack to hold it against the inside surface whilst I blobbed on a couple of small blobs of hot glue. There are a couple of places inside the head where there are no windows, so leaking wasn't an issue, but still, be careful here.

The head is resting on a tin to raise it up and minimize strain on the wires. 

February 27th, 2024 - Finally today, I ran a bead of Revell Contacta gel glue around one side of the head, gently put the pieces together, a bit of tape, some clamps, and fingers crossed... 😄  

February 28th, 2024 - Revell gel glue on the head and neck joins, and wedged into the hull slots. Had to really jam them in finally, with the lower, thin part first. A second or two of tension, and then - ok, fitted! I had to hold them together quite tightly for a long while, and even so, There Will Be Putty! 

February 28th, 2024 - Another picture of the same thing, why not. The lights should be brighter when the full 12v are running through them. 

February 29th, 2024 - The glue has dried nicely after a good 24 hours, the bandages are off, and the gaps are HUGE. 😄
The fit is insane, although I can't remember now how well it fit without all the paint and glue and so on, so possibly some of these ludicrous gaps are my doing.

Never mind though, because I have larger fish to fry here. The final light leak test reveals - entirely unsurprisingly - that the last light leaks are along the seam of the head, all the way down and around under the chin. So, here you see tape around the two neck joins, and all along the front seam. Tomorrow, putty. This weekend, hopefully, touch-up painting, and by Monday/Tuesday, she'll be done! 

March 1st, 2024 - Friday evening, and I've applied thick beads of Vallejo Acrylic putty along the head seam and around those two neck joints. 

March 2nd, 2024 - Saturday evening and I file and sand down the putty while the tape is still on, to protect the already finished surfaces either side of the seam. Even so, especially around the neck joins which have awkward shapes, and even though I'm using shaped needle files, I manage to file down to the plastic in a couple of tiny spots. No matter!

Here you can see the tape off and the filed-down putty. I do a light test and find a couple of spots where I've filed off too much, so I putty them again. 

March 2nd, 2024 - Sunday afternoon and it's time to start wrapping this baby up so that I can do some precision paint touch-ups. This means that I have to mask the entire ship except for: the joins top and bottom of the nacelles, both outward-facing and inward-facing joins; pretty much the entire tail piece; the two neck joins, and the head seam.

To accomplish this I mostly use what the Brits call cling film, the Americans Saran Wrap (I believe it's a trade name), and what many people generically call plastic film, or plastic wrap. It's the stuff you use to wrap up sandwiches and cover bowls of food, and so on. Anyway, it's pretty easy to wrap it around the wings leaving the nacelles free, and then tape it so that the tail sticks out. I wrap the whole thing up and then do the head separately, by slicing a small strip out of the cling film along the head seam, and then taping the film either side.

By the way, what you see here is my solution to rolling out long lengths of the plastic film without it sticking to itself, by laying it on a vinyl chair and then cutting it at the top, behind the top of the chair. The plastic sticks to the chair gently, and the tension of gently pulling on the roll whilst you scissor through it provides a nice, clean cut. 

March 2nd, 2024 - It took me about an hour altogether I think. Doing this touch-up painting also enables me to cover up some gluey seems and other crud, so that's a nice bonus. 

March 2nd, 2024 - Top view of this delicious Romulan sandwich! 

March 2nd, 2024 - The head, close up. My sanding is not the best, so this is far from an invisible correction, so I foresee some more 'shmutzing' with the rusty crayons coming up too... 

March 2nd, 2024 - I also wrapped up the dome base, which I recently temporarily wired up to the model for the light leak testing. 

March 2nd, 2024 - Aaaaand here she is, all wrapped up and with Citadel Chaos Black primer on all those messy parts. She's swooping down onto that new can of Tamiya AS-9, ready to munch it up and be all green again! 😄  

March 5th, 2024 - Since Saturday I've sprayed on the AS-9 Dark Green, touched up the tail because I missed a part hiding under the tape (lol), and done the final detailing and so on. Here we see our Romulan Warbird with the green applied.  

March 5th, 2024 - Here it is just this evening as I prepared to gently unwrap it. The plastic wrap feels quite brittle under the paint, but is still strong.  

March 5th, 2024 - Aaaaaand here it is, unwrapped, before final detailing and before the final matt varnish to seal the repainted parts. Oh, and the decals - all 4 of them! 😄

In the harsh phone light the myriad little paint flaws are quite obvious, but to the naked eye, a bit less so.

Next photos here will be the traditional, so-called beauty shots, and then I'll close the project here in Scalemates, take a breather for a few days and then... let's just say that I'm not yet done working for the enemies of the Federation! 😄 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 1/10 - Saturday again, and this big green bird is finally-finally complete: all 4 non-window decals are in place, and the final matt varnish has been applied. 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 2/10 - I used a brand-new can of the Tamiya TS-80 to seal the decals and nacelle re-paints, and there was no paint munching this time. Phew! 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 3/10 - Apologies for the variable quality of these pix. My phone struggles a bit in low light. I might get a new phone soon though. There are very good deals on Redmis these days, and some of them have very nice cameras. 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 4/10 - I think this ship looks great when lit only by its own lighting. Really menacing! 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 5/10 - Outside on a slightly chilly, slightly overcast Polish day. 😄 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 6/10 - Thinking about my overall experience with this kit, I would say that although it looks big and kind of easy to handle, it definitely needs some careful consideration. The fit of the parts is generally alright, although you need to check the seams on the hull halves, and the massive gaps where the head joins the body at those two neck points. Also, on the actual model the wings and the nacelles look like one, continuous, smooth join, which I utterly failed to capture on my build. 😄 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 7/10 - It takes lots of green paint, but you can have some real fun customizing the feather patterns. Of all the finished Warbirds I've seen, no two are alike. And yesterday in fact, I saw a YouTube video (by Michael's Models I think), where he had some after-market decals that add shadows and highlights to the wing patterns, if you want to maintain the overall greenness but add some depth and texture. Definitely a fun build though, and if you don't light it you will have a much easier time. Just watch out for those joins! 😄 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 8/10 - You can't stage some fun photos of a Warbird without throwing in Picard's boat too. 😄 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 9/10 - I think that although these two kits are in different scales, it just about works with the Warbird's 1:3200 scale against the D's 1:1200 scale. 

March 9th, 2024 - Final Beauty shots 10/10 - That's all, Scalemates! Live long and prosper, and see you again soon. 🙂