Star Trek Enterprise NCC-1701 "Into Darkness"
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Because of large surfaces I preferred the rattle can for primer.
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Because of use of a lighting set I drilled holes through the impulse engines.
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Some holes had to be made to let the LED's through.
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To prevent light leakage, especially with a white plastic, the interior was sprayed matt black.
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Painting clear parts with clear paint.
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After the black layer you can spray a silver layer to help reflect the light inside.
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Detailed masking of the front bulb of the Bussard collector.
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Together with Tamiya masking tape I used Humbrol Maskol to get into the diffucult curved parts.
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I'd done a previous Enterprise TOS with lighting, though this one was more complicated and I had to mix a 3V and 12V circuit, and I'm not an electronics engineer 🙁 But there are some very good tutorials on LED on the internet.
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Testing the 12V circuit.
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Use of LED strips
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The individual LED's had to be installed with a resistor. I think this is the kit where I (finally !) discovered the hot glue gun. What a tool !
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Blue LED's from the Artemis Designs lighting kit.
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Lighting test OK !
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Lighting of the upper saucer section.
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Combination of LED strips (12V permanent light) and individual LEDs (3V blinking with module).
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I ran out of white glue sticks, so I used the coloured ones that came with the glue gun (in this case the blue).
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Luckily this is not 230V AC ...
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OK, lighting test passed.
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Closing them up and start puttying and sanding.
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The "neck" was difficult to get the seems right.
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LED test for the dish.
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Spaghetti colore
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Assembly of saucer with lower hull.
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A lot of long seems to fill and sand.
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Assembly of upper and lower saucer sections. No more access to any of the LEDs ... (nailbite)
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This is a model with difficult to reach angles and curves.
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More filling and sanding ...
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First clear gloss coat.
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First kit decals.
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I started the bottom side of the saucer with de Aztec decals from Acreation Models but it was a disaster (see the gaps ; also very thin, and rather poor print). So finally I dropped the idea of the Aztec pattern not to ruin the whole model.
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The kit decals worked out fine. But the circular ones were a real challenge. It took me ages to get a decent curved line. So far the most time consuming decaling on a kit.
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Note the slightly wrong curve of the black line above the "U.S.S.". Some moments it was a pain in the *** (wrist)
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I fabricated a box from scraps of plywood for an elevated stand to hide the blinking LED module and battery pack.
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And painted it black with acrylic from the tube.
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Wiring through the wooden stand.
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Unfortunately, at some point, the blinking module broke down, so now I have static navigation lights instead of blinking 🙁
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LED there be light !
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Due to too much handling of the assembled kit (which is quite heavy) some of the seems got open and resulted in light leakage.
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Kommentit
1 1 May 2018, 18:50
![](/profiles/img/17224-211-s.jpg)
Nice work! There is so much more work to light one up! The 350 scale took me 5 months, so I know you went through some time on this one. Looks good!
12 June 2019, 14:03