Polar Lights 1:1000 U.S.S. Excelsior

October 22nd, 2023 - And so we begin with the traditional wash in warm soapy water. 

October 22nd, 2023 - Here's a good reason why a wash is still important. Some dirty grey smudges and some kind of oily residue. This is the eighth kit that I've built, and the third or fourth on which I've seen such smudges and residue. So we might say that about 40-50% of the kits I've built have been 'dirty'. 

October 22nd, 2023 - Anyway, let's peep the sprues. The box is nicely stuffed with the instructions, one large decal sheet, a small dome base and metal rod (solid, so we'll need to change that), one clear parts sprue, one saucer half by itself, and five other sprues. Here we can see the nacelle pylons and one of the variant interior pieces for the engineering hull. 

October 22nd, 2023 - Over here, the lower saucer half and the nacelles. In fact, this is not two halves of one nacelle, as is usual in a Trek kit, but two nacelle bases. The rest of the nacelles consist of walls and a roof and a couple of detail parts (inc. the legendary Tie-fighter cockpit dome). 

October 22nd, 2023 - The secondary, engineering hull. The oval cutout in the upper half is for the nacelle pylon 'island', and the wedge-shaped hole in the lower half is where we can see the main shuttlebay (according to the Excelsior's Master Systems Display (MSD) on the Ex Astris Scientia website). 

October 22nd, 2023 - The neck and rear cowling at the bottom, and some nacelle parts up top. 

October 22nd, 2023 - The clear parts! Look at how crazy this sprue looks. The way they got all of those long parts on one, connected frame, is quite remarkable. 

October 22nd, 2023 - Upper saucer half, more nacelle bits, and the two variant rear pieces for the top of the engineering hull. According to the MSD, this whole part at the back is a cargo bay (facing the rear), and part of the crew lounge (facing the saucer).

The next thing I'm going to do is put the window decals on, and use them as a template to drill out the windows. Hu hu hu!  

October 24th, 2023 - So, yesterday (the 23rd), I clipped the two saucer halves and the two secondary hull halves off their sprues, filed down the clip marks, and prepared for step 1 of a lit Excelsior - applying the window decals to the bare hull, and using them as a template to drill out the windows! I've seen other Trek modelers do this and it's a different, fun, and excellent way ahead! This model does not have any indentations or any kinds of marks where the windows are, so you need something to guide you.

That was the plan, anyway. And it was then that I noticed something that I had seen a few days ago when I was washing the parts, but assumed was an optical illusion... Yes, the dreaded plastic warp! I have only ever read about this, and never would have expected this relatively modern, new kit, from my usually solid main supplier, to suffer from it. But I guess it can strike anywhere. You can see how badly the lower hull half is warped -- the red line is the level! 

October 24th, 2023 - The flat, top part is also slightly buckled, but not so badly. Still, the fit would be quite bad, and I don't want to waste time, electric parts, and paint, if it's not going to hold together properly. 

October 24th, 2023 - Another view of that crazy, banana-looking lower hull half. 

October 25th, 2023 - I did a bit of Googling and most people were saying that softening the plastic in very hot water, bending it back into shape, and then letting it cool in its new shape, is the way to go. There is some slight disagreement about how hot is too hot, but hot water is the generally agreed-upon method.

Sooo, I started in the morning by running hot tap water over the lower hull half and 'massaging' the piece back into shape. Afterwards, I trapped the pieces under 1 Kg weights from a weight-lifting set, with heavy dictionaries on top and left them all day. In the evening I looked -- no change.

Next, I put a few inches of the hottest tap water into a clean sink, with the parts gently trapped under the 1 Kg weights, and topped up the sink three times with a bit of boiling kettle water every 5-10 minutes -- By morning of the next day, there wasn't much change. So, it didn't really help much. I mean, it *did* help a bit, but not fully. Hmm. 

October 26th, 2023 - I thought then that perhaps instead of making it hot and then forcing it into the correct shape, we need to force it into shape and *then* make it hot.
Enter my small Dremel vice, stage left! 

October 26th, 2023 - With the help of some scraps of wood, I wedged the hull into place nice and tight. Then, I turned on my heat gun, set it to the lowest setting (I say "lowest", but it only has two settings anyway 😄 ), and then waved it all over the middle, warped area.  

October 24th, 2023 - I kept it at a respectable distance so as not to totally melt or further deform the shape, which a heat gun could easily do. Then I left the whole thing where it is, cooling in the garage. Did the same thing to the upper half too, just to get it really flat. The locator pins on that top half, and the guide posts on the lower half, come together really well. Like, the fit is super tight, which you can tell just from even the gentlest test. I think that if we can bend the two pieces about 3/4 back into shape, a nice thick bead of glue all around will finish the job for us. 

October 29th, 2023 - Good news/bad news. First, the good. Over the last few days I did two more 'heat treatments', and as you can see it is about 95% straight and level again. Hooray! I think this will be good enough. 

October 29th, 2023 - Now the bad. 😄 After the first treatment, in the Dremel vice with the wooden jig, I changed my tactics a bit and went back to holding the hull half down flat with 2 Kg of those hand weights on the rear, flat half of the hull, and 2 Kg of weights arranged on the front, curved part of the hull. The first treatment like this was *really* effective, and so I did it again. And so the final result is that I mostly got the twist out, HOWEVER (lol) I added a new deformity, presumably from the pressure of those weights. The starboard side now has a big bulge. 😄

You can see this more clearly when we plug in part number 9, which is the visible interior part of the guts. The green circles show where the fit is still good, and the red parts are all... yuk. 😄 

October 29th, 2023 - Same photo, without all the colourful bits. 😄 Next, I will try to re-shape the plastic back into place, possibly while part 9 and/or the hull upper half are in place, to act as a visual guide. Not sure, we'll see. Hmm.

The other thing that I have decided is that if I can't get this fixed good enough, I will try building it without the lighting, so as to save resources and avoid having to deal with the mother of all light leaks. 😄 

November 1st, 2023 - The heat treatment worked well enough that I despite the remaining deformity, I can putty and paint and glue and the kit is basically saved! I'm not going to show off that starboard side, of course, but at least the whole thing isn't wasted. 😄 

November 1st, 2023 - Basically what I did was plug in the big interior 'guts' part, then blow the hot air (lowest setting) onto the side for about 8-10 seconds, then I 'rolled" that side part across my cutting matt. In effect, that's all you need to do to make the plastic soft enough to re-shape. I also did this a couple of times with my fingers - the plastic was hot, but not hot enough to be painful.

That finger-shaped 'chip' in the rim is from the pressure of the weights the second time I did this. Putty will help there. 

November 1st, 2023 - Ultimately, that cut-out shape is really a mess, but once the kit it built and painted and decalled, the whole ship will look fine from the port side, mostly fine from the front, crazy from the rear, and really crazy from the starboard side. 😄 But, hey, again, it's buildable! (Jut not gonna light it). 😄 

November 4th, 2023 - Alright, enough with the hot-air blowing, let's get on with actually building and painting this thing. Here I am, being over-protective of my glueable edges, prior to priming. 😄 I picked out all the parts that I need to build the engineering hull, which include the first variant part - the big, diamond-shaped shuttlebay part that sits aft of the nacelles.  

November 5th, 2023 - I couldn't get into the garage to actually paint yesterday, and in the meantime I thought I would do a bit more painting preparation. So, I built and attached the three-piece neck, because I think it will be easy enough to paint it in place. I also glued together the two-piece riser that lifts the nacelle 'island' up off the deck a little bit. For that part, I will just have to carefully scrape the paint off. Anyway, the end result is that in the photo here, you can see all these pieces after a good coating with Vallejo White primer.

Oh, and because I decided to prime the saucer halves too, I also had to make a choice about the bridge dome and and the impulse deck. They don't tell you in the instructions which parts belong to which ships (Search for Spock or Undiscovered Country), so some careful research is necessary. The clearest pictures, and the best resource generally (as always!) is E.A.S., here: ex-astris-scientia.org/scans/excelsior1.htm

There was one last bit of hot-air fun today too. As I was assembling everything downstairs and warming up the big can of primer in some hot water, I was looking again at the warp in the hull pieces, and I thought that the sag in the thin upper deck part is really too pronounced. I couldn't let it go. So, lacking the time and the hot air gun, I just turned on the smallest gas ring on the stove, used my hand to find the edge of the heat, and just held that piece there for about... maybe 10-15 seconds? Then I gently pressed it flat with both hands against the kitchen counter, and after a minute it was cool and straight! Straighter than it ever has been anyway. 😄 

November 5th, 2023 - Fun! Maybe helpful too, for future Excelsior builders. I used the Excelsior photo gallery linked to in the previous photo to make these determinations, and also double-checked the models in Star Trek Online. So we should be airtight here. 

November 6th, 2023 - With the primer dry, it's time for some real colour! As I've said before, I'm building this kit as the Star Trek VI-era Excelsior, NCC-2000. However, I'm making one small compromise, which is that instead of the clean white hull colour of the movies, I'm going to give it more of a light grey colour, as it appears on-screen in Generations, TNG, and DS9. Those are the so-called Refit Excelsiors, the most famous of which are the Enterprise B and the Lakota. (They have the bathtub-shaped lower hull). To that end, I'm using the same Tamiya AS-20 Insignia White (US Navy) that I used to paint my Revell TAS/DS9 Constitution class Enterprise.  

November 6th, 2023 - You can't really see it in these pictures because my camera light washes it out to white again, but it will be more visible later (when I take better pictures lol). Anyway, this morning I decided to start on the nacelles too, so those four long slim parts in the middle are the clear parts (two sides per nacelle), which in all but the Voyager episode "Flashback" (where we see Tim Russ playing Tuvok on the bridge of the B), are routinely not lit up like the usual Starfleet nacelles.

However, the top part of the nacelles needs to be the same, or a similar blue, as the blue of the decals and detailing on the rest of the ship, and I don't have anything like that in a spray. So, I will try to order some soon. I've seen a good colour already - Tamiya AS-8 Navy Blue. In the meantime, there are more nacelle parts and bits and pieces to do anyway, plus I could probably get on with detailing the saucer at least. I think I will do this kit in totally finished subassemblies - nacelles and pylons, saucer, and hull. 

November 7th, 2023 - A bit more painting today - Gunship Grey on the neck and nacelle sides, hull colour on the nacelle bottoms, and primer on the nacelle tops. Tomorrow I'll paint the little cowling parts and the TIE Fighter cockpits for the nacelles too. 😄 

November 7th, 2023 - Here you can see how that Insignia White (US Navy) looks compared to the unpainted plastic. The Gunship Grey is a really nice colour too - it's a really dark grey, almost black colour, but is still light enough to make details stand out nicely.  

November 8th, 2023 - Looking at the paint guide in the instructions, and looking at the gallery on E.A.S., I can see that on the top deck the two big panels between the neck and the nacelle pylons are a slightly darker shade than the rest of the hull. A lot of the photos of finished models that I see are, as usual, covered in Aztec decals, which I think look quite good in Excelsior's case. They sort of help all these differently shaded panels blend a little, but I think we'll be fine with a light grey. This will be a more impressionistic model anyway. 😄  

November 9th, 2023 - I mask it up, and mask up the shuttlebay cowling, and hit them both with a dusting of Tamiya AS-26 Light Ghost Grey. My masking job for the deck panels is surprisingly good, and the finished effect is really nice. (You'll see it eventually). 😄 

November 9th, 2023 - Today I also painted the clear parts - half the sprue with my favourite pseudo lighting colour (Tamiya TS-10 French Blue), and half with some of the ol' Vallejo Bloody Red 72.00.10. At first, I painted the two bigger pieces on the right, but after realizing that those two slim little sticks are the actual engine parts, I worked out that the two big pieces are part of a small number of unused parts! I guess these are left over from a previous mold or something, because they have no visible purpose in this kit. We'll have a look at some more of them eventually.  

November 10th, 2023 - Impulse crystals in place! I also penciled a letter 'B' on all the places on the saucer that need to be spayed blue, whenever I actually get that blue. 😄 Next week for sure, I can mail order it.  

November 10th, 2023 - The deflector dish is glued in, too.  

November 10th, 2023 - I then decided to glue the hull together. At this point, I know I still need to putty and try to fix that deformity, which will need painting anyway, so I think, why not. Fortunately it all goes together very well, except at the front where there is some slight misalignment between the two pointy ends. But overall, it's not too bad, and at least now I can see exactly where I need to file and putty. 

November 11th, 2023 - Speaking of which, just now I sat down and spread on a thick layer of Tamiya White Putty, for later filing and sanding. I will still need to do some acrylic putty forward of that big streak of putty, but we're off to a good start, I think.  

November 13th, 2023 - Here it is sanded down. I was quite pleased with the sanding, but the flash on my phone makes it look smoother than it actually is... 😄 

November 13th, 2023 - Here it is masked again, for the re-spraying. 

November 14th, 2023 - And now we jump ahead to a whole new chapter in this saga! 😄 As you can more or less see here, the puttying and sanding, when re-sprayed with our basic hull colour (Tamiya AS-20), was still very wobbly and bumpy. Soooo, I thought about it a bit, despaired for a moment, then bounced back and decided that I've come too far with this cursed hull to give up. And so! The result of my too-hasty and amateurish repair job in fact presented an opportunity to try something new - something I've always wanted to try: hairspray weathering! I will do this to create some kind of damage effect, to cover up all the lumps and bumps.

Here, you can see how on the starboard side, I have painted some blobs using the Vallejo figure paints' Black to represent the depths of the interior of the ship, with a Gunmetal colour around the edges to represent unpainted hull. I mean, that's the idea anyway. 😄 What you can also see here is that I gloss coated the affected areas, to protect the 'damage' effects. 

November 15th, 2023 - This morning I sprayed 2-3 light coats of hairspray on the 'damage' parts. This was a simple, unscented, basic hairspray - Cosmia brand, from an Auchan hypermarket. After a couple of hours it was touch dry and so I sprayed a thin layer of AS-20 on top of that. To recap, the sandwich so far looks like this:

- plastic
- primer
- hull colour
- damage colours
- gloss varnish
- hairspray
- hull colour

In this photo, I have liberally soaked the damage areas with warm water and started chipping away at those areas with a wooden pointy stick (don't laugh). I mean, it's something from my wife's cosmetics accessories, like a really thick toothpick. 😄 I also have another wooden thing which I can't even begin to describe but which is probably for barbecues and picnics. 😄 

November 15th, 2023 - About 5 minutes later, this is the effect. I used a bit of folded-up toilet paper to wipe away the water and loose crap. Sooo, I'm quite happy with the way this turned out. You can see immediately that the effect is best suited to rust on tanks and cars and so on, but what I will do eventually is add some glue and some charcoal powder - like I did with my big USS Reliant build - and shape that to give the scars some directionality and generally make them look more natural. 

November 15th, 2023 - This is the other, starboard, side. Here, the problem was that I did the re-spray too thick, and ended up with a thick line of painted 'snot' that I filed down. Eh. 

November 15th, 2023 - Here are the tools I used for the hairspray chipping - my wife's cosmetics spear, the weird BBQ fork, and a now-old-and-ruined No. 4 flat-tip brush. The brush was less helpful than the wooden things.

Still waiting to order the blue paint, but I think I'll get it in before the weekend. 

November 18th, 2023 - This afternoon (Saturday), I finally scraped enough clams together to order the much-needed blue paint! I really like this shade, which I picked to suit the nacelle tops. But despite being less bright than ideal for the other blue panels on the ship, I think I will go ahead and just do all the blue bits with this stuff. We'll see. I get paid in another week anyway, so if necessary I could buy a different shade for the hull panels, but... eh. Right now, I'm just following the process, not the plan. 😄  

November 21st, 2023 - This evening (Tuesday), having just been to the parcel locker to collect the paint, I sat down to mask everything. I'd already done the lower hull (again!) earlier in the day, which is just as well because it took bloody ages, just to expose those two triangle shapes and the big T shape on the bottom, and the two finger shapes on top. Masking off the saucer was much more fun though.

Making it SO much easier were my last three sheets of Tamiya masking paper, of which I only used one whole one, plus a few scraps. First of all, the lower half. I cut about a third of a sheet off so that the saucer fit inside nicely, and made a slice in the neck area so that the fit would be more snug. Then I gently ran first my little finger around that trench part, and then the eraser head of a pencil, making sure the masking tape fit as close as possible to the plastic. Next, it was simply a matter of gently slicing the tape out, following the shape of the trench. 

November 21st, 2023 - The top half of the saucer is much more complicated and I had to make a compromise. First though, I masked around the whole central 'column' shape. To get the curved 'head' of the column, where the bridge is, I went out earlier today and bought a really cheap plastic drawing compass. Turning the saucer over and setting the point in a conveniently placed dot where the mold was poured, I held the saucer up to a lamp and set the pencil on the wall of the column. 

November 21st, 2023 - You can barely see it here (sorry), but then I drew the circle onto a piece of masking paper, and cut it out. Against all the odds, the fit was perfect! 

November 21st, 2023 - Here you can see the saucer halves just before painting. So, the compromise that I made is that the blue on that central column is segmented, and the strips of hull colour between the segments are so thin, I don't think that I could do them with slivers of tape and have them come out looking okay. Or maybe I could, but just lack the confidence. Anyway, looking at them last night I could only imagine having to do re-sprays, sooo, le compromis! 😄 

November 21st, 2023 - I was a bit worried about how I would mask the nacelle tops too, which should go blue edge, slim hull strip, wider blue central part, slim hull strip, blue edge. In the end, this was remarkably easy. First I applied a strip of 6 mm Tamiya tape along each side. 6 mm fits perfectly from the edge of the "wider blue central part" to the edge of the whole thing. 

November 21st, 2023 - I then ran my thumb nail along the grooves to press the tape in nicely, then sliced along that second groove and peeled off the outer part of the tape.  

November 21st, 2023 - Et voila! (I don't know where all the French is coming from). 😄 Anyway, I only hope there is not any messy paint bleed along those "slim hull strips". Worst comes to the worst and I'll just blow over the whole part with the blue paint, but for now, I remain optimistic! 😄 

November 22nd, 2023 - Here we are then. This is most of the kit so far. The blue paint is touch-dry, but I'm leaving it for 24 hours anyway. (It looks almost black in the photo, but the light is not great here). In my near future I know that there will be some respraying to do after the saucer assembly, because the gap around the curved, rectangular part that fits under the impulse engines is HORRIFIC and requires a ton of puttying. It would be much smarter to fully assemble the saucer, putty it, and then paint it. However, with the amount of masking I've done already, I'm not too concerned. My plan is to put the entire thing inside a small plastic bag and then just tape it around the neck. So, eh. We'll see.  

November 22nd, 2023 - Looking at that last picture reminded me that I haven't painted *every* part that needs it, so here are the last few bits and pieces, masked off. With the nacelle pylon assembly, you only need to paint a small triangular shape and a stripe on each arm, top and bottom. But, I honestly could not be bothered with the amount of fiddling around that that would have involved masking-wise, so I decided to just paint the whole large panel that has the triangle shape on it. Let's say that the blue panels on the Excelsior are the strongback panels, and this one has extra strength. 😄  

November 24th, 2023 - I spent all day yesterday and today painting. This afternoon I peeled off all the 'bandages' and in terms of paint bleed, it was nooot tooo baaad. The most bleed, of blue onto hull grey, was on the upper saucer half. I had expected this, but it didn't make it any easier to look at. 😄 I tidied up some of it with the hybrid nail polish remover, and where it still looks ugly I'll use the black wash to cover it up. Following *this* process, as I usually do, gives my ships a very Star Wars-style dirt effect, which honestly I really like, although I do try to make clean, shipyard-finished models. Honest. 😄

Even so, I ended up doing a quick re-mask of the upper saucer and sprayed some AS-20 on the bleedy parts. We'll see how this ping-pong match turns out tomorrow. 😄 I also note that the Gunship Grey on the neck looks almost like the Navy Blue (USN) on the panels under the camera flash, buuuut, the alternative was having everything look like grey without the flash. But trust me, there is a difference between the two colours. 😄

The nacelle assembly is only dry-fit to the 'collar', but you can see that it's slowly taking shape. Finally! Phew. 😄  

November 26th, 2023 - When I say that this is all of it, I really mean it this time! 😄 On the left, slightly covered by the lower hull on its stand, you can see the legendary nacelle cowls, *finally* primed and painted. Everything else here is sitting shiny and bright from the first coat of TS-13 Gloss. Next will be the weathering, when I can finally hide some of the evil bits and make the buckled plastic look like proper battle damage and not just melted plastic. 😄  

November 27th, 2023 - Last night and this morning I weathered all the main hull pieces using my usual mixture of Vallejo Black Wash and crushed charcoal drawing sticks. This time I also mixed in with the wash a little Revell Contacta glue, dabbed the brush in, then dabbed the brush into the powdered charcoal too. This worked really well at covering some of the crappy painting and bleeds on the upper saucer half. Too well, in fact, as I had to chip off some off the charcoal later. 😄

On the lower hull, it got a bit messy and ultimately, not great looking. Sooo, I tried another approach, that Model Chili in NZ (check YouTube) did on some of his kits, which is to create a kind of 'temporary repairs' effect by masking tile shapes over this big blobby mess of damage, and then spraying hull colour in the gaps. Here it is, touch-dry, and tomorrow I will see how it turned out. I had meant to file the roughness down a bit, but eh, we'll see. Plan F now (!), is to use the painted masking sheet to make tiles and stick them on to cover some of the worse-looking parts.  

November 28th, 2023 - It's been a busy two days! Here we see the gloss-coated, weathered saucer halves, with the charcoal battle-damaged parts, and more gloss on top of those weathered parts. I'm not totally satisfied with the final effect, because it doesn't tell the story I envisioned. Instead of being streaks, like phaser burns, they look more like flower blossoms, which suggests to me that something exploded from within (also strongly suggested, I think, by their symmetry). Which is okay too, although there is not enough depth to them, so that now they look more like some kind of space shmutz that the ship flew through. I dunno, it sort of grows on me slowly. Ultimately, I prefer even this slightly botched battle damage effect to the more mundane, amateur-looking paint bleed though, so that's kind of a win? I'll take it. 😄 

November 28th, 2023 - Here, the halves are glued together. The two halves seemed to fit better with glue than in my dry-fit tests, with the only gap in the rim happening in the 6 to about 7 o'clock positions. Later on, I put some Vallejo Plastic Putty in that rim gap.  

November 28th, 2023 - With the halves still clamped together, a little later I went ahead and assembled the impulse engines. 

November 28th, 2023 - You can see here the incredible bad fit of that curved part to the saucer. In his AllScaleTrek review on YouTube, Mario Suarez also pointed this out, which is great because otherwise I might think it was heat damage again, or just bad manufacturing. Anyway, that all got puttied up nicely too. 😄 

November 28th, 2023 - On a roll now, I turned to the nacelles. My strategy here was to employ two blobs of old mate Poster Putty (that's the name I have settled on for this stuff), to help secure the chiller grilles in place. I also only glued the grill edges at the ends of the nacelle base (using the nice thick Revell Contacta), rather than all along and make more of a mess. As it is, I will need to just run the black wash over those grilles one more time, to take care of a couple of spots where glue got out and ate the paint. No problem really. 

November 28th, 2023 - With the grilles in place, I then brushed on some of the Tamiya Super Thin from the inside, just to help things along. I then placed the nacelles upside down on this old mouse mat that I use as a kinder work surface (pictured here), and gently pressed down, to ensure a good fit. 

November 28th, 2023 - Then I glued on the blue tops, and after that the end caps, and then slipped in the TIE-Fighter lids. (I can't say that without smiling). 😄

UNFORtunately... *sigh*, something strange happened with the second nacelle. And by strange I mean that I just assumed that I had it right because I had carefully checked the placement of the blue top for the first nacelle. But as you can see, the blue top part on the second nacelle (the lower of the two pictured here) is somehow too far forward... 😄 I know, right? Ridiculous. 😄 I did contemplate for a second pulling that nacelle apart and trying again, buuuut... ech... At this point I don't mind too much, really. I have accepted that this is a kind of 'cursed' project and have made peace with the various bonkers things that I have done and have had to do to get this far, sooo, yeah. C'est la vie, as the French say. 😄 

November 29th, 2023 - So that was all in the morning, and then in the evening I started the decalling, which I carried on with today too. Here we see the results so far: all of the top saucer half, the nacelles, and the port side of the lower hull.

Usually I enjoy the decalling process and am very lucky with it. In all of the kits I have made so far, I can count on one hand how many decals broke or had to be abandoned. But not so here, of course! The first decal I put down is that small blue circular one around the bridge (not the big U-shaped 'Tiger stripes' - they were fine), which immediately broke. Later on I tried to scratch it all off, which I think is an actual improvement. 😄 Then I tried to put the red pin-stripes on the nacelle pylons -- too fiddly, weird alignment, and so I decided they perhaps were not totally necessary. The big, blue, two-tone stripes along the port edge there have a big curve at one end, to loop around the front of the ship. Well that refused to line up nicely, so I ended up keeping most of it but slicing off the front scoopy part. (Tip: You can cut it in half and apply the two halves separately, no problem). I looked at the red pin-stripes on the nacelles and just thought 'Nahhh...' 😄 😄 I still need to apply the traditional red pennant on the port side hull too, but that can be tomorrow. 

December 1st, 2023 - Today and yesterday I was just decalling. I finished the top saucer, did the bottom saucer and the other side of the lower hull, and also did the saucer rim. Unfortunately, I kind of did the saucer out of order, because I forgot about the rim stripes - a set of three blue stripes that go all around - and so I'd already put the yeelow RCS decals on. These would look much better going on top of the stripes. So! I cut them to fit inbetween the RCS decals, and it looks okay. I mean, the whole thing is a mess, so this doesn't really make much odds. 😄 One last pair of decals to put on, tomorrow (the red pinstripes on the lower saucer half), and then I can gloss everything again, and then give it the final matt coat and call it done. Phew!

My next project is going to be something much simpler (theoretically, anyway), and much greener...

Anyway, here we can see the final three subassemblies, waiting to be put together. The last thing I did this evening was glue the nacelles onto the pylons, after which I was reminded that with this kit, one really needs to glue everything together first and *then* paint, because wow, the gap on the inside seam there... 😄 

December 2nd, 2023 - Just applied the last red pinstripes to the lower saucer half, and glued the nacelle-pylon subassembly to the lower hull. The metal post fits quite tightly to the hull, and over time I noticed that every time I pulled it out and pushed it back in again, it was more difficult and I could hear the tell-tale sound of creaking plastic... So I've left it in for most of the job, which means I had to do a quick bit of rigging to support the added weight of the nacelles while the glue dries. 😄

I also note that the pinstripes for the lower saucer are not quite long enough to go the full distance from the neck to the registry number, so don't freak out, that's just the way it is. 😄 

December 3rd, 2023 - I was about to go and do the final gloss coat on the saucer and 2ndry hull as two separate assemblies, and then thought 'Why not just glue everything together and then spray?' So that's what I've done here, and you can see some old CDs have joined the cassette tapes in holding her up while she dries. 😄 Without the saucer, the long nacelles make the whole thing want to tip over backwards. Perhaps it would be good to add some counter weight in the back of the nacelles, or in the engineering hull at least. Hmm.

Anyway, next stop - gloss coat to seal the final decals, then the final matt coat to take the shine off, and voila, bingo, and good riddance. 😄 Kidding, kidding. 😄 I think that despite the flaws, problems and mistakes that went into this build, the essential design of the ship outshines all of that. An Excelsior will always look amazing, just because it is such a beautiful ship. 🙂 All due credit to David Carson and Nilo Rodis-Jamero for the original design for Star Trek III, and to Steve Gawley and Bill George for building that original 7.5-foot studio model. 

December 6th, 2023 - Welp, the final Tamiya TS-80 matt coat is dry, and so here are the final photos, the so-called beauty shots. 😄 Hard to make this thing look beautiful, especially when you're looking at close-up photos of it, but here we are. 😄  

December 6th, 2023 - I never really got a good look at the deflector dish, which was helped enormously by that white 'star' decal. For an out-of-the-box effect, I think it's pretty good! 

December 6th, 2023 - Here you can see the twist in her back really well. Again, had not really noticed this until now, looking at the photos. 

December 6th, 2023 - Still, as I said before, the basic design of the ship is so good, even my cack-handed build here looks better than it should do. 😄  

December 6th, 2023 - Having said all of that, I am quite happy with it. I'm glad I stuck with it, and I learned some new tricks, with the heating and re-shaping of plastic. So that was a very rewarding experience for me. 

December 6th, 2023 - Alrighty then! Thank you for following along, and I hope something in here was useful for you! 

December 6th, 2023 - Love long and prosper, Scalemates!