This week I continued to work on a customer build. Models like this take weeks to build. There are so many things I have to do to accomplish a finished product model of this type. From painting, to installing electronics and lights in subassemblies to applying decals of hull markings in the sub assembly stage before one can assemble the model in its entirety, fill the gaps between the major sections and mount it to the base.
At this point I'm still installing lights. This requires a series of test ideas to get the right effects. One of which required the testing of two different methods to achieve the correct result for the star ships warp nacelles. One was using micro LED strip lighting in a translucent white plastic tube and the other was to place a large LED at each end of the same tube. The latter produced near perfect results in lighting the tube evenly. The strip lights had too many source hot spots.
Now, I owe a great deal of credit to Randy Neubert and his company, VooDooFX.com. Randy and I have been friends for years and he has helped me set up the best possible lighting kits for my modeling projects starting with the nearly 6 foot TOS Enterprise model that I built from scratch over 12 years ago now. Needless to say, the large model to this day is lit daily in my office and all the lighting has been working well all these years.
Here it is today in my office. The smaller Enterprise refit is a 3 ft model that will give you an idea of its size.
But I digress; Randy had the great idea to use the plastic tubing and place the LEDS at either end to make a makeshift sort of neon tube. And it worked. This is the wonderful thing about modelers sharing and working together to produce great works. It's not about ego and secrets but making a great model which was always the idea. The nacelles took all week. The model is small and there's not a lot of room to work with. I had to fit in 4 LEDs, 3 with resistors, plastic tubing, wiring, and fiber optics to create the strobe light top and bottom of the aft nacelles. After I figured out the first nacelle (which took 4 days) the second only took one day. I even had time left to light up the deflector dish.
As always, I will have to gap and light block all the poorly fitting parts after I finish all the light installation. At the end of the week I had all the windows scribed out and lit on the saucer section and the engineering section. Both nacelles lit and the engineering section nearly lit. Next week the saucer section gets its NAV lights and strobes, registry lighting and a few more doodads.
Moving on, we did a few more things this week. I took Miss Charlotte, the Spider, to American Tires and got her some much needed new tires. She came with a set of track tires on her for racing. This made for a most uncomfortable driving experience on the street. The end result was quite a transformation. She now drives very smoothly.
We still don't have the Realta back and miss it dearly.
I was sent some interesting personal projects to do at home in the Slot Car Cave this week. This lovely 1/24 scale 917K Porsche will be built into another race car for my racing with the big boys at Buena Park Raceway.When finished it will look like this finished car.
My friend in New Zealand, John Warren, sent me this resin body of a 1957 Maserati 250F. It's 1/32 scale for my home track and I'll be making a scratch built chassis for this car. This is a show car and a piece of history. I love building historical cars that I can run on my track.
The actual car looks like this.
In Mary's corner, she was busy painting and burning. When her neighbor saw the trinket box on Facebook that she made, she had to have it. Enjoy, Georjean.
She painted a Jellyfish in the Dark on Monday
and now she has a new obsession with encaustic painting. Encaustic art is painting with a hot wax medium. She couldn't wait to get her wax paints from Enkausticos (which were on the doorstep when we got home Friday) So she got some crayons out and her craft iron. Melted the wax on the iron and painted an ocean. Crayons are not archival but it is a fun little piece.
The Battlestar Galactica model was packed up and shipped to Arizona on Monday and I am happy to report my shipping job got her there safe and undamaged. A fitting end to a long week.
Happy Mother's Day Sunday. Have a great weekend. Have lots of fun. We love you bunches!
Steve and Mary
https://marycacciapaglia.wordpress.com/
Fine Art America - Steve Neill
SNG Aero - Rockets by Steve Neill
As always, feel free let us know if you want to be removed from our newsletter by emailing us.
Share with friends if you think they would be interested in what we do. Comments and suggestions are encouraged.
We love hearing from you!