Progress from this past week...
I took the impulse engines and glued in the clear part. Then I backed the clear ports with black tape before gluing the part to the saucer. I also gave it a shot of Dullcote for a matte look:
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IMG_4543 by trekriffic, on Flickr
I worked qutie a bit on the shuttle bay. I glued the clear control room to the top of the open bay door part then glued the doors to the stern with CA. I placed a white decal behind the control room window so it will glow but won't cause lens flares when I take pics of the stern. I took the ParaGrafix PE after heating to soften it and bent it around a round xacto tool handle so it fit around the clear control room piece without springing back on me. Then I glued it to the clear part with CA:
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IMG_4550 by trekriffic, on Flickr
I took a break from the shuttle bay and worked on the nacelles. After a couple of sessions of puttying, seam scraping, sanding, and priming all the seams disappeared. The parts weren't bad as far as seams go; I've seen a lot worse. Then I attached the flux constrictors, intercoolers, and the stern "vents" with Testors cement. After another session of puttying with PPP around the edges of the aforementioned parts to fill any gaps I applied 3 coats of Duplicolor primer:
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IMG_4551 by trekriffic, on Flickr
I'll save the end caps and ships "balls" for the end after I paint them.
The clear fantail lights were painted red, green, and amber orange using Model Master enamels. I also painted the top edge with black enamel for light blocking. ParaGrafix provides a PE piece to wrap around the face which really blocks extraneous light leaks. It also gives you nice, sharp, frames around the lights. I primered it preparatory to gluing it to the fantail with CA:
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IMG_4552 by trekriffic, on Flickr
Aligning the top edge of the PE part with the bay floor left a slight rim projecting over the lower rim of the fantail so I used PPP to blend the lower rim of the PE part in with the uncercut:
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IMG_4560 by trekriffic, on Flickr
Window masks were cut from Tamiya tape. I used dividers to measure the length and width of the windows before translating the measurements to the tape:
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IMG_4562 by trekriffic, on Flickr
For the round windows I used a nail set to punch out holes in the tape. Actually "punch" is the worng term. What I do is stick the tape down on a vinyl mat; then I press the tip of the nail set down into the tape and twist back and forth until the tape is cut alround. I have 3 sizes of nail sets and it took them plus a couple of sizes of Harbour Freight hole punches to do the masks for all the round windows and ports in the saucer halves and connecting dorsal.
The last thing I did involved the saucer halves...
Sunday they got their first airbrushing of the base hull color:
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IMG_4567 by trekriffic, on Flickr
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IMG_4568 by trekriffic, on Flickr
After allowing a few days to dry I used a plastic flexi ruler and a compass to draw the radial and circular gridlines on with a sharp 2H pencil. Having the gridlines will certainly help a lot with decal placement. I used the smoke colored saucer domes with holes drilled dead center to anchor the pin on the compass arm for making the circles:
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IMG_4569 by trekriffic, on Flickr\
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IMG_4573 by trekriffic, on Flickr
The lower saucer was given a second airbrushing of the hull color over the gridlines to make them more subtle:
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IMG_4571 by trekriffic, on Flickr
To those who think only the upper saucer had gridlines originally I'm fairly certain there were faint gridlines on the lower saucer as well because I've seen evidence of them in blowups of black & white photos taken of the ship during production at a low angle to starboard. I'm sure most of you are familiar with these photos. They are hard to see but they are there if you look closely.
Anyway, the upper saucer will also get a second coat of hull color to mute the gridlines but first I need to spray on some rust for the rust ring!
