1:350 Star Trek Pre TOS era ship S.S. Columbia

My friend Jack Holczer 3D printed a 1:350 scale Daedalus Class ship from the Star Trek universe and he sent me a kit. I have never been a big fan of this design but I wanted to build this up because its something that a friend created.
While developing the iconic look of the original USS Enterprise, Matt Jefferies came up with this preliminary design as well as many other variations. One of the ones that I like is the one with the engines down (upside-down from what we know as "correct"). That is the ship that I am going to build out of this kit. I was going to name it the USS Icarus (Son of Daedalus), But I decided to go with S.S. Columbia. This ship was mentioned in the original pilot episode of Star Trek starring Jeffry Hunter (The Cage). The S.S. Columbia survey vessel crashed on the planet Talos IV 18 years prior to this episode. It was never seen on screen, so I decided that this is what the Columbia looked like.

 Two things that I will change are the length of the hull and the length of the engines. I think both are way too long so I am cutting the hull in Half and cutting three sections off the engines.





3D printing with filament (vs resin) doesn't produce a very smooth surface. Lots of sanding was required to get this thing down to a sort of smooth painting surface. Even then I couldn't get all of the striations out as they run too deep. Its just an inherent part of the material.

So I decided that it was going to be an older, weathered ship. The paint scheme is very much influenced by the rough texture. I'm using Lou Dalmaso's trusty Aztec Dummy painting masks for the panel effects. I started with Tamiya XF-72 Brown, then XF-59 Desert Yellow, them XF-23 Light Blue. I went back over the panel lines with some more XF-72 Brown using a 0.2mm airbrush. Then I went over the whole thing with Flat white until the details were just barely visible.

Then it was time for some lights! I opted to put white styrene behind the windows rather than have them open and filled with something like Micro Krystal Klear. I think it looks much cleaner and more in line with the filming ship props from the 1960s.

One big 10mm Red LED flanked by two strobing RGB lights. It gives a nice effect that there is something going on behind the translucent red end caps. I haven't had much success adding video to this blog, but I'll give it a try for the next post.

I put all the lights into the body, but I didn't take any photos for some reason. So next up was the end cap for the back of the ship. I was going to need some blue lights for the impulse engines (big holes around the outside), Red, Yellow and Green for the optical landing system under the hangar door. Rather than run wires for two red, two yellow and a green LED, I filled the holes with Tamiya clear red, yellow and green paint, then lit behind with one white LED. I had some problems with the blue light leaking into the white so I came up with a compartment system as you can see below.

As the master of piss poor planning, the inside of the hull was crammed full of wires for the lighting strips that are illuminating the windows.
Some of the strips were too close to the edge to allow the end cap to go on. I also had inserted a very large lead fishing lure as a counter weight for to the Ball that will be on the front of the ship so there wasn't any room for all the shit I had added to the end cap for light blocking. I was really worried about shorting the electronics out if I shoved it in there and something touched something else. So I did a little rearranging and I got it to barely fit. I mean Snug. I was surprised that everything still worked when I was through!

 

 After all of that I wired up some blue lights for the ends of the engines and glued them into place. I almost went with pink but it was too much. Best to stay with a unified look.

I opted to not add running lights to the ends of the nacelles as there were none on the original USS Enterpise. As this is an earlier ship I figured they wouldn't have them either. Plus I was being lazy and didn't want to do all of that work. That's the real story. Ha!

Aoshima 1/72 Genesis Climber Mospeada Armo-Fighter and Armo-Soldier Finale

Alrighty. I came up with a solution for the "too bright" light problem. I painted some styrene Yellow, cut it to shape, masked off the middle and painted it flat black. Then inserted into the spaces where the LEDs are. Problem solved.

It's a little messy from trying to fix light leaks with black tulip paint. I need to find a better technique for that.

Aoshima 1/72 Genesis Climber Mospeada Armo-Fighter and Armo-Soldier Part 2

A small update today. I've been working on this as I can after work. I got the fighter all wired up and working. It's hard to get a shot where the LEDs don't blow out the camera and look too bright.

Started putting the mech together. I had planned to run all of the wires down one leg but the bundle is too big. There is no room inside the "knee" to accommodate the wires. So I will just have to run it out the back. Not ideal but I guess its no different than the post that the fighter is being held up with. We just ignore it as not part of the model.

The kit came with  tiny little pilot figure that I attempted to paint. Not too bad considering its only about 20mm tall.

Aoshima 1/72 Genesis Climber Mospeada Armo-Fighter and Armo-Soldier Part 1

 I'm finally back at the bench after a 6 month hiatus. Next up is Aoshima's 1/72 scale Armo-Fighter and Armo-Soldier from Genesis Climber Mospeada (Robotech the new Generation for US audiences). This is one of the kits that I picked up in Korea for around $27. It has the vehicle in all three modes, but I think the Diver mode looks dumb so I'm not building it.

















I actually started building this 6 months ago. I ran some fiber optics into the cockpit, masked and premiered it and there it sat. I didn't take any pics of that stage for some reason.


















Getting back to it the first thing to do was the pre-shading. I need to get a better airbrush for this part. I'm currently using a 0.3mm tip and it isn't producing fine enough lines. I decided to live with it and see what results I could get.

I painted the white first. tried to put it on so that you could still see the pre-shading. This part came out pretty good.

I then masked off all the white in preparation for painting the blue parts.

I opted for Tamiya X-14 Sky Blue. It's the same blue that I used on the Macross SDF-1 tv version.

Tape off and hey that doesn't look too bad! I went a tad too heavy and covered most of the presiding in the blue areas. but you can see it here and there.

One of the areas that I wanted to stylize was the yellow lights. The kit came with solid plastic in those areas so I hogged them out and filed them nice and neat. I used the flat part of a clear sprue (where it shows the part number) to build some structure into the lights. Glued those in from behind backed by a yellow pico LED, painted the front black and sanded the paint off of the flat top. Results were pretty good! I had planned to do this same technique on the "legs" of the jet as well as on the robot version, but there wasn't any space to do so, so I had to come up with a different approach to those areas. I'll show youth later.

I installed the blue lights for the thrusters and yellow side lights on the "legs" but I didn't take any pics. I'll show those in the finale. After all that I put down a gloss coat of Tamiya TS-13 and used Tamiya Panel Line Accent Black to accentuate all the panel lines. I Cleaned up any start spots for spills with lighter fluid. It's strong enough to clean up the enamel wash, but not too strong so that it ruins the gloss coat.

Decals were next. I did the absolute worst thing possible and spilled a bottle of microset on my decal sheet! So I quickly applied all the decals that got wet before the microset started to soften them up so much that they would tear or disintegrate. But I got them all on!

I needed an idea for the base. I found a plastic dish from a frozen entree of some kind. I thought it would do. The plan is to mount the fighter on the post and have the robot standing behind on the tarmac. The Tarmac is a piece of styrene cut with a circle cutter and painted using some left over Aztec Dummy paint masks that I have from the Excelsior build. 

I think it looks alright.

Now it's time to start on the robot mode. I put yellow pico LEDs in the shoulders and head. There wasn't any room to build it up like I did on the fighter. I used a piece of rubbery foam ( I don't know what its really called) to hold the pico LED in place. Once in I used Silly Putty to mask off the hole for painting. I'm not sure if I will come up with some sort of cover for the LEDs or just leave them as they are. We'll see.