Needless to say the day was spent on the Enterprise. I had to work out all the wiring and how it would travel from the saucer section to the engineering section with the least amount of clutter.
All the wiring for this phase was non-board driven. In other words, only the lights that have no blinking or flashing. Today I’ll start routing those. In the end I should have no more than 6 wire cables traveling through the brass stem to the board and main power.
The nacelles will be closed up today and attached to the pylons and the pylons to the engineering section.
Because of the difficulties of posting this on the blog related to pictures the newsletter is hosted for free on Buy Me a Coffee. Click on the link to read about this last weeks and all the things we did.
Yes there was more work on plastic models yesterday and it will remain that way until next month when this model needs to be done along with one another that’s not started yet.
I had to pack in 4 LED’s, three resistors and a bunch of other stuff into this tiny nacelle and it took 4 days to do it. Not to mention the single LED attached to fiber optics that acts as the strobe lights that blink very brightly. I managed to capture it on a blink in one photo.
The second nacelle will be done in one day and hopefully the engineering section done as well. It will be easier to work on as it’s a bit more roomy.
I had a mail call yesterday and a very special package arrived from New Zealand from my friend John Warren of MVD resins. He makes fine resin bodies for vintage racing cars from the gold era of racing no one else has.
This is the 1/32 scale Maserati 250 F I spoke of before and this will make a delicious project to work on at home in my slot car cave.
In addition to that my 1/24 scale 917k Porsche will be my next build for the hard body races in Buena park. Like the Mclaren I recently built this will have a scratch built chassis in brass. This will all keep me busy for a while.
I have been asked by many, “When will you make some new masks sculptures?”. My answer to that is be patient, I have to finish these modeling projects for a friend first and my racing season. Then I’ll get back to it.
I spent the day getting tires on the Fiat(the old racing tires were dangerous), shopping groceries, and working on the Enterprise E.
It was pleasure to get away from scribing windows. I did tests to get the nacelles lighted in the best way possible. I first tried the small strip lights that Randy Neubert put in the lighting kit. They were a bit sorcy and showed the individual blue dot LEDs on the strip.
So I tired his original concept and used thin plastic tubes he sent along and mounted a bright 3 mm LED at either end of the tube and that worked so well I was dancing!
I lit up the bussards in red using his diffusion and that worked well too. Now that that’s done I can do the other nacelle and install the strobe lights.
Needless to say my life at the studio has been a broken record the last week or more until I have a bad shoulder from repetitive motion doing all these windows but they are all scribed now!
This means I can move on to things like lighting the nacelles and placing anti collision and NAV lights in the model. Close it all up and blocking the light leaks.
So I was packing up the Battlestar Galactica model yesterday. It took awhile because it has to survive a great deal of rough handling before it gets to Arizona.
I packed it in bubble wrap and more bubble wrap. And put it in a box and then put it in another box surrounded by peanuts. I have done this in the past with very successful results on the receiving end.
After that I finished off the day working on the engineering section of the Enterprise E scribing out more windows. I should finish this task today and I can move on to assembling this model.
I came home and finished things off with more CAD studies as I prepare to make my own model kits available to the public.
Lastly before the evening closes my favorite time at the track with shots and laps. These are the cars I ran. Two of them I built from scratch. What a hobby.
It was a nice weekend and I usually don’t post about the weekend because I’m not at the studio but as Mary p[ointed out to me this morning the only separation from the Studio home and the house we live is 15 minutes by car. They are both our homes.
I brought the Enterprise E to the house this weekend so if I had a moment I could scribe out more windows. I did that yesterday and finished the saucer section. That’s a huge deal as it moves me along a bit faster as June 14th approaches. That’s the due date.
I still have the engineering section to do but now that I scribe out countless windows on the saucer section I have established a technique that works well. This means this section of the model will happen faster and it’s my hope to finish all the windows today.
Saturday Mary and I took a brief gunt down the street from our house to the harbor for an art show. The place where this took place is reminiscent of Amity island. This abandoned building caught my eye as we parked the car.
Much of the weekend was spent editing shows and resting. I finally watched Ford vs Ferrari. How I missed this one I’ll never know because racing has always been in my blood. My dad was a driver and I grew up in garages with famous drivers that were his friends and their cars. I went to the track often with my dad and watched the races and met the giants of racing. I enjoyed the film very much.
One of the shows I cut this weekend is my regular weekly show, “Slot Car Fun”.
This show is growing in popularity and content as I go to the races and document them as well as interview the drivers and track owners of slot cars.
It was a nice weekend and now it’s back to the Studio today.
The week was spent on model building for hire and website work. We still haven’t recovered from the PayPal debacle as it cascaded through our little business from our bank account to our stores and websites. We have spent countless mornings and afternoons sorting out this mess so we can have a convenient way for our customers to purchase masks, props, art, and rocket kits.
SNG Studio now has a Shop on Buy Me a Coffee where you can quickly see what the Studio has.. One can merely click Buy Nowsee everything we have so far in our Shop.(we are still populating it, so if you don’t see something you want, you can just ask us. Everything should be there soon.)
When you are at the Buy Me a Coffee site, you will see the Shop listed at the top. So “Buy me a Coffee” is more than a place to support the Studio but also a store now.
As for PayPal? They are still waiting to hear back from Chewy, (the cloned site went poof) until sometime in June and they are holding a lot of money of ours until they do hear back from the non-existent site. They won’t. so maybe we’ll get our money back. Either way I would never ever use PayPal again.
So, back to what we are doing at SNG Studio. I finished the beautiful TOS (the original series) Battlestar Galactica.
I’m now starting on the Star Trek Enterprise E designed by John Eaves that has more windows than Carter has pills!
The model is small and the windows tiny. How do you get them to light up? Well, thanks to Lou Delmaso, he reminded me with a model this small, you can’t drill out, file, and fill canopy glue in every window. One puts a lot of paint on the outside of the hull so when lighted from the inside it blocks the light. Then it’s a simple matter of scribing out every freaking window removing the paint so the windows glow. Sounds easy enough but it’s not. It takes days.
This has taken all this week. I took it home to work on over the weekend. Glen Kramer is coming on the 14th of June to pick it up. Once I finish all the windows, it will go a lot faster. I still have the engineering section to do as well.
This is what she will look like finished. This is a shot from the film “First Contact”. An excellent Star Trek movie that I highly recommend. Somewhere in there, I finished the Mclaren M8B 1/24 scale slot car. It will be first raced at Buena Park Raceway this month. I will be building more in the future now that I have all the tools and means to build them. That was a hurdle to overcome just getting started. There’s a huge difference between buying a premade slot car and building your own and the adventure and challenge is well worth the effort.
Next up, in a couple of weeks I’ll be getting a small package from New Zealand (from my friend who makes a line of resin cast slot car bodies) a Maserati 250 short nose 1957 formula one car. It’s a body kit in 1/32 scale. I’ll be building the chassis from scratch in brass. Another great build of an historic race car from the golden age.
I’m very excited about this build.
Here’s the weekly video update if you dare. It documents the work Mary and I do at the studio every week. Yes you even get to see Mary doing her beautiful art both wood burning and alcohol ink this week.
Mary’s efforts this week:
Oh and one last thing. Charlotte the Fiat 124 Spider successfully passed smog and is registered. Mary and I are thrilled to be driving this classic sports car.
It was quite a week!
Thank you for all your support and love. Come and visit the Studio some Friday. We would love to see you. and, as always,
It took me all day to do this much of the window scribing on the Enterprise E. At this size it’s very difficult to be exact and many of the windows are irregular because you are at the mercy of scribing a thick layer of paint used to block the light from the outside of the hull.
Normally we would block the inside because the windows would be already open. This makes for a thinner layer of paint on the hull.
This model is too small to even drill out and file the windows so I was left with no choice but to block the outside only and scribe away the paint at the windows.
The strip LEDs on the inside of the hull make the plastic glow, making the effect of the windows lighted.
I will go back over these with a bit of paint and my magnifying glasses to clean them up a bit. Once the hull decals are on I’ll do a bit more and it will all look pretty good. To say this model is a challenge would be an understatement. I am used to light models twice this size as a minimum.
Leaving my office this image caught my eye after the lights were turned off and the sun leaked through my office window.
Moon watcher and the Star Child from 2001: a space oddyssey
The Art of Steve Neill 