Polar Lights Klingon D7 Battlecruiser

This the small snap-together (though I glued-it-together) Klingon D7 battlecruiser. I've always liked the design of the ship, jokes about Klingon warships not having toilets notwithstanding, and the little Polar Lights kit is pretty easy to build. Forget the snap-together features; the fit (as is usual with snap-together kits) isn't great and seams yawn like a tired cat. It's best to glue it together, and even then you'll have to spend some time with putty and sanding sticks, but since it has almost no raised detail at all, it's easy to clean up.

The main problems with a ship like the D7 is getting the warp nacelle angles right, and getting the boom to sit straight. One warp nacelle didn't want to lie at what I thought was the right angle (and anyway, it was different than the other one) so I had to strong-arm it, and the boom kind of wanted to angle off to one side, so I held it straight and then filled the resulting seams with super glue and white glue later. (I remember reading somewhere that Klingon warp nacelles were actually called "graph units", but it's also possible that I only think I remember reading that.) The kit supplies a tiny clear red part that pokes up from the underside of the bridge assembly, but the red vanishes when installed and I dotted them with Testors gold instead.

Other than a few issues with seams and alignment, the only real problem was the fit of the torpedo launcher tube in the lower bridge. It doesn't fit very well and cleaning up the seams isn't much fun. If I were do this again, and I will, I'd superglue in a piece of thin-walled brass tubing and sand it flush with the hull, and then poke some gimologized piece of nonsense into the tube to simulate the torpedo launcher itself.

I was at Wal-mart a while back, looking for God knows what. Charcoal briquettes, probably, but who knows. Anyway, I bought a pack of the old Testors square-bottle paints and used them extensively, applying them with a variety of cheesed-out old brushes that I'm too cheap to throw away. (I guess that's the reason.) The gold-colored parts are actually Testors Bronze (as a general rule, anything on the model painted bronze was chrome-plated in the kit originally) and I used a little Tamiya dark grey on the bulbous underside of the bridge section, and a little Tamiya NATO black on the boom buttresses.

The decals are thick and glossy, but are at least sturdy, and the lack of raised surface detail makes them easy to apply. There was a little silvering here and there, but less than I had expected, given the thickness of the decals and their refusal to yield to Micro-Sol. The kit also comes with stylized Romulan bird of prey markings, and a great plenty of spare Klingon letters so you can name your ship whatever you like. I used the basic decals so I wouldn't have to piece together separate letters. (Amusingly, the basic decals look like the stylized letters "TCS", which in my car happens to stand for "Traction Control System", so every time I glance at the D7 I think "Oh, it's the Traction Control Ship.")

Upshot? Well worth the trouble. You can't have too many Klingon ships around the house, and I could see this being an interesting canvas for all sorts of unusual paint schemes.