Progress

The Polar Lights Enterprise, such as it is. It isn't finished - some of the small parts haven't been added and I haven't finished painting the deflector dish assembly, or done any striping on the nacelle caps. I include this picture mainly to show the color I picked for the model, Luftwaffe RLM 65 light blue out of a Tamiya lacquer spray can. By Jove, I think I like it. I still think it's a little too dark, but it captures the blueness of the original as seen on my old TV. Astern of the Enterprise is the Klingon D7, painted entirely with Testors enamels in the funky old square bottles. It isn't done either; I haven't applied the decals. Maybe tonight.

Here's why the Star Trek models aren't finished. I started building a Cousteau Calypso about a hundred years ago, before I got sick. Then it sat for about two years, untouched. When I finally started working on it again, I found that a major superstructure part had gone missing and the plastic had become very brittle and difficult to work with. It was so bad that I bought the Revell reissue of the kit, now called the Neptun "Ocean Exploration Ship", and combined the two. The hull, decks and superstructure parts are mostly the new issue; the small parts and decals are from the old Calypso. The new issue parts are much easier to work with (that is, they weren't so brittle they broke into a thousand fragments at the slightest touch) but the molds are apparently wearing out because some of the parts, especially the life raft canisters, were misshapen to the point of being useless.

I managed to save the old Calypso decal sheet by cleaning it with cotton swabs and overcoating it with Micro-Scale decal film. It took many applications of solvent to get the decals to lie flat, but they eventually did, even the tiny "Cousteau Society" lettering on the helicopter tail boom. The kit is mostly out of the box. About all I did was drill out the portholes and windows, and subsequently fill them with gooey white glue (my Micro Krystal Kleer had solidified) after painting. I also used a punch and die set to replace the malformed portholes on the "observation dome" in the bow, and I added some rigging and some signal flags that spell out the name of a friend of mine. Partially, anyway; I only had one "E" on the printed flag sheet so the signal flags spell out "PRUDENC". It's also carrying more mini-submarines than it normally would, but I thought it looked better with more stuff rather than less. One of these days I'll get around to building the second shark cage (the first is on the foredeck).

In the background can be seen the Calypso's escort, a 1/72nd scale S-100 schnellboot.