Spock

This is what happens to me when I go to a hobby shop - only instead of being ambushed by three-headed snakes, I'm ambushed by models. I go in for something simple, like some super glue or decal solvent, and I end up buying so much stuff I almost need a porter to help me get it all to the car. No wonder my tires are wearing out; I'm constantly hauling all that wretched cargo.

This is, of course, the recent re-release of the famous old kit. Not hard to build at all, though the three-headed snake was a bit ill-fitting. The snakes had seams in a concave part of the tops of their heads that I couldn't find a convenient way to fix, so I cut fake crests out of sheet plastic and glued them in to hide the seam (and to make them look a little less like ordinary terrestrial snakes). There are also bits of stretched sprue in their mouths, to hide other seams that I couldn't fix. And the strap for Spock's tricorder wasn't acceptable, so I cut it off and burned it (to to speak) and replaced it with a strip cut out of doubled-over electrician's tape. The final thing I did - I glued Woodland Scenics "blended turf" on instead of trying to paint and drybrush the molded grass. It looks a little park-like, but better than the stock parts, and it was useful for filling the yawning gaps between the asparagus-like tree and the base.

For whatever it's worth.

Odds and Ends

Here are some odds-and-ends things I've been tinkering with lately.

A Rebel Transport (better known as the "fish ship") from the "Rebel Base" set. It came with several X-wings, several Y-wings, a Millennium Falcon, and this thing. I'll add photos of the others later, but for now, this is what I've been doing while waiting for other paint/glue/decals to dry. Got a minute? Grab the fish and do some painting. I added a couple of nozzles made from the noses of 1/48th scale Maverick air-to-ground missiles, but otherwise, it's out of the box.

An itty-bitty Federation Dreadnought from Amarillo Design Bureau, intended for use with the Star Fleet Battles game. Someone does make decals for these two-inch models, but the idea of putting decals the size of an amoeba on a model the size of a Ritz cracker gives me the shakes.

More Amarillo Design Bureau ships, a Klingon D7 in the foreground (flat black with lots of silver drybrushed over it) and a Kzinti battlecruiser in the background (hull red, mostly, with decals scavenged from a Matchbox A34 Comet cruiser tank).

A figure I now refer to as the "Wally Dude", because I think Wally gave it to me. It's mostly a combination of old-school Testors square-bottle enamels and craft store acrylics.

More of the Wally Dude. The skin was medium brown Testors enamel with some orange acrylic drybrushed over the top, and I thought it worked reasonably well.

Polar Lights USS Enterprise

Polar Lights 1/1000th USS Enterprise, TOS-vintage. It's a fun kit - not many parts and not many really serious construction problems, except the obvious one of "How the hell do I hold it while I apply the decals?" Speaking of which, the decals were quite good. Many are very large and weirdly shaped, especially the window/racing stripe combo on the secondary hull, and they look like they're going to be awful trouble, but they really aren't. They respond to Micro-Sol, but slowly.

Here we see the only decal problem I had: the tail end of the red "racing stripe" on the starboard warp nacelle folded over on itself, and all my attempts to fix it just made it worse. Some of the other decals folded over, but I was able to save them. But not this one.

My plan was that after painting and applying the decals I would draw yellow and light orange lines on the warp nacelle caps with felt markers (Sharpies, to be specific). But yellow and light orange Sharpies have absolutely no coverage over gloss orange paint. None. Zero. I know they work - I colored my thumbnail testing them - but there's absolutely no sign of striping on the nacelles, either in person or in photographs. Had I known this, I would have left the caps off so I could stripe them with oil paints separately, without having to manhandle the whole steenking ship.

But it's a nice kit and I enjoyed it. Who's up for a battle-damaged Constellation?

PS: I think I like RLM-65 as Federation paint. It's more blue than the actual studio models, which have a distinctly greenish tint if you ask me, but the blue seems right to me. It looks more right under bright halogen lamps and less right under fluorescents, but on the whole, I think it's going to be my de facto standard Federation paint.

PPS: Back when I used to play Star Fleet Battles I collected and painted a few of the tiny Amarillo Design Bureau models - some odd Federation frigate or somesuch, a Kzinti battlecruiser, a Klingon D7 and B10, a Lyran catamaran-hull thing, some Tholian grooviness and so forth. On what amounted to a whim the other night I bought about 40 more on eBay - pretty much a whole Federation and Klingon fleet, plus some oddities, like a pair of Kzinti frigates that are about the size of pieces of breakfast cereal. I could swallow most of the fleet whole, now that I think about it... Anyway, my point was that RLM-65 is going to be way too dark in such a small scale, but I do think I'll "scale" it by adding a lot of white so my Federation fleet will have the same bluish tint.

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.

Star Trek Colors

I'm slowly recovering from shingles - probably more slowly than most people do because my bone marrow has been completely killed twice this year. The worst problem from a modeling point of view with my shingles is that my eyesight still isn't very good. Better than it was, but I still find intense close-range work (like painting figures) uncomfortable and, frankly, unrewarding.

But over the Independence Day holiday I watched a minor marathon of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes on BBC America. This compelled me to dig out a couple of newish Polar Lights Star Trek models from my collection, and I've found them pleasant to tinker with - they don't require much in the way of intense focus or concentration, or at least not yet, and I can work on them inside, out of the 115 degree heat in the garage, where my main workbench resides.

One of them is a Klingon D7 battlecruiser from The Old Show; the other is an Enterprise, also from The Old Show, which comes with a breathtakingly large and complete decal sheet. They're snap-together kits, and you know what that means: low parts count, simplified surface detail, thick plastic, and a tendency toward poor fit. It means a lot of gluing, clamping, filling, sanding, regluing popped seams, resanding, refilling and so forth, but I happen to enjoy that. (If scribing panel lines is one of my least-favorite modeling tasks, filling and sanding is one of my favorite.)

I also got to use up most of the scrap sprues; I cut them to random lengths and glued them inside the Enterprise to reinforce the mortises that the warp nacelle pylons fit into, a joint that looked pretty rickety to me in the basic kit.

I'm almost at the point of painting, and now I have to confront the issue of color. I've already decided that I'm doing to paint the D7 my way. Decades ago I built a D7 and painted it with a combination of blues and greys that really appealed to me, and that's how I'm going to do it again (and in Klingon markings, naturally. I've never liked the Romulans). Besides, I have my own vision of what Deep Space Fleet ships look like, and it doesn't seem to mesh with the Trek authorities.

But the Enterprise is a slightly different matter. For one thing, it's fairly iconic, and wild ahistorical paint schemes look strange. For another, it's important to me that models of the Enterprise look like the Enterprise. So what color is the damn thing? According to Internet sources, it is best matched with a greenish-grey color that WalMart calls "Concrete". Others insist on white. But on my TV, and on the TV that plays in my head, the Enterprise was always light blue. The preserved studio models aren't light blue, but the ship as it appeared on my clunky old TV was light blue.

So I've made my decision: I'm going to paint it RLM 65 light blue and see how it looks. I suspect RLM 65 will be too dark and I'll end up repainting it RLM 76 or even Model Master "Duck Egg Blue" (I painted an Enterprise-D once in an Aztec scheme of light gull grey and duck egg blue, and I thought it turned out very nicely). But that's my plan, at least for now. I just have to finish all the sanding and filling first.