Archive: 1:350 Scale Enterprise NCC-1701-A (Mark W.)
This version of the famous starship is the one seen in Star Trek IV - Star Trek VI.
The model will be lighted with a lighting kit built by Trekmodeler. Also, this model has additional lighting in the shuttle bay in the form of sequential landing bay lights.
Here's the "guts" of the secondary hull. It's composed of the bottom of the secondary hull , the assembled shuttle bay, assembled arboretum, and the port and starboard sides of the hull. I have only taped the sides in place at this point, as positioning may need to be adjusted when the top of the hull and the "stern" (shuttle bay doors, etc) is put in place. By the way - in the shuttle bay, there are four tiny crew members - see if you can spot them. There are also two crew members peeking out the arboretum windows.
This build includes the sequential running lights in the shuttle bay. Here you can see them on.
Assembly of the secondary hull... Lots of tape to hold this together while it dries! There are seams that will need to be filled with putty and sanded. Also, you can see one design flaw that exists in the Polar Lights kit... The base of the pylons do not fit perfectly together. The only way to get them to fit together without a gap would be to sand down the lower pylon pieces underneath until they were quite thin, but that would very likely weaken those pieces and thus the pylons themselves. So, the best route is just to close the gap as much as possible and fill with putty. The neck is also assembled, but I'm not attaching it to the hull until I've also done some detail work on it... The halves have a pretty visible seam (not visible in the photo) and I will putty and sand that as well. The secondary hull is very much the most difficult part of this model to assemble.
Mostly assembled - still needing to attach several parts (the deflector dish, for example) and apply some marking decals. The third photo depicts the dorsal spot lights that were added to the lighting on this model.
She's complete!
