Yet another studio-scale BATTLESTAR

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Time for another update. . .

Richard has been hard at work finishing the landing bay rear end caps. Making these from scratch has been a real challenge. It’s not easy matching the quality of 3D-printed and/or laser-cut & etched parts. But, I think we’ve managed to do pretty well so far. At this point, the rear end caps have been masked and primed. All that’s left is some final “preening.”

In the meantime, I’ve been working on the complex wiring. I spent weeks designing everything. Now, it’s time to see if what I’ve drawn up actually works as planned. As with all complex projects, a number of things will need to be tweaked along the way.

The landing bay wiring was installed during the previous update. It has now been finalized and connected inside the main body. One of the challenges in this area is the fact not one but two fuses are needed inside each bay. With little or no room to spare, it was not possible to install panel-mounted fuse holders. Thus, I was forced to employ inline fuses. Because they must be accessible in order to change the fuses, these take up a lot of room in the wire harness.

Everything must be done through the narrow opening at the end. This includes being able to remove and service the custom printed circuit boards, each custom back-lit interior painting with light box, the 40mm computer fan, and of course the two fuses.

Once all that was sorted, it became apparent that, with all the wires stuffed in there, it might be possible for one or more wires to find their way into the path of the fan blades. I asked Richard to make a custom “fan guard” assembly and he did a brilliant job as usual. It is pretty neat and should be quite effective I think.

So far, I’ve made up and installed the main body harness. That went fairly smoothly. I still need to make the circuit board that will go in the main body (and a similar unit that mounts inside the head section). I also have to make up all the individual LEDs with their own wire harnesses. These will plug into the circuit boards.

The engine wiring was next. There’s a lot going on in there, so it’s the most complicated part of the ship to wire. I’d say it’s about 2/3 done at this point. I still need to install the custom computer control module behind the port side cooling fan. And, of course, we need to fabricate and install the main engine lights themselves. These will be completely custom made.

The computer module will monitor four internal temperature sensors and all four cooling fans. In the event of a problem, it will be programmed to cut power to the printed circuit boards inside the landing bays and/or the main lights inside the engine section, as well as any or all of the cooling fans as needed. For example, it should be able to detect if a fan gets stalled or jammed and shut it down in order to prevent the fan motor from burning up. In addition, if a fan quits working, the associated circuitry will automatically power down to prevent overheating.

A lot of careful planning and design work has gone into figuring all this out. Once I get it all wired up, there will be some extensive testing in order to make sure everything works correctly.

I had hoped we would completely finish the structure during this session. The ship had other plans, however, as we spent a lot of additional time on the wiring. As a result, we still need to build the front end caps and side mount covers. That should happen next week.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of soldering and wiring to do!
I’d like to say “thanks” once again to Richard Lindstrom for all his hard work helping me finish this beast. We’ve put in a lot of 12-hour days trying to get it all done.

Until next time. . .