October Updates 2014
September has been another busy month for drydock building. I was able to spend a lot of time on the Light Panel frame fronts. I had to cut out all of the plexi-glass pieces to use as clear windows and a 3rd piece of plexi for the graphic decals. For each light panel there are 2 pieces of plexi. That makes 112 pieces for each of the panels. The plexi was then cemented in place. I then had to make all of the decals which amounted to the same number of pieces. There are what I'm calling left and right side decals for each piece. There's a slight variance between each of the decals, so I had to make sure they were all put on the appropriate sides.
I've also spent a great deal of time making the turnbuckle anchors and tension rods. One of my clients requested that this detail be physically bolted to the panels and the frames. So here's how the work load pans out for this month. There are 504 tension rods needed for each drydock. These rods connect from the light panel to the panel frames. I am using styrene rods because they are very light weight. I'm spraying all of these rods "Rust" before I cut them to size. This way there will only be a minimum of touch-up work to do. On each end of these rods will be an anchor with a loop on the end of it. (See pics of this process in the October updates page) There are 2 of these anchors on each of these rods so I need to make 1008 of these. 336 of these anchors will be for the center tiers of the light panel frames. The remaining 672 have to be made with the end loops on a slight angle because of the way the top and bottom tiers are of the panel frames are curved. As of this posting I have the 336 anchor loops finished and will be working on the rest later in the week. The hard part is keeping track of how many of these have been done. The other dock will have just the sleeve part of the anchor loop on them so it will look more like the filming miniature version. Later when I start adding the rods to the model I will be able to touch up the unpainted surfaces.
In other areas... because of how repetitive some of this work is it's nice to break off and work on something else for a while. For the last year and a half I've been contemplating on how I was going to build the work light arrays. On my 1/350 version I had no idea of how I was going to tackle this because of the complexity of these lights. In the end I wound up taking a piece of cardboard that had a mirror like surface on it. I cut it into a hexagon shape, then etched a lot of line into it and drilled holes for where the lights were supposed to be. I then back-lit this piece with 3 LEDs to make the lighting effect. Although I've hear some good suggestions of how and what to use for this array, such as a florescent light cover cut into a hexagon shape, it just did not work out for the scale I needed to build these arrays in. I have found some pictures of these light array panels and they were originally used in the unused TV series version of ST
hase II drydock as the side panel lights. They have a very complex configuration and I wanted to at least in some way be able to come as close as I could to getting these as accurate as possible. I stumbled on the simplest of solutions. At my local Hobby Lobby I came across a section that has all kinds of beads, glitter and most importantly of all Sequins. They were in various colors and I happened to notice that the silver ones had a reflective quality as that of mirrors or reflectors that are used in lamps and/or flash lights. JACKPOT! They had 3 or 4 different sizes, so I bought a couple of small bags. I notices that even though they are punched out into round shapes, the center of each sequins had a hexagon shape to it. So I lined up 60 sequins of 2 different sizes of each kind of sequins then measured out the overall size of both of them and decided I had a close match for the work light arrays. When lined up properly with the edges of the hexagon they reflect light similar to what is seen in ST:TMP. So I built 4 of these panels 2 for each of the docks.
I cut out a hexagon shape made from sheet styrene, sprayed them FLAT BLACK, then carefully cemented one sequins at a time until all 60 were lined up and in there proper places. Next I drilled out all 60 centers of the sequins so that one LED could fit into each of the holes. It looks great so far and I can't wait to wire them up and do a lighting test.
For the last part of my update: Since I was able to add the Starboard side of the light panels to the overhead modules I wanted to see how one of the Enterprise models looked inside of the dock so I snapped a few pics and put them into this month's update. There are 24 new pics on the "October Updates 2014" page on my site!Hope you like them. More updates coming next month! See you then! Have a great month!
Mark
http://www.NemVia.com
September has been another busy month for drydock building. I was able to spend a lot of time on the Light Panel frame fronts. I had to cut out all of the plexi-glass pieces to use as clear windows and a 3rd piece of plexi for the graphic decals. For each light panel there are 2 pieces of plexi. That makes 112 pieces for each of the panels. The plexi was then cemented in place. I then had to make all of the decals which amounted to the same number of pieces. There are what I'm calling left and right side decals for each piece. There's a slight variance between each of the decals, so I had to make sure they were all put on the appropriate sides.
I've also spent a great deal of time making the turnbuckle anchors and tension rods. One of my clients requested that this detail be physically bolted to the panels and the frames. So here's how the work load pans out for this month. There are 504 tension rods needed for each drydock. These rods connect from the light panel to the panel frames. I am using styrene rods because they are very light weight. I'm spraying all of these rods "Rust" before I cut them to size. This way there will only be a minimum of touch-up work to do. On each end of these rods will be an anchor with a loop on the end of it. (See pics of this process in the October updates page) There are 2 of these anchors on each of these rods so I need to make 1008 of these. 336 of these anchors will be for the center tiers of the light panel frames. The remaining 672 have to be made with the end loops on a slight angle because of the way the top and bottom tiers are of the panel frames are curved. As of this posting I have the 336 anchor loops finished and will be working on the rest later in the week. The hard part is keeping track of how many of these have been done. The other dock will have just the sleeve part of the anchor loop on them so it will look more like the filming miniature version. Later when I start adding the rods to the model I will be able to touch up the unpainted surfaces.
In other areas... because of how repetitive some of this work is it's nice to break off and work on something else for a while. For the last year and a half I've been contemplating on how I was going to build the work light arrays. On my 1/350 version I had no idea of how I was going to tackle this because of the complexity of these lights. In the end I wound up taking a piece of cardboard that had a mirror like surface on it. I cut it into a hexagon shape, then etched a lot of line into it and drilled holes for where the lights were supposed to be. I then back-lit this piece with 3 LEDs to make the lighting effect. Although I've hear some good suggestions of how and what to use for this array, such as a florescent light cover cut into a hexagon shape, it just did not work out for the scale I needed to build these arrays in. I have found some pictures of these light array panels and they were originally used in the unused TV series version of ST
hase II drydock as the side panel lights. They have a very complex configuration and I wanted to at least in some way be able to come as close as I could to getting these as accurate as possible. I stumbled on the simplest of solutions. At my local Hobby Lobby I came across a section that has all kinds of beads, glitter and most importantly of all Sequins. They were in various colors and I happened to notice that the silver ones had a reflective quality as that of mirrors or reflectors that are used in lamps and/or flash lights. JACKPOT! They had 3 or 4 different sizes, so I bought a couple of small bags. I notices that even though they are punched out into round shapes, the center of each sequins had a hexagon shape to it. So I lined up 60 sequins of 2 different sizes of each kind of sequins then measured out the overall size of both of them and decided I had a close match for the work light arrays. When lined up properly with the edges of the hexagon they reflect light similar to what is seen in ST:TMP. So I built 4 of these panels 2 for each of the docks. I cut out a hexagon shape made from sheet styrene, sprayed them FLAT BLACK, then carefully cemented one sequins at a time until all 60 were lined up and in there proper places. Next I drilled out all 60 centers of the sequins so that one LED could fit into each of the holes. It looks great so far and I can't wait to wire them up and do a lighting test.
For the last part of my update: Since I was able to add the Starboard side of the light panels to the overhead modules I wanted to see how one of the Enterprise models looked inside of the dock so I snapped a few pics and put them into this month's update. There are 24 new pics on the "October Updates 2014" page on my site!Hope you like them. More updates coming next month! See you then! Have a great month!
Mark
http://www.NemVia.com
"... once it's activated, there's no way to stop it!" - Scotty - DMa