November Updates 2014
Hey Everyone!
I have some glitches to deal with on my website this month.
For some reason I'm having trouble uploading photos to my site so I'm setting up the photos to be in the Forum thread until I get things up and running again.
In this month's update I've been working on the part of this model that I've been dreading, but need to complete. The assembly of all of the tension rods with turnbuckle anchors and nuts and bolts. There are 9 pieces per tension rod and there are 2,268 pieces that need to be put together on just the Starboard side of the dock alone. Each piece has to be cemented in place and aligned to each of the panel frames and light panels. Rather than just drilling holes into the Light panels and panel frames and running the tension rods through each of the holes and cementing them in place as I did with the 1/1350 scale PLE Dock My client has requested that the bolts on each of these connection be visible to give greater depth of scale to the final model. Detailing is very important to my client so this once again will slow down the completion of the Drydock. There is one shot of this detail that was visible in ST:TMP when the Enterprise was leaving the dock and the little dude in the space suit was waving good-bye to the ship. I now need to touch up all of the ends of these rods with Rust paint which will blend everything together. The pics show how this detail looks.
Another setback is the light panel lighting effects. After putting some reflective paper into the panels to defuse the light I discovered that this lighting effect would not work at all because you can see the EL wire behind the defusing paper. Bummer. I had to remove all of the EL wire and put in LEDs as I did with the 1/350 scale dock. So I'm now adding reflective tape to the backs of the inside of each light panel and will then have to hard-wire all of the LEDs in place. Not a very easy task at this point at least not with the Starboard side panels. Well, live and learn. We'll see how far I can get with this within the next month or so. December is a very bad month for me to work on this project so there may be very little for the January update to show. But, enjoy the pics. I will try to have them set up on photobucket for now.
That's it for now.
See you in a month.
Mark
Hey Everyone!
I have some glitches to deal with on my website this month.
For some reason I'm having trouble uploading photos to my site so I'm setting up the photos to be in the Forum thread until I get things up and running again.
In this month's update I've been working on the part of this model that I've been dreading, but need to complete. The assembly of all of the tension rods with turnbuckle anchors and nuts and bolts. There are 9 pieces per tension rod and there are 2,268 pieces that need to be put together on just the Starboard side of the dock alone. Each piece has to be cemented in place and aligned to each of the panel frames and light panels. Rather than just drilling holes into the Light panels and panel frames and running the tension rods through each of the holes and cementing them in place as I did with the 1/1350 scale PLE Dock My client has requested that the bolts on each of these connection be visible to give greater depth of scale to the final model. Detailing is very important to my client so this once again will slow down the completion of the Drydock. There is one shot of this detail that was visible in ST:TMP when the Enterprise was leaving the dock and the little dude in the space suit was waving good-bye to the ship. I now need to touch up all of the ends of these rods with Rust paint which will blend everything together. The pics show how this detail looks.
Another setback is the light panel lighting effects. After putting some reflective paper into the panels to defuse the light I discovered that this lighting effect would not work at all because you can see the EL wire behind the defusing paper. Bummer. I had to remove all of the EL wire and put in LEDs as I did with the 1/350 scale dock. So I'm now adding reflective tape to the backs of the inside of each light panel and will then have to hard-wire all of the LEDs in place. Not a very easy task at this point at least not with the Starboard side panels. Well, live and learn. We'll see how far I can get with this within the next month or so. December is a very bad month for me to work on this project so there may be very little for the January update to show. But, enjoy the pics. I will try to have them set up on photobucket for now.
That's it for now.
See you in a month.
Mark
"... once it's activated, there's no way to stop it!" - Scotty - DMa