USS Enterprise D

I can still remember the first time I saw the new enterprise. I was watching TV.

The Enterprise D is the ship flown by the intrepid crew of Star Trek the Next Generation. Even with the wuss Wesley on board, the ship still looks most cool. This is the first of 3 Enterprise-D kits I plan to build; the next two will be a lighted version and an ‘All Good Things” super-Enterprise D variation. Check back. I should get around to these sometime.

This kit taught me many things,. One of them was patience. Assembly was a chore. I decided early that I’d build it with an attached saucer section. You don’t have to. You can even have the Captain’s yacht separate. However, the saucer didn’t line up properly with the supporting “neck”. I glued it into place and took a Dremel tool to it to round it off. I then sanded it down.

The bottom piece of the secondary hull has the top detail molded into it on the rear. This led to some serious defects there which I had to sand away and then re-scribe panel lines with a sharpened dental tool.

Clear pieces continue to be my bane. Once again I used Tamiya clear colors, blue and red for the nacelles and backed them with reflective aluminum foil. I did the same in the impulse engine ports. I attached these pieces with superglue: fogging wouldn’t matter on these colored pieces. Then I got to the forward deflector dish.

I think it’s a fault of the kit. I don’t mean to pass the buck and squirm out of my responsibility for the disaster which is the deflector dish, but I couldn’t get the SOB to line up properly. I set it up in the bottom piece of the secondary hull, and put the upper piece on only to see that it was out of alignment. This was the only way to place it and a little variation meant that the upper and lower pieces wouldn’t fit properly. I fought with it until I had a welding bead of superglue around the poor piece, but I finally got it right. I just stopped looking at that place for the rest of the construction. Denial is a powerful tool. Then while I was masking it for painting, yep, it popped right out. The entire model is done and I have that @%!@%$ deflector dish rattling around inside. I probably lost my place in the Celestial Kingdom for my reaction, but I think it had it coming. I managed to place it again after much work with files and copious amounts of superglue. Even now, I choose not to look at the kit face on.

Okay, onto the color. I never thought the ship was blue, but everywhere I looked said it was. I mixed a gray/blue with my trusty tubes of Liquitex Basic Acrylic (I just love plugging these paints). I laid on two coats of this basecoat with my Aztec airbrush. Then came the Aztec pattern.

The Aztec pattern is the name given to the different shades of color on the hull of an enterprise. First seen in the Enterprise refit from Star Trek the Motion Picture it is the defining detail that sets a thrown together kit apart from a modeler’s craft. There is a company that makes templates for many of the Star Trek models to assist in painting this pattern. You basically lay the template over the kit and use your airbrush. Easy as a stencil. If one had been available for this kit, I’d surely have ponied up the cash for it. I painted the entire Aztec pattern with a brush. I used thick Americana DecoArt Slate Gray acrylic and had a problem keeping the paint thinned properly. I ended up with a muddy look to much of it, but after spending weeks picking out the panels, I was happy with not going back and doing more. What a pain!

I hand painted the phaser strips and shuttle bay doors and airbrushed yellow over a white base coat for the nacelle rings. I’m still fighting with yellow. I think it’s a hard color to use. I used a mechanical pencil to scribe around some of the panel lines.

The windows were all painted by hand. I used artist pens for the black and white. The white kept seizing up on me. I think I’ll try another brand next time.

I then did something that brought the kit up from the yucky to passably mediocre. I purchased JT Graphics aftermarket decals from Federation Models. These decals are great. Every lifeboat is individually numbered and there a lot of them. After spending weeks painting the Aztec pattern, I got to spend weeks sliding hundreds of decals onto the ship. When finished, I sealed the kit with Future (gloss coat) and then dullcoat to remove the shine.

I display this model hanging vertically on the wall like a trophy in my study. From a distance, it looks awesome.