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Building the Classic Enterprise
Part One
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Cliff Cherry took this and some of the other 'beauty' shots of my twenty-nine inch long scratch-built TOS ENTERPRISE model. He
got a little artsy-fartsy here with a diffuser/star lens element. This shot, as with most of the 'lit' pictures of the model was taken with a tight aperture and a very, very long exposure. The lights
appear nowhere this bright in real-time.
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Another Cliff Cherry ENTERPRISE beauty shot. Cliff, at the time he took these pictures, was a member of a local Star Trek club.
I met him at a convention. Cliff showed me his portfolio of photos he had taken of other model subjects. He was wearing a Star Trek uniform. In spite of that, we hit it off right away. I think you'll
agree that it was my good fortune to get Cliff to photo document my completed ENTERPRISE model.
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I'm no Star Trek fan - there is precious 'real' science evidenced by TOS and the spin off series and movies... magic crystals,
'transporters', and 'inertia dampers'. Please! And the shape of the 1701. Just plain stupid... and ugly! However, professional Model Builders don't chose the subjects they build - the client does that! I
was commissioned to build this model by a rather well to do gentleman out of New York. His criterion was simple: "Build me the finest display model of the ENTERPRISE in the world!" Mission
accomplished!
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The model presented here featured several 'zones' of lighting that were controlled off-model through a control panel set within
the side of a Display Cabinet. I employed LED's exclusively to backlight the many portholes and to represent the various running and navigation lights. Simple 555 IC chips were wired to provide flashing
navigation lights and the circular array under each Warp Engine dome. Incidentally, this model project was featured in an old issue of Scale Modeler magazine - now a collector's item.
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A specific mandate imposed by the customer was the incorporation of a scale Hangar Bay within the stern of the Secondary Hull. A
removable 'hangar door' was also made and could be installed by the client to represent the ENTERPRISE's Hangar Bay with its doors closed.
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The models major components were vacuformed over wooden plugs, the small detail items were cut from wood, metal, and plastic,
these masters then used to make rubber tools from which cast resin pieces were produced. The model was painted exclusively with DuPont automotive acrylic lacquer paints. The markings were spray painted
through acid-etched masks.
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I'll take you through the process of vacuforming a small structure, such as the Bridge area that sits atop the Primary Hull, to
give you an overview on how the process works. Here I've laid out the plan outline of the Bridge onto a block of seasoned Sugar Pine. Note that I've already incorporated a shop-change to the Allen
Everheart plan I used as source for this project.
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After cutting out the wooden plug to the plan and profile shape lofted off the Everheart drawing I further worked it with rasp
file and descending grades of sandpaper to achieve the correct radius curve around the Bridge plugs perimeter. It's important to make vacuforming plugs undersized by the thickness of the plastic sheet
that will later be pulled over them. Note that as work progressed with the shaping of this Bridge plug that I maintained radial lines in pencil, this to help me eye-ball the work as I carved it to shape.
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Vacuforming a Bridge piece from seventy-thousands-of-an-inch thick styrene sheet started by mounted a piece of the plastic
between two wooden frames. This affair was placed into a hot oven. As the plastic came up to heat and began to sag, the frame was quickly pulled from the oven and the malleable plastic draped over the
Bridge plug which had been placed atop the vacuforming plenum.
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As the sheet was slammed down over the plug, the vacuum source (a shop vac, in this case) was engaged, which sucked the air out
from between the plug and the plastic sheet. Higher air pressure atop the plastic sheet caused it to conform to the shape of the plug. Everything was held in place for about a half-minute as the plastic
cooled. The plastic sheet, now having adopted the shape of the plug, was pulled off the plug and the piece pulled from the supporting frame elements.
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I used a Machinist's surface gauge to scribe the cut line around the base of the vacuformed Bridge piece, supported over the
plug that gave it form during the vacuforming process.
On to Part Two or back to the introduction
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