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Not all ENTERPRISE windows are rectangular. The Bridge piece featured rectangular, and large and small diameter circular windows
on its surface. Here you see some square and round extruded acrylic rod being employed to create the different type window shapes.
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So, how did I arrange and mount the back-lighting LED's within the model? Looking under the Bridge piece and studying the
lighting arrangement there is representative. Note that I used both the square and globe shaped LED's. Typically I would mount one or more LED onto a small platform of sheet styrene, gluing the leads of
the LED directly to the plastic.
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I would then glue the plastic within the model parts structure, so positioned as to place the LED directly over an inboard
projecting acrylic lens. Note that the transparent dome atop the Bridge has an LED positioned at its center.
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The Hangar Bay was lit from the overhead through a thin piece of clear plastic sheet that had been buffed down with steel wool
to render a 'frosty' translucent look. This piece was then marked with pen to represent the cross-hatching seen on the studio miniature. Mounted to the Secondary Hull within the annular space, atop this
frosted translucent piece, were four LED's. These light sources had to ground down with a file to fit.
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The pronounced yellow tint to the model ENTERPRISE windows is an artifact of using the yellow glowing LED's. At the time of this
project the white LED's (now coming on the scene, but still terribly expensive) were not available. As this models sub-assemblies would be glued together and the model buttoned up for good once all the
lighting had been worked out, I could not use incandescent bulbs as they have a very short life and would build up excessive heat within the unventilated models interior.
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Florescent lighting would have been a viable alternative if the client had the money to spring for custom glass blowing. So, we
went with the yellow burning LED's for the back-lighting source. And here's the result.
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Currently I'm working on a thirty-three inch long ENTERPRISE. Now that Lightsheet is on the scene (not around when I did the
twenty-nine inch long TOS ENTERPRISE model featured here), I'm giving serious consideration of using that light source as the primary means of lighting this current model of the Big E.
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Back to the twenty-nine-incher: Not until all sub-assemblies had been built and primed and their window lenses installed were
the LED's permanently attached within. The means of positioning and sticking the lights out into the narrow perimeter of the Primary Hull was done with the aid of a long stick tack glued to an LED
support piece. .
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A heavy smear of CA on the base of the plastic support was applied, and the light unit was positioned over a set of window lens
(the LED's lit during this operation so I could determine maximum illumination through the windows) from within. Once happy with the location I pushed the stick so that the support made contact with and
adhered to the inside of the hulls surface. After a few minutes wait to let the bond cure hard enough, a simple twist of the stick broke the tack bond and the stick was removed from the work.
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As each LED light unit was glued within the Primary hull, its wires were temporarily secured to the outside of the hull with
masking tape. I was careful to stick to a two-Volt power source so as not to overdrive and kill the LED's. Once the entire window LED array had been installed each element was wired to the others in
parallel.
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Later, these lights would be fed through a two wire connector that ran down the Dorsal, into the Secondary Hull, made up to a
floating terminal buss there, and then down through the Support Stand, and on to the control panel where I could turn on the Primary Hull window lamps from a selector switch. (For an in-depth, and
excellent presentation about the care and feeding of LED's I recommend you review Kirk Schermerhorn fine article located at the 'Trade Secrets' page of the CultTVman site.
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Before permanently bonding the Bridge to the Primary Hull its LED's were wired up to the same terminals shared by the Primary
Hull windows. Here you get a good look at all the 'spaghetti' wiring leading to the many light sources (windows and navigation lights) contained within the Primary Hull.
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A simple 555 IC chip supplied the clock pulse needed to drive the upper and lower Primary Hull navigation lights. Fiddling with
some capacitors and resisters was enough to establish the correct flash rate and duration. You don't have to be an electronics whiz to wire this sort of gadget up, just buy one of those Radio Shack
'experimenter's handbooks', buy some perf-board, components, a battery and you're off to the races!
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The customer wanted the ability to change the blink rate of the navigation Lights so he instructed me to provide a potentiometer
on the control panel - wired into the clock circuit you see here - so he could 'control' the nave lights. Big hairy deal! But, I build for the customer, not me.
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Seen here are the two navigation Light wires (one set for the upper and lower starboard green LED lamps, the other set for the
upper and lower red port LED lamps). Here you see how all the wires will be routed out of the Primary Hull: they are passed into the interconnecting Dorsal piece and from there into terminal connectors
within the Secondary Hull and from there down into the Support Stand and down into the control panel.
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more to come in part 7
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