You GOTTA add fiber optic lighting to the cockpit and turret bays!!!!... LOU!!, it would be a crime not to add this into such a wonderful kit. You lucky bugger, Im so jealous!... keep up the great work, looking good.
I wasn't going to flaten the raised pieces in the cockpit down but I will now because it would make it easier to drill and I could just use a white led and the decal. Reason is like everything I one make my own circuits and light them up. I was planning to make a alternating duel LED circuit using red and yellow but if I'm using the decal I just have to match the decal with the fiber optics as the color would come from the decal. But for the engines I will be using ten blue LED's and five white LED's, I've never been a fan of the LED strips. But for the ramp I need to find a copper plate so the light turns on when ever the ramp is down. But Lou it all looks great.
The Motion Picture Enterprise is my favorite of all the iterations so hoping you do that one soon. And just want to say that I have come to look forward to seeing your weekly vids on a Saturday morning, almost as much as looking forward to watching cartoons when I was a kid. Keep up the good work Lou, much appreciated :)
Wow! I like all the work you have done by now and the way you took care of the BANDAI Squeak! I really and especially like what you did for the Engine, for an old battery it really lit up the engine the right way from the New Hope I think.
Gotta love that bandai click and squeak it makes you wonder if it's actually designed into the kits as I've yet to find another company that has those traits, brilliant work as always
I think I figured out why you still like making models of things you've already made, Lou. You're like Gepetto: you love bringing all these models in boxes to life! :)
First off, your money's no good here. Second off, I look rather fetching in harem pants (I do a priceless Rex Ingram impression! (Though he was wearing a breechclout... ) Seriously, I get a lot of enjoyment out of your builds. We have similar enough tastes to make everything interesting to me. I only miss seeing the drudgery of the actual painting. Plus, you yourself have a folksy presentation that suggest you should have gone into radio. My only mild request is that we might break bread some day when I'm in the nabe-- but travelin' about to a random schedule is more remote these days (we missed each other at Steve's when you came to pick up your Captain's Chair-- about a week after the Big E party). My one failure with that double-row LED strip was that I was still in my decade-long brooding hatred of "white" LEDs. 'Round about 20 yarns ago, the only "white" was that eye-gouging blue-white. I had coughed up plenty to get a couple and was terribly disappointed. When I found ("stumbled" is more like it; It turns out that the search terms are critical but a linguistic puzzle-- what the Chinese manufacturers think are perfect descriptions of their product is a real head-scratcher to us 'Mericans-- especially about 4-5 years ago when I found the double-rows) that weird new family of double-row guys, I sneered at the idea of getting the cool white version; only getting the warm white. Nowadays I'm much more open to the needs of the many LEDs. Hence you see the cool and warm varieties of those half-height crowded strips. Of which, I am glad the cool one serves. And looks great. There are 12V batteries out there-- not as compact as a 9V-- but a lot of juice over time. Less batt replacement. And finding a battery pack for those garage door remote 12Vs is a nuisance. Still, a 9V battery has around a full Amp when new-- good lighting for a while. Bandai seems to have built their engine grill around that double-row variety. Interesting that they spent so much time developing that "light guide" hunk o' plastic. Mmmm... I can almost taste the fish...
So there's a lot of info here, and I've never used led strips, so I know nothing of the differences between them.. I'd rather not spend a lot of money trying to find the same "cool white" one Lou decided to use that you sent him, so is there info that would lead me directly to the same one... Maker...length...or where you found that one?
My friend found a color changing battery box for the engine lights I wished I had found them b4 installing the kit light diffuser now it's a challenge to remove it an installing the strip light
Lou, she is looking magnificent! One thing that I have been wanting to ask you, and perhaps other people have already asked you. Could you show at least some of the building and painting, as you are doing it, rather than just showing the accomplished steps? You do your best to describe what you are planning to do, and what you have done. It would be nice to be able to see you doing, at least, some of it!
Love the lighting on the main engine! Will probably do something similar on mine. Have you tried Stynylrez primer? Similar stuff to Vallejo, but it's a bit darker gray and I love it.
Looking great Lou! I like the way you decided to do the engine light as it looks spot on and it's only blue when the light is on. Nice touch. I also like the way you got rid of the "bumpy" surface inside the cockpit. Also, did you wash the parts before you painted on the first layer?
Any issues using the surface primer in the airbrush? I've read more than a few reviews saying that it gummed up the needle quite often. Looks amazing as always! -JT
Ahem, I am at fedoratron.com but my shop's items are in a rather narrow range of interest. Mostly for the 18" Jupiter II. But I do have a rather brilliant solution to the problem of painting the 12" Jupiter II's fusion core (if I do say so myself) as well as some brass work for the 1:537 "box scale" Klingon ship. A few simple lighting boards as well as a couple of new ones coming out soon.
Thank you Eliot,@@MrChief101 . I actualy have your Jupiter II and Klingon parts. Didnt realise you were the man behind them, They are excelent parts. I was intersted in the LED tape you forwarded to Lou, as I havent seen doubel density/row LED tape before. We dont get many options in OZ for this sort of thing.
@@pauljohnson2692 Thank you, kindly, Paul. The world of LED strip lighting has exploded and it's not like they are available in any store (though Canal Street Lighting (NYC) may indeed have them and everything else...). Okay, so here's some of the story-- when the big Proteus came out, I started looking for something that would fit in that ring under the dome. That is a signature element of that beautiful ship and I felt critical to the whole look. The problem with LED strip is that we are all limited by their standards of manufacturing. Thus whatever width they felt necessary is what we get. (It is possible to slice off a sliver from top and bottom, but you're often right in a conductor and it is risky. I say employ your nerves of steel and it'll work!). My previous big score in LED strip lighting was on eBay, so I returned to try my hand at inventive search terming. I needed something that was much less wide, top to bottom. So I tried "half height" and "narrow profile" or "slimline" that sort of thing. I think I spent an afternoon, maniacally at it avoiding other work... At that point in time, I was rather flush and so pushing that "Buy Now" button was easy. I did find a fairly narrow strip-- but as far as I could tell (I was not coughing up that much money for a Proteus... yet -- so I was guessing at what was needed. I sent off a couple of "guesses" to ModelManTom, he of the late, lamented Modeler's Brand who convivially helped out) it still was not narrow enough. At the end of all that, I realized that the manufacturers were into "case sizes" and number of LEDs per reel (5 meters or about 16 feet, Mate!). In the beginning, LED strip lighting was figured out for the automotive trade, hence the love of 12Volt power. Then it slid over to the decorator world of lighting accent and that was when it exploded. Never mind the whole RGB thing and those RC controllers. (Nobody has lit a Steve Neill TOS Enterprise with all-RGB strip-- disco Enterprise OR normal cruise mode to RED ALERT! just sayin'... One might be able to stuff them into a 1:350...) I advise any searcher of LEDs to find a listing of the modern case styles of "surface mount devices" (SMD) LED and then look for the strips. Then, consider the number of LEDs per reel. In the good old days (of 2014) 3 every two inches was much of all there was. That worked out to 300 LEDs per reel. Then 600 showed up-- very exciting. The jammed LED strips that Lou has are 1200 per reel! I *think* the double-row LED strip is also 1200 and we're back in the confuso-zone. My old brain gets muddled when the eBay-ers present all your choices in the order form. One has to slog through each one to see which is right. The hunt can be fun, as you never know what turns up. But settle down with brew of choice, project in mind and a firm grip on the mouse... The Proteus? I never found anything that would "drop in." (Randy Neubert seems to have, over at VoodooFX, so see what he is doing). But my plan is to hand build what I hope is "perfection." Again, with all the insane case styles out there (and keeping my nerves of steel in abeyance till needed... ) almost any kind of "impossible" lighting is out there! Actually, doing the hand work on tiny case styles (look up 0605) is a challenge, magnifying lenses, jigs and really fine soldering irons are all 'musts'-- but more irritating is dealing with finding SMD resistors and then using them. Luckily they look like grains of sand and are similarly priced! Good hunting!
Which Falcon kit do you like better -- The Bandai PG 1/72 scale, or the Fine Molds 1/72 scale TESB version (assuming you've built that one already)? I've seen little bit more views of the two main models they used in the original trilogy and I think I like the shape of the original ship from the first Star Wars better. They didn't quite capture the original curvature/hamburger bun of the original Falcon model with the Hero model they used after TESB. It's a shallow, narrower/learner looking ship in sid profile. From the front it would also look less chunky. Suggested Episode 9 titles from the (disaffected) fans... Episode 9 : Return of the Round Dish! (=> on the Millennium Falcon) Episode 9: The Fonz Thanks Rey, ("Jumping the TIE Fighter" replaces "Jumping the Shark" as the new colloquial phrase for falling off the tracks) Episode 9: A Desperate Hope (or Nobody Wants To Buy Our New Trilogy Toys, Books, Comics, Music, etc., etc. so we'll push the Classic Trilogy merchandise again) Episode 9: A Nightmare on Death Star - Palpy's Back Episode 9: We're Gonna Kill Lando This Time
I like the bandai for overall shape and detail. I'm a burger guy, I guess. My title for 9? "Maybe star wars isn't for you anymore." Or "Oh my God, there girls in my clubhouse, they're icky" or "Episode 9 Get off my lawn!"
