We have light!

I spent this evening wiring up the saucer section. The top half has the blinker board and of course the two beacon lights nestled in their aluminum pipe fittings. The wiring for that was pretty simple. I attached the entire thing to one of those tiny plugs so I can keep the two halves separate until I am ready to seal the hull.

The upper saucer wired up.

The lower half has the white lights for the windows and the red impulse lights. I had a good time soldering them all together, running the wires around to try and avoid the windows, as well as to keep things flat. Though this may look like a mess of wires, it is in fact one of the best wiring jobs I have ever done on the inside of a starship. thinking through the wire rig more completely (and having learned from past attempts at this kind of wiring) helped.

The lower saucer wired up.

Powered up. The beacons do blink, I just caught the picture with them on.

The lower saucer with lights. The dome in the center lights up really well.

The upper dome lit. I will glue in the bridge piece sometime later.

I originally had three 5mm white LEDs on the saucer, but it looked too dim. After some consideration I opted to add three more 3mm white LEDs to brighten up the saucer a bit more. The only issue I ran into is that two of them are a slightly different color, but I think it is close enough for it not to show to badly.

Five LEDs instead of three.

The little 2mm plugs are amazing. making this will be so much easier just because of those plugs. I think that the 4 LEDs I have planned for the engineering section should work fine as it is a smaller space with less distance between the lights and the windows. The only section I am a bit worried about is the neck. We shall see. I hope to have the engineering hull done in a few days. Then it is just wiring up the nacelles, sanding and painting.

I forgot to mention a few weeks back that the Vanship model I ordered in June finally arrived. This was the third time in fact I had ordered the model. I actually thought it was lost, but it finally arrived. It is about the same scale as the ones I started working on way back when I started this blog. This will be a later project, mostly due to the detail level of the painting. I need to get a lot more practice in with the airbrush before I tackle something like this.

The box

A shot of the parts on the spue.