Wow amazing stuff. Thank you for posting. All the 66inch scratch build videos I have relocated here:https://vimeo.com/showcase/6042148

Good Start to the Starship
Best I could do in the 4 hours I had yesterday. I spent most of that time at the lathe. Love the lathe I don't need no stinking 3D printer. Actually that's not true and for some small parts I'd love to have one although I'm still faster. If I had told it to make the nose cone and the tailpiece it would still be printing,

These are just the the blanks. The balsa will get sealed and then primered. Details will put in and eventually when finished they will get molded in silicon and the final product made out of alumilite.

The recesses worked out perfect and the parts fit just inside the tubes. The fins have yet to have the landing pads added and today I need to make the hinge look filets for the fins to plug into.

A few years ago I had to take a break from model building for awhile for health reasons. When I wanted to try finishing my 33 inch Enterprise, my wife suggested that I start back in with something a bit smaller and less stressful.

So what came to mind was a TOS Type I Phaser!

I gathered some references and figured out what I wanted the final piece to look like...


From there I scratch together masters of the parts I'd need and made molds...


And then cast parts to build a couple of them...


In the end, this is what I ended up with...



But that isn't what this thread is about!

Like many of us, I get into a nostalgic mood from time to time. And recently I was thinking about the old AMT Exploration Set kit that I built as a kid (around 1976). I noticed that Round 2 had re-released it and I took a long look at some photos of the parts to pre-plan what I might modify if I bought one.

Then I saw the price... ummm, I couldn't afford it.

But I never let that stop me before (I had just thrown together a Type I Phaser a couple months earlier), so I tried to figure out if I could scratch build the set. And because there are tons of full size prop replicas out there, I decided to attempt to match the AMT kit's scale (about two-thirds from what I could tell). I gathered together drawings and photos and started in.

Not having a printer (or at least ink for my printer), I just freehanded the shapes and started building masters.

I started with elements of the tricorder and communicator...


And later jumped into doing the phaser (I wasn't as worried about that as I've built a few of them in the past).

I made molds of the main tricorder parts and did a test pull to see how it was coming together (below is just a quick-n-dirty assembly of those test parts). I also have made some good progress on the phaser masters.


Here are the first pulls of my phaser parts...


... except for the emitter assembly, that is the master painted silver. The first emitter assembly is being made in clear and had to cure for a few days. I still have some puttying to do before I paint them, but this should sorta show what I'm aiming for.

Here is a shot of the molds for most of the pieces and the communicator (with the parts just sitting in place)...


Here is a shot of the phaser body with the communicator (again, with the parts just sitting in place) and the Galileo (that is my one-quarter studio scale scratch-built study model, which is a little over 5 inches long)...


Here is some more progress shots, this one with the unfinished phaser in a shadow box display...


and the phaser with test assemblies of the other pieces...


The communicator lid is actually the shape I'll be using to form a photo-etched screen later on. I just painted it for the fun of it.

And another group photo...


The tricorder still has a lot of work needed, but I think it is showing what I'm aiming for.

Still a ways to go, but I'm pretty happy with the results so far.

Sometimes clients need to see something in front of them to understand it. Some people can't "see" ideas in plan form. That's where I came in. Completely scratched up to 1:12 scale. I was almost feeling the need to fabricate a specific deep C-channel when I found such a part already made. Phew. The Mockler (sp? too lazy to look it up) wheel hardware was unusual and a nail-biter to put together. Would the physics of the styrene and MEK solvent work at that scale? It did; but I wouldn't want to run the thing like a car on a carpet (vrrooom vroom).
The marble top is added-up sheet styrene to get the speced dimension and a custom decal for the whole thing.

Thanks a ton guys! It means a lot to me that you guys like my work. I've been following (and learning from) Tracy's builds as much as I have Steve's (one of my favorites is Tracy's USS Copernicus).

Right now I'm working on something a bit smaller... a scratch built Star Trek exploration set (with all the props at two-thirds scale like the original AMT kit). This is the start on some of the masters from a few months ago...


I've made a lot more progress, but I don't have any images to share (my camera has been having fits). This is along the same lines as the last two projects I've done... mainly small and not meant to be too stressful. Before my wife let me step back into finishing the Enterprise, she wanted me to show I could do work on inconsequential projects first.

One of these was a scratch built Type I Hand Phaser (I made two of them from the molds, both non-functional)...


And the other was taking the spare parts from my one-quarter studio scale shuttlecraft build and building a third finished model...


I had been under the weather recently (and off the net), so I couldn't work on any model stuff. What I could do was play in Photoshop, so I started in on a set of calendar desktops for 2020 (sorta like the ones I did for 2016/2017). Here are some of the images I'm considering...


And here are a couple based on my 33 inch model that I'm pretty sure are done...



Thanks again for the encouragement!