derex3592

Oh DUDE!!!!! I had no idea they were showing this! I just got my two tickets for Sunday Sep 26th down here in a great theater that I went to see Close Encounters re-release in a few years back! I'm STOKED! Haven't seen TFTM since 86 in a theater!!!!

Ok, Imma bite on this, I love the bot mode, couldn't care less if the jet is super accurate or not, still beats MP-52 hands down in every other category IMHO. How much is this guy gonna run me???

@sqidd I agree, the fact that they are on MW Forums now addressing issues is a good idea. It's NOT 2019 anymore, a lot of people need to realize that and take a breath when dealing with supply chains, not to mention labor shortages of companies both here and abroad.

awwww..come on guys, no love for the Matchbox Southern Cross bad guys??!! I was a super happy camper at age 10 or 11 when I got the Matchbox bioroid terminator/hovercraft AND one Robotech Master figure to play with for my bday! I still have them! They're in that they are SO bad they are cool category!

Yeh it is!!!

Well.... Color me UN impressed with Tamiya lacquer paints. I was under the impression that these you could brush paint straight of the bottle and NOT have to do multiple coats. Ummm.. NO... Ohh well, I'm sure they'll airbrush beautifully, I'm going to have to pay through the nose and get some of their new enamel paint and try that. I can't keep doing models with no way to brush paint small details with one coat. Hell Model Master enamels never had a problem with it. Tamiyas lacquer is just to THIN.

Awwww...It's SO tragic it's cute!!!

very cool!

Since Bandai has failed us all in not giving us a HiMetal R QRau... Back to a project from 2 years ago. Having another go at the seams with some Mr Surfacer 500. Stay tuned.

Honest answer to the second part of your question....no. It isn't elongated enough to look like it actually should look in the real world. Only the 1:72 model kit does that. However I think the little HM-R VF-1D actually got it a tiny bit closer from a side view than the DX does.

that's exactly what I was thinking!

How the HELL does he not paint over all the Tampo printing??? I doubt he redoes all the markings with waterslide decals..or maybe he does? But how would he get them to match the Bandai ones???

I remember when I first transformed my VF-11's, there must have been two or three pages on here back then about how to properly lock in the canopy sections..LOL..good times trying to get the front part to lock into place. Kinda miss those Valks...

Wow! That's a REALLY good looking pilot for 1/72!

DON'T be intimidated by lighting! I was SOOO you for many, many years, and yes, it was more daunting back in the bad old days of fluorescent tubes and such, but NOW!, LED's have it super easy!, barely an inconvenience! (Someone will get that joke...). Seriously, just buy yourself a decent soldering iron if you don't have one, spend less than $30 bucks on some cheap china special LED strips and a roll of fiber optic on Amazon, and just play around a practice with it. Knowing how to solder is the main thing honestly. Practice makes perfect on that front. The Runabout made it to work today and is now on display:

Great! Can't wait to see this happen! Very exciting!

@Gabe Q - Looks great! How do you cut such perfect little circles in the Tamiya Masking Tape??? A skill that is something that still eludes me!

Thank you for all the nice compliments guys!

I gotta say....that looks reeeallly good!

I'll have to disagree with that! Skyfall was awesome! The others ---meeehhh.

WTF with the LED gimmick GIANT flashlight??? Does ANYONE want this??? I'm willing to wager NO...GIVE ME MY SEVERED TUNA HEAD DAMMIT!!!

From this point forward, it was just a lot of masking and painting up to 8 different shades of gray all over. All Tamiya acrylics. Most were airbrushed, some of the smallest ones are done by hand. Weathering was done with Tamiya Weathering Master pallets and finely ground up artist chalk. Final flat coats were Tamiya spray can TS-80. The base was a basic wooden base purchased off Amazon, painted with a gloss black Rustoleum with silver specs in it. The glass was purchased from a glass shop near my brother in law's print shop. The glass shop also drilled the hole in the center ($25 for that hole!), but hey, I wasn't ABOUT to try that! My brother in law then used one of his super fancy $$$$$ printers to print on the backside of the glass the picture I had found that I wanted under the ship followed by 4 layers of white ink. I used clear Gorilla Glue sparingly to glue the glass down to the wood. That's pretty much it in a nutshell....If anyone has any questions about anything, I'll be happy to try and answer them! Thanks for reading!

I started experimenting around with fiber optic lighting at this point, I got the method right and even had the micro holes drilled in the tops of the warp nacelles for the lights, which worked great!, as you can see. However, I couldn't make the LED bulb fit into the warp engine. As I had already sealed up the impulse engines at that point (there was plenty of room to hide the LED bulb inside those!) I had to abandon the fiber optic navigation lights idea. I puttied up the holes and moved on. Maybe next time! Putting the warp engines together was one of the hardest parts of the build. The blue plastic chiller grills literally just "lay" in place and you have to glue the two halves on the engines together. Super glue was used sparingly to achieve this and not mar the clear (tinted blue with Tamiya Sky Blue) plastic. Countless hours were spent puttying, sanding, and rescribing the deep lines on the engines to make them look seamless. The standing figures are architectural figs I got off Amazon, bag of 100 for like $10. Anybody need some??? I have plenty!!! I have always hated figure painting, so having to paint all these with mostly Tamiya Acrylics by hand was a laborious task to say the least!!! God I miss my Model Master Enamels for stuff like this... I decided not to use the included clear parts for the windows as they were super thick and you could NOT see through them. Everything was really distorted. So I ended up cutting clear transparency sheets and using those instead. I actually had to make all of them TWICE, as I got overspray on the first ones at some point on the inside. In case you're wondering, I used my photo etch bending tool to bend the front windows. The last GIANT hurdle was getting the interior parts in the bottom of the ship, sitting flat and where they needed to be, AND to get the top and bottom halves of the ship together. The top half of my ship was bowed inward in the middle and slightly in the front end. In order to fix this, I finally wedged and hot glued a brass rod and a brass beam in place to spread the top half apart enough to get it to semi close up with the bottom half. Then MORE puttying, sanding, and rescribing, I must have worked on this part for weeks to get it looking close to right....

I went with Tamiya AS-16 for the interior color and through many trials, I ended up going with it for the outside base color as well! Extra greeblies from old Bandai Star Wars kits were added to the transporter area, and the silver handles on the transporter are paper clips cut and bent to length.

Moving on into the build, I got to the point of priming and light blocking the kit. Went with Tamiya Fine Surface Primer on the outside, some SEM high build black surface primer for interior, then a nice coat of gloss black Rustoleum, followed up by a final coat of metallic silver Rustoleum for all lighted engine parts. They say this bounces the light around inside the part and makes it brighter. Also I modified the front cockpit and rear cockpits to be larger, as they felt to cramped the way they came. I got a set of aftermarket interior decals as well from the HDA Modelworx website that would be supplemented by my own LCARS DS-9/Star Trek TNG screengrabs that I would print and turn into waterslide decals for both the front and rear cabins. I wanted actual screens from the shows and especially ones of the wormhole and DS-9 along with images of the Runabout itself on screen. I had my video editor at work insert a Cisco and Dax image into one of the images as well. I begin figuring out the wiring of the warp engines and the method I would use for the impulse grills honeycomb look. In the end, it was a cheap roll of sticky window screen mesh and old scrap orange lighting gel from my work. I had never really scratch built anything from styrene before, but with a little practice, I built a pretty cool looking transporter for the middle of the front cabin.