3 Enterprise Set, TOS, A & D (Eventually a full set of 1/2500 Enterprises) Here's how I got started:



Start by cutting the parts from the sprue and gluing the main components together. Glue all the warp nacelles, hulls, and saucers together. Then clean up the flash at the edges of all the pieces. Cleaning the flash after gluing makes it easier to make sure both halves are symetrical and also leaves less of a gap to be filled later.

Most of the parts look good, especially the TOS Enterprise, but the raised lines on the hulls are way out of scale, although their placement is nearly perfect. Most people wouldn't worry about this, but then we're not most people, are we? I started the cleanup by sanding off the raised lines for the windows of the TOS Enterprise with the plans of painting them on later. I ended up going with my own decals for almost all of the detail. The other ships are a little more involved.
	I began scribing the lines on the A and D using an exacto knife with the tip broken off. The raised lines were so huge that it really was one of the easiest scribing jobs I've done.
	Then I used a 400 grit sandpaper to sand off the raised lines, and finished up with some 1000 grit to smooth the surface.
	Then, using a scribing tool, I cleaned out the lines and got rid of any little plastic bits hanging around. It looks so much better now!
Next up was the task of puttying and sanding the seams. This took a lot less time than I expected. It all went pretty smooth, smooth being our goal, of course. While this was going on I was also in the process of making decals for all of the lifeboats and 1,000 or so windows on the E-D. Wow! What a job! I scanned in the instruction sheet from the large E-D kit and used that as a starting point. With some help from Photoshop I began to recreate the windows in 1200dpi so that they print out nice and clean on a 600dpi laser printer. Thanks to Larry Wherthey I ended up printing on an ALPS printer with white for the windows! They really turned out great! More on that later...

Next, all the parts were primed and the saucers were glued on. The seams around the necks were filled and smoothed. Then all the parts were lightly sanded with 1000 grit to smooth out the primer. I like to paint the detail areas first, then mask them off and paint the main colors. Here I've painted the phaser strips and started on the warp engines.

Here I've masked off the phaser strips and the main deflector. The impulse and warp engines are also masked off, but I didn't get any pictures of those. Sorry. A base coat of a blue-gray was then sprayed on the whole kit. The TOS Enterprise was also sprayed the same blue-gray.

While the paint was drying on the TOS and the D I began painting the aztec pattern on the A. Using white with a slightly blue tint I began painting the paneling by hand with a fine brush. I painted the aztec pattern on the saucer and a random checkered pattern on the engineering hull. The warp engines got a vertical checker pattern. The effect is very subtle per panel, but it gives it a nice scale to the whole kit and really didn't take too long. (By the way, the color in this picture is slightly altered to make the aztec pattern show up better!)

After The paint had a few days to dry I began the task of masking off the panels on the D to paint an alternate color. I took a half ounce of the original color and mixed about six drops of a grey-green with it. This color will hopefully be very subtle, but show up enough to give a large scale feel to the very small scale D.
Throughout this I was always working on the decals with my spare time. The decals for the windows on the top of the saucer were complete and I was just starting on the lifeboats. Then there was still the saucer bottom and enginering to tackle. Whew!

I removed the masking and began to paint the aztec pattern by hand. Even the large checkerboard pattern looks pretty good, but once the aztec paneling began to take shape it really took on a large scale look.

Here's the aztec paneling finished! It took about 5 hours to do which was much less time than I thought. I have to admit that 1/2500 scale is starting to grow on me! It takes less paint, less tape, and in some cases less time.
A close up look at the paneling. Cool, Huh?
	All the detail painting was completed on the TOS Enterprise in a few minutes. The decals I made will add the rest of the windows and hull markings.

I finally finished my decal sheet and here's the first test of the windows on the engineering hull of the Enterprise-D. They look fantastic! A big thank you to Larry Wherthey for printing them for me! They will probably take longer to apply than it took me to paint the aztec pattern!


I got the set of the B, C and E and began working on them as soon as I could. I made some lifeboat decals for the C and used decals from Thomas Models for the E. So fast forward a few years and I was finally about to finish the entire set of all six enterprises in 1/2500 scale. Then along comes "Enterprise" with the NX-01. What's a dedicated modeler like me to do? I decided to scratchbuild the NX in the same scale as the others. This only took me about 9 months! (did I mention I have two kids now?) Here's the final NX-01 scratchbuild. You can buy a kit of this from my other site: Sci-Clone So finally in 2002 I finished my set of Enterprises and took them to Wonderfest. StarshipModeler.com took a great picture of the final display. Now I can sleep...

Please check out my other web site: last updated March 2003