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The Nacelles
11 August 2006
With the engineering section lit and assembled, I turned my attention to the warp engine nacelles. In order to make wiring the nacelles easier and to ensure I got the spotlighting effects I wanted, I took an unusual approach with this part of the model. The nacelles mainly consists of two halves. I decided to attach only the inboard half at first, so that I could mount all the LED's and wiring to that half. This would remove the hassle of assembling the nacelle and then having to contend not only with attaching the part to the model, but also making the necessary wiring connections and cramming the excess wire wherever it could fit. To make sure that the nacelles were attached straight and level, I dry-fitted the two halves of the nacelle together and carefully applied cement only to the areas where the inboard half touched the pylon, except for a 1/2" strip along the top of the pylon. In this area, I applied CA. After the glue was applied, I stuck the nacelle to the pylon, made sure the position was good, and hit the CA with a little kicker, setting it instantly. This held the nacelle in place while the cement dried. Fortunately, the armature and the overall good fit of the model meant the nacelles needed very little adjustment (a great improvement over the NX-01 model!). Once the cement had fully cured, I carefully removed the outboard half of the nacelle. and well pleased with the way this product helped to distribute light on the dish, so I hoped that it would do the same for the grills.
Above: Here is the nacelle with only the inboard half attached. The long wire is for the strobe at the end of the nacelle an the short one is for the static lighting.
Now that the inboard halves were in place, I could start the wiring process. The first order of business was to affix the LED that would serve as the spotlight for the federation pennant on the side of the engineering section. Credibly re-creating this effect was very important to me, and one of the major motivations for attaching the inboard half of the nacelle first. My logic was that if the part the spotlight was attached to was fixed in place, I could be guaranteed to have the spot shine on the right place after assembly. I was originally going to use a 3mm LED for this purpose, but I discovered that a 5mm LED actually gives a more confined spot effect (Don't ask me!). So, this meant that I had to open up the hole in the front of the nacelle a little more than I was originally planning to, but the larger whole isn't really noticeable. The 5mm white LED provides a very good re-creation of the effect seen in the movies. In order to position the light, I applied some CA to the whole, pointed the LED where I wanted it to go, and hit it with a little kicker.
Left:
Positioning the LED
Right: The effect look really nice in low light!
The next step was to work out the blue LEDs for the crystal on the top and the gill. For the crystal on the top, I simply used an under-driven 5mm blue LED (the hole in the model is the perfect size for one). As for the grill, the major concern was to achieve an even glow along the whole length of the grill. To achieve this, I frosted the inside of the grill and painted the inside of the outboard halves of the nacelles, with some of that Rustoleum chrome paint I have been using. I was also planning on using 4-6 blue LEDs, with 2 or 3 on each end of the grill and pointed at different angles. However, once I started wiring the thing, I discovered I only needed one LED on each end of the nacelle to get the affect I wanted. Sweet! Only having to use 2 LED's on the grill simplified the wiring considerably.
Left: Here
you can see the blue light from the LED's reflecting of the chromed surface
of the outboard nacelle half.
Center: The glow looks very nice, hard to believe only 2 LED's did
the trick!
Right: The wiring inside the nacelle is fairly simple.
The total LED's I used in each nacelle comes to 5: one for the spotlight, one for the top crystal, 2 for the grill, and one for the strobe at the aft end. I am pleased that the blue glow looks as good as it does, but I did run into some difficulty when I masked the outside of the grills for painting. I mis-aligned the tape, and when I pulled the tape off to re-position it, it took some of the black paint on the raised areas with it. Argh! I've decided to leave it be for now, and touch up that area by hand after the rest of the model is painted.
Andy Rucker