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A Set of Rims for the Big E
09 June 2006
Since I'm in a bit of a holing pattern right now has I'm waiting for Trekmodeler's lighting kit to become available, I have decided to tackle several small side projects. One of these is painting the three concentric grey bands around the rim of the saucer. This is one detail that I absolutely want to include in my model, as I feel it adds much to the look of the ship. You can see the bands I'm talking about below.
Above: Note the grey bands around the saucer rim.
The PL model breaks the rim down into eight separate pieces that fit around the perimeter of the two saucer halves. The bands are actually molded in, which makes the painting a bit easier. I tossed around several ideas on how to go about painting them. First, I though I might be able to just hand-paint them, since they are molded detail. However, I was worried that my shaky hand wouldn't be able to get a clean enough line to achieve the look I wanted. So, that left masking. I considered using liquid mask, but I decided against it as I was worried about getting all of it out of the molded grooves in the rim pieces. I tried a couple of different tapes, but finally settled on plain ol' Scotch blue painter's tape. Since the tape is wide, I would have to mask each piece several times in order to paint each of the separate bands. Thus, it took me about a week to get all of the rim pieces painted. I decided I would take one piece and test my chosen technique. First I primed it with flat grey paint, then painted the whole thing gloss white. Once that was dry, I started masking for the first grey band.
Left: Here is
the test section primed grey.
Right: Now that it is painted gloss white, it is masked for the first
band.
It was about this time that I realized what I doofus I was being. You see, the model part starts with a ribbed band, followed by a smooth band, another ribbed band, a smooth band, and finally the third ribbed band. I'm painting the bands grey, the same color I'm using for priming. So, rather than paint the part white after priming and then mask 3 different grey bands, I instead decided that I would leave the part grey and mask for the white bands, which means I only had to mask each part twice! So, that's just what I did. I laid out all eight pieces, primed them, masked for the first white band, and painted that. Once the first white band was dry, I re-masked for the second and painted that. Easy! The only tricky parts were the last two pieces at the back of the saucer on either side of the impulse engine. The grey bands end in a bit of an angle there, so it required some minor trimming to mask the area correctly.
Left: Here
are the pieces laid out for painting. You can see the test piece on the
left.
Center: After the first masking, with the first white band painted.
Right: This is the tricky area. The impulse engine housing sits
between these two pieces.
After finishing both rounds of masking and painting, I decided that I would re-do the test piece. The fact that I painted it all white first resulted in the white being a bit brighter on that one piece than on the rest. So, to get a more even look I re-primed it and I plan on painting it like I did the other 7. I fitted the two halves of the saucer together so that I could test-fit the rim pieces and see how it looked. I'm fairly happy with the way they came out, but I will need to touch-up a couple of spots to get the bands to blend more evenly at a couple of the joints.
Left: This is
how they look test-fitted..
Right: Pretty good overall, though some of the joints need to be
touched up.
Andy Rucker