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I just happened to have finished an AMT Romulan Bird of Prey and so I thought I would submit some pics to you.
I built this Bird of Prey from the 1976 AMT kit. This kit was what I would call a "rescue" project, as I picked it up
in the box partially finished but (thankfully) unpainted. By the looks of the finished parts, I guessed it was last touched by a kid in the seventies --I could practically smell that orange tube glue.
I began construction by breaking up the finished parts in a quick bath of Wesley's Bleche White. This is also a great paint
stripper and takes chrome plating right off as well. I decided to paint the kit as a whole unit, so I assembled it using mostly liquid plastic welder. I decided to keep the look of the kit
"classic" -- IE I wanted it to look like the one I had when I was a kid, but with a professional finish I was not capable of back in the late seventies. I ended up doing very few modifications
to the plastic. Drilling out the "sensor" holes on the hull, adding a weapons emitter, and replacing the big ugly "domes" on the ends of the engine nacelles was about all I intended
to do. However, once I got into the assembly process, I also sawed off the exhaust tubes on the back of the engines and replaced them with plastic tubing cut at an appropriate angle. I found a couple of
clear navigation domes from a Monogram B-29 in my spares box and used them to replace the kit "globes".
After carefully filling all of the seams and gaps on the kit with CA glue, I sanded it smooth and primered the ship with Tamiya
Fine Surface Primer. I know that the actual studio model was painted some shade of silvery grey, but as I said, I wanted the "retro" look of my childhood, so I used a combination of white
slightly tinted with camouflage grey as a base coat to imitate the box art color scheme. For weathering, I used a combination of Radome Tan and RLM 76 Light Blue/Gray.
Once I was ready to decal, I sprayed the model with several coats of Future. After decades of storage, the kit decals resembled
an ancient scroll -- dry, yellowed, and rolled up into a tube. Clearly, a new set was in order. I ordered the JTGraphics set and even got the top side markings included on the sheet. Once decaled, I
overcoated the model and added the engine domes, which I painted a dark metallic blue ( I know they are supposedly red, but the official Star Trek website and Magazine shows them as blue, and they look
practically black on the DVD ) from the inside. The drilled out sensor holes were then filled with drops of Krystal Kleer. Once the model was put on an acrylic display stand, it looked great on my shelf.
Now, what did I do with that old AMT 18" Enterprise kit I've had in the closet for years...
Thanks,
Kevin Stooksbury
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