Building the Klingon Cruiser part 3 by Billy Lehner

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The front-end lighting is straightforward. I made decals of small windows and applied them to the upper nose deck. Those decals showed me where to make the windows. The square windows were made by micro drill bit in a pin vice then carefully cut out with a sharp Xacto blade. Fiber optic “stems” supplies light to the round windows.

The lit recessed deflector dish effect was easy. The model was molded a light blue. I shortened the tube one third and carefully masked the tunnel with aluminum foil sprayed with Krylon Easy-Tack repositionable artist adhesive out of the can. After the model was painted the foil was removed. The deflector lighting effect is simply the high intensity LED shining through the translucent blue plastic.

This is the inside of the nose of the ship. In there is the high intensity LED and fiber optic going into the neck windows.

The “goose neck” of the model always seemed fragile to me so I added a reinforcing piece of plastic spruce to the “neck” of the D7. It was a tight fit with the spruce, fiber optic leading from the nose of the ship to the center neck windows and the LED wiring.

The base of the neck where it meets the engineering section was also reinforced using spruce pins and a technique I learned when I build home speakers. I placed two spruce rods extending from the front body wall to the rear body wall. The spruce rods mutually couples the front and rear walls and reinforcing both walls. This effective and easily modification doubles the strength of each wall. Since the top and bottom are attached to the walls the neck is effectively attached to all wall of the hull making an extremely sturdy box and solid neck bracing. I can safely say the walls would rip out before the neck would!

On to part 4