Gary Kerr’s Enterprise photos 1991

Gary Kerr has spend a good part of his life documenting the Starship Enterprise and other special effects miniatures.   In late 1991, he helped disassemble the studio model of TV’s Enterprise as part of Ed Miareki’s restoration.   He has shared many photos of this on his Facebook page and has granted permission for them to be posted on the CultTVman website.   These photos show the model before the restoration work by Miareki.  The notes with each photo are from Gary’s comments.

Back in 1991, before the Enterprise model was disassembled, I took some photos of HO-scale [1:87] model railroad figures taking a “spacewalk” on the model to give an impression of the theoretical size of the actual spacecraft.   The model is a smidge larger than 1/85 scale.

A photo of HO-scale figures doing some spacewalking – this time on the saucer section of the Enterprise. And yes, Virginia, there are grid lines on the saucer.   This picture came from a scan of an old 35mm negative, so the exposure isn’t the greatest. In real life it looks like they lightly sprayed some tannish-brownish paint in those grid squares – more heavily around the edges of the grid squares.

Originally the lines were supposed to represent seams between panels in close-up shots, and they became grid lines when the Franz Joseph plans were published. Pencil lines were by far the easiest & cheapest (emphasis on “cheapest”) way to add the seams. Engraved lines are difficult to create and would have required retouching and/or repainting the entire saucer, which would have been prohibitively expensive.

Pencil lines *looked* like engraved lines on low-res TV screens, so that’s the way they went. You’ll remember that when Jefferies designed the Phase II Enterprise, which was supposed to represent a modestly updated TOS ship, he had a decent budget and added engraved grid lines to the saucer, not pencil lines.

The problem with pencil lines is that the graphite is reflective, so when the light hits the lines one way, they’re clearly visible, but when light hits them from a different angle, it reflects off the graphite and the
lines are virtually invisible.

Spacewalking continues as my HO-scale figures stand alongside the bridge, vainly looking for an entry door. Ignore the ludicrously incorrect dome that was added during an earlier restoration. The taller, all-wood 2nd Pilot bridge had a rectangular opening cut into its front, and an illuminated “windshield” was installed in the opening. The Production version bridge was created by slicing off the top of the 2nd Pilot bridge & 1″ dia. turbolift tube at the upper edge of the opening for the “windshield”, mounting the upper bridge on a round sheet of Plexiglas, and replacing the lower half of the original bridge with the “new & improved” shorter Production bridge.

Apparently something happened to the original dome, and later in the series it was replaced by a more rounded dome. The dome was still on the model when it arrived at NASM in 1974, but I don’t know what happened to it.

To accentuate the lines of the 11-footer, they sprayed dark green “shadows”, which photographed as dark gray, around the bridge & turbolift, the B/C deck, the edges of the lower sensor dome, etc.

This photo shows the bridge in 1991 after it had been removed from the 11-footer. Note the solid-wood construction, which was hollowed out by Richard Datin when the decision was made to add lighting to the model. The red light on the side of the bridge is a piece of frosted clear plastic that’s shaped like a traffic cone. A long stem penetrated through the wood and transmitted light from the bulb inside the bridge to the light on the exterior.

The bridge & B/C deck were removed & repainted in 1992

“I claim this spaceship in the name of Mars!”

Check out the 1″ diameter bow light, which some people claim doesn’t exist. The rectangular light panel on the left side of the picture is an incorrectly-made replacement for the original, which was made from the same frosted Plexiglas as the bow light – but was lost sometime between 1972 and the model’s arrival at the Smithsonian in 1974.   The port half of the bow light originally had a streak of weathering covering it, but light was visible through the weathering. At some point the weathering was cleaned off.

There *were* grid lines on the sides & bottom of the saucer. Before the 1991-92 restoration some of the pencil lines were bleeding through the thin layer of paint that the Rogay company had applied earlier.

Also of note is the light gray paint that Ed uncovered when he sanded the face of the impulse deck. It’s not generally known, but on the Pilot versions of the ship, the impulse deck, as well as several other parts of the ship, were painted a very light gray that usually photographed as white.

In this  photo you can see some faint remnants of the green-gray leading edge of the dorsal, which was repainted during an earlier restoration.

The “red ring” was created by either applying reddish-brown or brown paint or chalk in the crevices next to the ring to accentuate it.

This photo shows that the leading edges of most of the 1/16″ square pieces of ribbing had been broken off prior to 1991.

How about a Sunday stroll on the hangar deck? A couple items of note: first, the dimple to the right of the landing lights is some shrunken putty that’s hiding the screw that attaches the wooden fantail to the secondary hull. There’s a matching dimple on the other side.

The landing lights were made from pieces of colored Plexiglas. An area of the landing deck just inside the doors was carved out to allow light from the bulb illuminating the hangar bay bubble to reach the landing lights. This approach was less than fully successful due to the location of the bulb. Technically speaking, the landing lights should only be operating when a shuttle is landing. The lights replicate the lights of the Optical Landing Systems (OLS) of aircraft carriers, and they serve as a manual check for the pilot to ensure that he’s on the correct approach path, especially at night (or in outer space).

Check out the screws (which were puttied over originally) that hold the heavy, mostly-wood endcap onto the metal cylinder of the nacelle.

Ed Miarecki sanded through the paint on the ball in 1991 & didn’t find any evidence of white paint beneath. In the interview with Matt Jefferies during the pre-production of George Pal’s abortive ‘The War of the Worlds’ TV show, they propped up the starboard nacelle of the Enterprise behind Jefferies. Viewed under normal lighting in an office, the ball was clearly hull-colored. And the corrugation on the endcap & vent is simply corrugated plastic sheet.

The back end of the endcap wasn’t black – it was the same darker gray as on the ribbing.