John Narducci’s Voyager

About the model: It is the regular Monogram version of Voyager. I started this model back in March and took my time on building it. I spent maybe an hour or two a week on it. I started this kit knowing that it would be a lit model, I just didn’t know how I was going to go about lighting a kit that was not made for lighting. This is were your site and some others really helped me out.

First I started by drilling out every single window on the ship; labor of love or just insanity, you be the judge. Ten years later or at least it seemed, I then made some modifications to the model by adding the missing elements like deflector shield emitters, missing windows and the hatch behind the bridge. It actually took me quite a few weeks to drill and sand out each window. I wanted them to all be uniform, even if they were not going to be lit. So I started painting the entire inside of the model with a couple of coats of flat black and a final coat of chrome, which I will change to a final coat of white on my next project. The entire ship was then airbrushed and sealed with a coat of gloss.

Once it dried and set up for a week, I glued all the parts together and then filled and sanded where it was necessary. I did it this way because I really didn’t want to have to cover all those windows when I was painting. I filled all the windows in with resin. Unfortunately I used the wrong kind of tape and the resin poured out all over the outside of the model which I had to strip off and repaint and in my laziness I only stripped off the areas where the resin bled through, leaving some unevenness.

To light her I used fibre optics for the running lights and anti collision beacons, cold cathode for the nacelles and general lighting and a few leds here and there. I purchased the deflector dish from DLM and cast the windows on the back of the ship myself. Once I had all the wiring done I decide on how I was going to mount it. Bases are definitely not my thing but I gave it a go and with some spare molding and wood slapped something together, not to bad. Thinking that the windows were probably going to be the worst of it I got to the decals. There has got to be hundreds of very tiny little decals and I hate decaling, I hated it as a kid and hate even more as an adult. Ten more years past, millions of decals later, and a few final coats of flat and she is complete.

John Narducci