Kyu-Woong Lee’s Nostromo

This kit was pretty much built from the box. It was an interesting design, with all those antennae sticking out. The accuracy and detail achieved in Halcyon’s model really made me want to get one and build it. It was, after all, the ship which made that fateful landing and started the whole story. In this case, however, “built from the box” meant something a little different…

This was the first time I’d worked with vinyl, and it was a new experience for me. There was a lot of excess vinyl to remove, and some warpage to correct. After the major sections were trimmed, shaped, and assembled, the rest of the assembly went pretty quickly. I also used newspaper to fill the inside of the vinyl pieces.

I had also always worked with enamel paints before, so this was the first time I used acrylics. Since enamels damage the highly detailed vinyl, water based paints had to be used. Oh well, I was going to have to break out the air-brush anyway, since there was that ever present, dreaded, sci-fi modeling question: “What darn color is it, anyway?”

I started out with Tamiya “Sky Gray”, but it looked a little dark. I had to thin it down with white, about 2:1 white/sky gray. I used medium gray for the vents, and used cut pieces of black racing stripe tape for the center section vents of each vent panel. I then used charcoals for weathering, and finished with acrylic clear and flat base mix (there’s no premixed flat).

The kit looks great when completed, and after it’s built, you realize why Halcyon decided the detail couldn’t be achieved using injection techniques. Seams in an injection molded kit would be impossible to remove with all that surface detail they managed to capture with vinyl.

Kyu-Woong Lee