[dhanners]

Here's my build of Legal01's USS Kelvin, available in the Downloads section.

When I first saw the Kelvin in the 2009 J.J. Abrams "Star Trek" movie, I wasn't sold on the design. In fact, I thought it was butt-ugly. But after time, the ship grew on me and I've come around -- so much so that it is now one of my favorite ST ship designs. (Small bit of ST trivia: Early in the film's production, the ship was named USS Iowa, but the producers decided it would be too much to have the ship named that AND for Kirk to be from Iowa. The name was changed to Kelvin, after Lord Kelvin, the British scientist, and Harry Kelvin, J.J. Abrams' grandfather. The ship breaks from ST tradition having by having a registry number that begins with a 0.)

Legal01's model builds into a nice replica. Not sure of the scale. There are no instructions, but with a few photos (and Rapidtox's fine build thread earlier this year) it is fairly easy to figure out where the parts are supposed to go. One note: It appears the part for the impulse engine housing at the rear of the saucer isn't included on the three pages of parts. I scratchbuilt one out of light gray cardstock.

I always feel the saucer-based ST models rise or fall with how good the saucer build is. To that end, I backed up the upper and lower saucer pieces with cereal-box cardboard to make sure they were flat and wouldn't flex. I cut the cardboard a fraction of a millimeter smaller than the kit piece and then centered it on the kit piece. This left a small ridge around the perimeter, perfect for the circular edging piece to glue to. I also cut circular formers to beef up the engineering section and the warp engine. The formers also help keep the pieces circular.

The build was straightforward, although I had trouble getting the pylon for the engineering section to match the contours of the upper saucer properly. I wound up actually cutting a small wedge out of the inner ring of the upper hull to get it to fit; the pylons slid into the open wedge.

I'm not sure I got the forward dome on the warp engine properly, either. I couldn't get the petals to meet in the center, so I glued a disk punched from gold paper and glued it to the center. It looks good, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.

All in all, it was a fun build and I like the look of the Kelvin even more now. It is one of those ships that look good from every angle. I once read an interview -- I think it was with Rick Sternbach -- in which he said they had to be careful how they filmed some of the ships, particularly the Enterprise-D, because from some angles, it looked ugly. I really need to build a stand for it, since it unwieldy and is impossible to pose for photos. (And since I'm posting this on my iPad, I can only upload one photo per post....)