Building Thunderchild's Shuttles with extras

[bgt01]

I promised myself I was going to finish all my in-progress builds before starting a new one…then I broke that promise and started assembling some of Thunderchild’s most excellent 1:200 scale shuttles. My reasoning was a lot of these are small and don’t have a lot of parts, so they should go quickly. That was before I started detailing. Oh well.

1. Work bees and Travel pod
“Wait a minute,” you’re saying. “There are no work bees or travel pods in ThunderChild’s file.” Well, you are correct. However, there is a reason for these being here I’ll show later. These are a mix from the Rawen/Legal01 1:200 Enterprise and the original Rawen 1:400 Enterprise files. I thought it would be cool to have in-scale versions of these ancillary craft to go with Thunderchild’s shuttles.

The work bees are simple score, cut and fold jobs. I cut off the tabs and edge glued them using Super Glue gel applied with a sharpened toothpick. Oddly enough, it didn’t occur to me until right as I write this that I should have added some detailing to these. I’ll have to remedy that.

The travel pod is more complex with its curved body. No tabs used on this one either. I rounded the body by rolling my wooden dowel until I got the curves in, edge glued the center strip to the top part of the main hull, then worked the bottom part into place. I recessed the door at the rear and glued the top and bottom in place, along with the docking ring. I added some raised detailing, and I’ll probably add a little more to make it look more like the model. I might even make one more travel pod with Kirk and Scotty in the window.

[bgt01]

2. Shuttlepod El-Baz
On to the Thunderchild models. This is the Type 15 shuttle pod El-Baz from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s basically a one-man shuttle and man is it SMALL! I figured this would be the hardest for my man-hands to build, so I started here. It’s only 3 parts: a main hull and 2 engines. The body is another score, cut and fold. Again, no tabs and edge glued with Super Glue gel. The engines are a different story. Trying to build something so small was almost too much for me. I was finally able to use a toothpick to roll the engine tubes around. The pointed ends are mangled mess but they are on. I eventually rolled them around the tip of my metal pick enough to get them glued together. If anyone can build a nice version of this, please do so and show me how you did it.

This thing is so small my camera can’t focus on it to get a good picture. I thought it was too small for detailing, but I may go back and add some raised panels.

[bgt01]

3. Shuttlecraft Hawking
This is the Galileo type shuttle Hawking as seen in Star Trek: Generations. Its design is based on the Galileo from Star Trek V. The main difference is the addition of side windows at the front of the hull.

The main hull is all one piece, so score, cut, fold and edge glue is again the procedure. I started at the top and glued my way around until the bottom panel was left. It has to be left open to glue the engine struts in place. The struts are basically square bars. I dry fitted them and trimmed the holes they go in several time to make sure the bottom wouldn’t bulge when glued over them. The ends of the struts are angled to match the angle of the engines when attached, so make sure you don’t glue them in upside down. The engines are basically boxes, so take your time and they can come out pretty straight.

Without a doubt, the two hardest parts are the engine cowlings and the long pods above the engines. The pods are small and curved and hard to handle. I curled the sides some, glued the ends and then worked the sides with the end of my metal pick until I got it as close to the shape I needed as I could. Then I glued the outer cover at one end and slowly glued the cover into place. I worked it a little more with my fingers and spread some Super Glue on the inside to get it to hold its shape.

The engine cowlings are very thin at the front and fiddly. I wound up putting some regular paper gel glue on the edge and working the little black ends into place with my metal pick.

[legal01]

Looking good there bgt01, if you would like I have completed turning all the shuttles from Thunderchild into vector so I can email them to you if you want.

[bgt01]

That would be awesome, Legal01. Shocker , I've found some changes that need to be made the models, particularly the TOS Galileo. I'll PM you.

[bgt01]

4. Runabout Rio Grande
This is the runabout Rio Grande from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It is one of the largest models with the most pieces in this set. It builds to a very nice model. Because it’s bigger, I put more effort into the detailing.

First up is the main hull. It is composed of several sections. Again, all edge gluing with no tabs. I started with the nose, which is another straightforward score, cut and fold. The front window assembly glues in from behind. I thought about recessing the black windows, but decided against it. For the bottom, I printed a second gray panel section, cut out the areas I wanted to be recessed and glued the new panel over the old one.

[bgt01]

Next is the center/rear section. I got ambitious with this and decided to have areas recessed to show off the framework. This took a lot of careful cutting with a sharp blade. My method is to never cut all the way to the end of the cut. I place the tip of the blade at the start of the cut, then stop short of the end. Then I turn the piece around and repeat this so the cut is completed in the middle of the line. This helps take stress off fragile cuts like this that can tear easily during cutting. I printed out a second piece to cut up for raised panels and to glue under the framework. I folded the area under the frame and slowly glued it using Super Glue gel for strength and to keep everything in place after folding. I still got a little twist and lift from the thin frame areas, but it was worth it because it gave a nice effect.

[bgt01]

Next is the impulse engines. They are simple score, cut and fold pieces to which I added some raised panels. Then comes the outer pylon wing section. I added more raised paneling. This is tricky because it needs to match the shape of the impulse engines and provide a flat, level surface on the ends to mount the warp engines. I glued the support piece to chipboard, but I decided to not use it, which may have been my mistake. I didn’t do too bad, but the ends didn’t come out level for some reason. I wound up trimming them level. Also, the starboard “NCC” number is printed in red instead of black. I cut one off a spare piece and glued it in place.

[bgt01]

Next are the warp engines. I recessed the warp grills and raised the vents on the landing side. I glued the top mounting panels to 1mm chipboard and edge painted it silver to more match the model. Their boxy shape made them easy to assemble.

[bgt01]

Next up; the engineering section. The base piece is another score, cut and fold part. Same with the small parts that go on top. I started at the front and glued my way to the back. I glued the round orange antimatter injector to 1mm chipboard and edge colored it with an orange marker.