I got this AMT kit for Christmas from my wife. It's not quite finished-I need to secure the rear support under the hull, without which it has an unfortunate downward tilt that you'll notice in the pics. It also needs a flat coat and perhaps a bit of weathering. BUT.....I'm gonna post up pics anyway because I'm taking a break from it.
As you might expect, the build was tricky. Nothing lined up and there was quite a bit of sanding and scratch construction involved in order to get the hull pieces to go together solidly. I installed a long bolt into the secondary hull as I planned how to mount the ship, then I continued the build around that. I made a wooden base for it and had a graphics printer print me up the emblems you see attached to it. Those I ripped off the internet (and kudos to whoever the original artist was on those-I never could find out). I was going for a kind of classic "ship on the ways" look with the stand. I used a hole saw to cut the vertical support "cradles". I'm not fond of the way Polar Lights prints their decals. They are unwieldy in shape and excessively overzealous in what they try to cover with one decal, in particular the windows. I ended up cutting quite a few of them down to a smaller size in order to apply them. I gave the bussard scoops a base coat of chrome silver, and then oversprayed a coat of turn signal yellow and a coat of clear red, which gave them a nice sparkly red-orange look. The pics don't do those justice. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out so far. Check out the pics:
I chose to do the navigational deflector in a rust/orange/red color to give it a retro look similar to the box art. This pic makes it look cherry red, but it's similar to the color of Bondo glazing putty. I think it turned out pretty good as well:
This pic is not quite square head on. The nacelle's are actually lined up much better than the pic lets on:
Well, there she is. Enjoy.
---Chris