10/13/11

Dragon officially announced the kit today so I thought I would go ahed and post this gallery. Keep in mind I didn't do all the equipment because most of it would have been left off a 700th scale model. Certain items like anchors they would have just scaled some of their existing stuff to make for the sake of continuity, so in case you are wondering why there are no anchors. There is more I would like to do before I could do drawings though.

11/12/10

More to report this time. I was able to finish Sponson 1, Sponson 7, add some detail to the aft bottom of the flight deck, and get a lot done on the sponson 3 and 5 areas. I also spent a lot of time correcting the elevators so that now everything lines up correctly with the new dims on the hangar drawings I have. All in all, things have begun to move quicker now, so I hope to be done soon.

10/26/10

After extensive re-working, the hangar is now almost complete. All that is left is a fire fighting station high on the stbd wall between ACEL 1 and 2. I finished the flight deck, including the arrestor gear, JBD's, and catapults. I also re-worked some areas of the elevators and sponson one and the area fwd of elevator 1. The help I got in the form of drawings of the hangar deck and flight deck has been a two edged sword. I have been spending a lot of time correcting work I did before, and every time I make a change two more problems crop up. It has set me back considerably and I am now very far behind schedule. I still think I have another months worth of work to do.

9/28/10

I took out the hangar deck because I got some new info on it and have been churning away on it ever since. Mostly I have been able to get the Jet Engine Shop (JES) done. There have been a myriad of other small details I added as well, but are not really important ones, just minor fixes that I was clued in on. Some might question the reasoning behind doing the JES, but I think showing closed up compartments is a very big waste of detail that could make the difference between a good kit and a truly tremendous kit, I also have a feeling we would need to show it for other reasons, so I am making sure anything that could be seen fom outside the ship is shown.

9/16/10

Sorry for not updating for a while, the side jobs Dragon asked me to do kept me busy for a week and a half. In this update you can see where I added the left sponson, the skeg, prop shafts and stern afterdeck area.

8/27/10

Updates are slowing down now, getting caught up in the dolldrums. Spent a lot of time on the elevators, more time than I expected. Had to re-do some stuff more than once, which slowed me down. I wasn't happy with that, but hey live and learn. I did add in all the major components that were missing, now it's down to detailing.

8/16/10

Well. Four days for the hull. I didn't have much smoothing to do this time, just had to make a lot of connectors between the waterplanes. The understructure for the flight deck is pretty tedious. Looks good once it is done though.

8/10/10

I had some issues with the height of the "beehive" and wanted to get opinions. Specifically look at the second and third images. It just appeared that the dimensions on the Book of General Plans for the beehive were just too tall. So I found an image with a good planer view of the island and put it in and sure neough it was too tall by about 30-40". The third image shows the after shot and the last two show the beehive compared to the image. Please let me know what you think.

8/7/10

I spent the majority of the last four days on the hull. Things are definitely going quicker than I thought they would be, though I am having a little more difficult with the hull than I normally do. I am trying to get the elevators to line up and it is proving to be a challenge. The island is nearly complete and should be done within another day or so of work. I also set up some cool cameras so I can make some interesting renders.

8/2/10

First update for new "Big E" project. I started this on the 29th so it has been about four days worth of work. I hope to have the superstructure completed within a few more days. The boss might be right, this might go a little quicker than I had thought.

This project will be of the USS Enterprise (CVAN-65) during the summer of 1969. I am glad we are able to do a beehive radar, this version of the Enterprise has always held a fascination for me.