Love, hate and the AMT Enterprise model

[jayrath]

I built I don't know how many of these as a kid. My first two kits still included the upper and lower dome lights. Two years ago I got bought one of those unassembled light-up kits on eBay, and I adore it. Like any good starship, its double-A batteries instantly transport me in time and space (back to the late 1960s). The whole upper hull glows, as does the dish. This was "my" Enterprise, when I was nine and went to bed at 8 p.m.

Unfortunately, as everyone who ever tried to build it knows, the damn thing breaks if you look at it cross-eyed. Older and wiser, I keep my throwback model on a bookshelf in a styrofoam cradle!

I'd welcome memories of any other early TOSers and our shared, maddening experiences with the various early AMT models.

[TREK_GOD_1]

The memories! I had my 1st Enterprise in the early 70s, when it was packaged in a long box (long after the lighting kit was no longer an option), and I tried so hard to match the paint scheme from the box photo, instead of the studio miniature! When looking at the decal sheet, and reading all of the alternate starship names one could use, it made me dream of having an additional two or three kits to make a Constellation and Exeter, but *sigh* no such luck!

[Christopher]

TREK_GOD_1 wrote:

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The memories! I had my 1st Enterprise in the early 70s, when it was packaged in a long box (long after the lighting kit was no longer an option), and I tried so hard to match the paint scheme from the box photo, instead of the studio miniature!

That wasn't the box photo that made it look mostly blue with a yellow light across the front, was it? When I put mine together as a kid, I followed that literally, actually painting parts of it yellow and the rest blue. I don't know what I was thinking.

[TREK_GOD_1]

Christopher wrote:

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That wasn't the box photo that made it look mostly blue with a yellow light across the front, was it?

Yep! Light blue, with yellow highlight across the edge of the saucer (I'm guessing that was supposed to be the reflection of sunlight)

When I put mine together as a kid, I followed that literally, actually painting parts of it yellow and the rest blue. I don't know what I was thinking.

I think a lot of people followed the box as the guide--especially if they did not have a lot of photo references at the time. Its funny--despite the series' nacelle caps pulsating with the spinning effect, I preferred the caps to be red like the box!

[Christopher]

I hadn't seen the show in color at the time, so I didn't have any other referents beyond what was on the box. Well, that and the cover image on The Making of Star Trek -- I think I had some doubts about which one to go with, but I ended up going with the box art for whatever reason. I have a vague recollection of discussing the choice with my father, maybe, but I don't remember which of us was advocating which option.

[jayrath]

Never saw the spinning effect on original broadcast TV. It just sparkled (as we spun the TV nob to get better reception). And yes, there were no other color cues at all from the time, except the cover of TMoST.

Besides the floppy nacelles, the main challenge was splitting the decals on the secondary hull, to replace the batteries.

[Christopher]

Mine didn't have any lights or batteries.

[Melakon]

My first Enterprise was in the first release I think, it had the little grain of wheat bulbs in it. I was never successful at hanging it from the ceiling though in those days, I couldn't figure out how to make a successful thread cradle to avoid gluing thread to it. In the late 70s, I built another one to use in a window display of a record store (for you youngsters, that's where we used to buy music in the olden days) when Jefferson Airplane's Starship album was released. And one time, I took the little Enterprise from one of those 3-Ship Sets and turned it into a battle scarred Constellation.

[TREK_GOD_1]

Christopher wrote:

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I hadn't seen the show in color at the time, so I didn't have any other referents beyond what was on the box. Well, that and the cover image on The Making of Star Trek -- I think I had some doubts about which one to go with, but I ended up going with the box art for whatever reason. I have a vague recollection of discussing the choice with my father, maybe, but I don't remember which of us was advocating which option.

That sounds like my experience. I had The Making of Star Trek, and later, The World of Star Trek, but for some reason, I thought the box photo was "just right."

I think my mind changed once seeing larger color photos of the ship in the ST Poster Books a few years later. Why that convinced me when the paperback covers did not is mystery I cannot explain!

[Christopher]

I think my reasoning was that I expected the box art on model kits to be a guide to what they were supposed to look like. I saw them as instructions to be followed as much as the booklets on the inside.

I never had that much luck with model kits. I remember doing a decent job with a C-3PO kit and a Darth Vader TIE Fighter kit years later, but otherwise not so much. I got kits of the Enterprise-A and -D and of the War of the Worlds Martian War Machine with the expectation that my best friend would help me assemble them, but he turned out to be kind of a flake and never got around to helping, so they just sat unassembled in my closet for years until I finally got rid of them. I did get that snap-together 3-ship set and applied the decals rather crudely, but I left them unpainted, and they didn't hold up very well.

[scotpens]

I built my first Enterprise model kit when I was 13. It was the original 1967 release with the godawful stirrup-and-retainer attachment for the nacelle struts. There was no way in hell to build that thing according to the instructions and not have the nacelles droop. I ended up tying a piece of thread between the engines to get them to line up more or less straight.

The mid-1970s re-tooling solved that problem -- but introduced even more inaccuracies than the original had!

[Elder Knight]

I assembled a kit for my son many years ago. That design was never meant to stand up in a gravitational field! I ended up filling the hull with foam and using metal supports inside the pylons to keep them from falling off.

[TREK_GOD_1]

Elder Knight wrote:

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I assembled a kit for my son many years ago. That design was never meant to stand up in a gravitational field! I ended up filling the hull with foam and using metal supports inside the pylons to keep them from falling off.

I wish someone told me about that back in the day.

Somehow, I think if my "E" was that stable, I would have played with it to the point of fingerprint oil destroying the decals.

[Redfern]

My first kit (purchased in late 1972, maybe early '73) was the long box and the kit itself had the "loop" and "peg" approach to attach the nacelles. The light kit had been phased out by the time of this release. I didn't paint anything other than the engine domes and the main "dish", and like so many other kids, I used Testors red. I may have painted the back part of that dome piece black because the box art suggested it was dark.

About a year or two later I bought a second kit. It was still in the long box, but AMT changed the nacelle attachment method. A semi-circular piece aligned with the holes where the pylons fitted. Both the semi-circle piece and the pylon "tabs" had slots that fit each other at 90 degree angles. This provided a bit more stability. Ironically, that semi-circular piece was positioned more or less where the bulkhead of the shuttle bay would in the "real" ship. So I didn't glue the clamshell doors. Instead, I drew the deck detail of the shuttle bay (based upon the Franz Joseph plans) onto card stock and glued the trimmed paper to the model.

The previous kit? I lit a match and strategically torched sections, turning it into the wrecked Constellation.

Sincerely,

Bill

[Forbin]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKWSPunar3w

(Yeah, I know it's too long. But I was, like, 18 when I made it).