Amazing work, the engines look fantastic... are you going to find tiny figures to put in inside the bridge?

Yep! Can't have my starship go into battle without her crew, can I?

Man, I love this! Awesome work, I'd never try it myself but its cool to see someone pull it off.

He bent my wookiee..

Looking good so far look forward to seeing the finished product.

Once again MF amazes us with his abilities. My corvette now looks like a pile of junk sitting on my table comparatively. I also kinda cringed seeing led's directly to the battery.

Yep! Can't have my starship go into battle without her crew, can I?

I have some of the micro machine miniature figures I would gladly donate to you for the project. A little out of scale but not terrible.

Oh wow

Yep! Can't have my starship go into battle without her crew, can I?

I have some of the micro machine miniature figures I would gladly donate to you for the project. A little out of scale but not terrible.

They're actually twice the size they should be. If I built the corridors to scale, the micromachines would be scraping the ceiling at least. I'm just going to modify some small photoetch 1:350 figures and carve them down somewhat to get them small enough to work. Alternatively I think there are some 1:500 figures that won't look out of place.

Got my LEDs in the mail today to start my CR90 lighting project, too!

I love all of this.

That is really amazing work.

crazy cool work with the lights

Thanks for all the replies. They really help me "stay on target", which means I'm probably going to pull out and get shot by Vader.

So, yeah . . .

Anyway, here's where I am so far with this beast. There aren't many progress pics because the engines are all the same and I didn't want to post five more sets of pretty much the same thing over and over.

First of all, someone disassembling this might be interested in knowing where the pins are in the engines:

It's not glued together, by the way. Just pop the halves apart at the seams. However, I found it faster to simply roll up some 3/4" sections of aluminum tape sticky side out (avoiding sticking it to itself, of course), inserting it into the engine, and then burnishing all the edges together to create a light-proof seal.

After all the engines were assembled and light tests done, I began final assembly of the engine block. First I glued the lower center engines in place:

Then I glued in the center block of engines:

When the welded seam in that section was mostly set, I welded the outer engine sections together:

Finally I glued in the top engine block:

Here's a test of the engine block:

Yeah, it's not very bright. Low-amp testing battery, remember? Anyway, I'm going to develop a circuit board for it when I calculate the current draw of each cluster and find an appropriate rechargeable battery that will fit in the hull.

That's straight up gorgeous.

Wow... so jelly... that thing is sweet.

This is so full of Win.

Thanks, guys!

You so crazy MF!

I can't wait to see the completed bridge, engines look great btw.

This project is fantastic! Can't wait to see how it turns out.

I wouldn't be surprised if people start throwing money at you to do theirs too, Falsehood. You're a great craftsman.

Well, I certainly would be happy to accept commissions to do this. I already have one under my belt (or rather, will have one under my belt) that I can use to figure out how long it will take and thus judge the amount of money it will cost. It would be kind of expensive, though. Just a fair warning.

Don't worry, I'm just using a button cell for testing the lights. It has extremely low amperage, so it won't fry LEDs. It's designed to be hooked directly to the leads of an LED without destroying it. I'll be calculating the proper resistance using Ohm's Law when it comes time for that and then hook up the proper resistors to each circuit.

"extremely low amperage"

*cringe* Sorry, electrical engineering reflex reaction. What battery voltage will you be using? It's a voltage source, so the output current amperage will be I = V/R. If you short the terminals then the current will be limited by the battery's internal resistance. "extremely low amperage" in that case, or putting the LED directly across the battery, is very relative.

I = ( V _S - V _f ) / ( R _S + R _ext )

(Edit: assuming a single battery / LED and V _S > V _f ).

I look forward to seeing pictures!

Voltage is stated as 3.6v, with 110mAh, so it's meant for really low-amperage applications, like testing small circuits and powering LEDs with no inline resistors. If you've seen tealight candle circuits, you'd know this is fairly routine for these kinds of batteries. I'd never hook up larger cells like AAs directly to LEDs (I learned the hard way not to do that when I fried a lighting circuit on my 1:35 X-wing once while testing it).

I can't wait to post my fully lit corvette with repaint! i Dont wanna take your steam, will wait till your done! Great work man!