Okay, I know it's been a while, lol! But I finally got the main hold finished!!
The biggest problem as I've noted in this thread has been the time it takes Shapeways to print parts as well as their expense. My income is limited, and I have had to spread out ordering parts over several months. But I got the damn thing done and now I can move on to MUCH quicker modeling! I'm also happy to have it done because these parts are so delicate that having them as separate parts really left them vulnerable to damage. However, as a single unit they're much more durable. But enough about that, let's get into the build process!
As a reminder of where I started, this is the main hold before I put my build on... hold:
As you can see, I'd intended originally to just replace the floor in order to get the grating, but thought it would be sufficient to save money by detailing the walls as they come in the kit. But after drooling over pictures of DoubleFire's parts on Shapeways, I decided to drop this idea and just get the fully-detailed parts from his store. They are accurate to the set blueprints, and contain details I couldn't hope to replicate precisely, and I want this to be as close to the full size set as possible.
One area where I did save money though was in molding the floor grating in order to cast copies of it for other areas of the ship. This came in handy later in the main hold, which I'll get to shortly.
One of the first parts from DoubleFire I got was the starboard hold wall, which I used as a paint test part. The base coat was Rustoleum X2 Flat Black Primer, followed by a coat of Rustoleum Slate Gray. After this, I painted the raised details MM Magnesium Buffable Metalizer, and MM Sand for the door alcove padding. This was followed by lightening some of the areas with Dark Ghost Gray, and then dabbing on some Burnt Sienna oil paint for rust. Then I did a wash of black and spattered black lightly over the whole piece.
Since this proved effective, I copied this paint scheme across the board as each new piece of the main hold arrived from Shapeways: the forward wall, starboard wall, lounge, and aft wall. I also painted the floor like this.
The circuitry bay received some special modifications. This isn't a DoubleFire part, and as it comes from Shapeways it doesn't fit with the portside concentric corridor because it follows the official blueprint (which is slightly out of sync with DeAgostini's floorplan). I had to cut it down and reshape the backside in order to get it to fit.
Then it was time to add lights! I began with the lounge, threading in fiber optics into the back of the seat. The DoubleFire parts only had the biggest lights pre-drilled, so I had to drill additional holes for the smaller lights. I also added bright white LEDs behind the lights above the seat and to the back wall of the bunk. It's hard to tell from the photograph, but the holochess table has two kinds of metallic paint. The body is painted straight silver, but the playing surface is painted gloss black and chrome. It's more apparent if you tilt the model, but it's a subtle detail that someone will notice in person if they're looking for it.
Next I began working on the maintenance pits. I could have bought parts from Shapeways, but I was tired of waiting on them to print me stuff, plus I was in the mood to do some greebling, so I decided to scratchbuild them. I sketched out a rough plan after looking at stills from The Empire Strikes Back, then built two boxes to sit under the holes in the floor. I then glued on bits from my parts bins, trying to mimic the detail on the walls visible in the film as closely as possible. The rest of the walls were detailed as I wished, and I had a blast just adding parts and making tons of tiny details! Also, remember where I said earlier that I molded the floor grating? I cast a few copies and used them in the floor of the pits, since you can see that they are made from the same industrial pallets as the hold floor when you look into them in the film. After assembly, I painted them similarly to the main hold, but cranking up the amount of grime as these areas look
very dirty in the film. I also installed LEDs to illuminate them before gluing them into the floor of the main hold.
Now that most of the construction was done, it was time to start working on the electronics for the navicomputer's lights. Hoo boy, this was an interesting challenge! Some might start with an Arduino, but I'm old school and love simple analog circuitry.
So I designed this circuit around a 555 timer, a 4017 decade counter, an array of transistors for switching, and a diode array to randomize the outputs to 24 LEDs. It took a while to iron out the bugs in this design. To begin with, I was using 1N4004 diodes, which worked okay on the breadboard, but after installing were so prone to failure due to poor connections that I just abandoned them. Then I found diode arrays that were perfect: low-impedance signal diodes that would allow me to direct the current wherever I needed it! I just needed to wire them up so the signals from the transistors would activate only the LEDs I wanted.
This was accomplished by first creating an animated gif of the navicomputer so I could plan out the blink patterns of the lights on its front panels. I didn't want it to be a crazy, attention-grabbing thing; just a subtle animation that you'd notice if you looked at it. I then made a spreadsheet to track which lights were on in each frame of the animation, and from there I used that to wire together each diode array. I probably made a mistake here or there in how I wired it, but it was close enough that I didn't care.
After it was all wired together, I plugged it into power and it worked beautifully!!