U.S.S. Atlantis - Finishing (part 1), Final primer coat.

Back in step 8.5, I mentioned that I was not happy with the primer I chose due to the fact that it did not fill the body tube seems and was not very sandable. Well, while shopping at AutoZone the other day I came across this stuff by DupliColor. It touts itself as "High Build" and sandable, so I thought I would take one more crack at getting rid of those tube lines.

I must say I like the results I got with this primer alot better than the Rustoleum I used earlier. True to it's claim, it went on thick, and sanded like a dream. In the following pictures you can see quite a bit of improvement.

The tube lines are gone!

And as a final step before the color coat, I wet sanded the entire model to a very smooth "sheen". Then I wiped down the whole model with a damp paper towel to remove all the primer dust.

Now she's ready for paint. But first, lets go back and finish up that antennae assembly.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 18 (part 2 of 2), Attaching cardstock bridge pieces to the main deck piece.

In this step we will assemble the bridge detail piece from the two cardstock discs provided and then attach it to the main deck.

First it's a good idea to trim up the discs as they will have small "burrs" where the were attached to the cardstock sheet. I didn't note this in step 18 part 1 but I like to use a single edge razor blade for this task as it is even sharper than a hobby knife. Just be very careful! In the above pic I have cleaned up the edges and we are ready to glue the two discs together.

As mentioned in part 1, these cardstock discs have a wax coating to make them shine a little and we want to scrape that off to give us a better glue joint.

So now we have the bridge pieces glued together and ready to attach to the main deck.

According to the instructions, the bridge is located 7" from the aft end of the main body tube which is 6.75" from rear edge of the main deck piece. So we mark the main deck piece where the bridge is to be glued on.

Next, I removed the layers of primer all the way down to the bare wood to ensure a strong glue joint. I used the two part epoxy in this step to give me a few seconds to ensure everything was exactly centered.

And there we have it... Now our bridge is securely glued down and we are ready for our next step which is applying a final coat of primer and sanding to a smooth shine in preperation for the gloss white color coat.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 18 (part 1 of 2), Attaching cardstock end caps to the warp drive tubes

Now we will do the first part of step 18 which attaches the cardstock end caps to the warp drive tubes. The second part will deal with attaching the cardstock disks for the bridge on the main deck piece, which we will cover in step 18 part 2.

These cardstock pieces have a wax coating on one side to give them a slight "shine" but that can interfere with a good glue joint, and since we are going to be glueing another piece on top the discs on the front of the warp tubes, I decided to "scuff" the surface of the two front discs. In this picture you can see the difference of before and after "scuffing". Be sure not to over do it; we just want a good glue joint

Here we see one of the rear discs attached. One other thing I did was to dab a little CA glue around the edges of the disc to seal it and also harden it for sanding. I had to sand the edges of the discs a little to eliminate a couple of areas of overhang.

Here we have all of the discs attached. Next up, attaching the cardstock discs for the bridge to the main deck piece.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 14 (part 1 of 2), Assembling the Antenna Dish

In this step we begin assembly of the antenna dish. I am going to make a slight "improvement" to the kit here. The original kit design (as can be seen in the instruction illustration above) simply sandwiches the antenna dowel between two cardstock pieces. I am going to do that also, but then I want to add some small balsa "filler" pieces to give the assembly a more solid appearance.

I just cut a balsa piece that would match the open space between the two cardstock pieces and then cut a gap where the antenna dowel lays in between.

Here is the completed assembly, ready for primer. If you do this it's obviously important to make sure that the angle of your filler piece matches the front angle of the fin that this attaches to. We will return to this step later and finish attaching the antenna dowel and dish piece and then attach the whole thing to the rocket. Next Up is starting on step 18 which attaches the cardstock endcaps to the ends of the warp drive tubes.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 16 (part 2 of 2), Attaching dowel details to the warp drive tubes

Now that we have our warp drive tubes attached we can return to step 16 and finish attaching the dowel detail pieces that we postponed. The reason we didn't want to attach them prior to attaching the warp drive tubes is seen in the above picture. Since the dowel piece lays right up against the support pylon, it's now a very easy attachment.

I also postponed, until now, attaching the the dowel piece that sits on the fin simply because, the less things that were in the way when attaching the warp tubes, the better. Here we finally have our fin dowel attached. I chose to make the dowel the length shown in the instructions, though many people chose to make it slightly longer so that the rocket will stand up on the warp tubes and the fin dowel. Mine will be going on a custom stand that I will make as part of this blog, so I kept the fin dowel "stock". Next up, we go back and begin step 14 - Assembling the antenna dish.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 13, Attaching the warp drive tubes...

OK, so it's finally time to attach the warp drive tubes. This is the last major construction step before we start painting and finishing (remember we are going to wait to attach the main deck piece after painting).

The trick here is to get them on STRAIGHT! I decided to go back to the 5 minute epoxy for this step since it will give me those few seconds of adjustment time after it begins to really "stick" but before it fully cures. This proved to be critical as it was a bit tricky to make sure everything was aligned. I wouuld not have wanted to try and do it in the 2-3 seconds you get with CA glue. As can be seen in the above photo, after the epoxy set, I laid down a fillet of CA to "lock" it in.

Here you can see both pylons attached. I didn't get a good picture of it but I also applied a fillet of epoxy to the pylon/tube joint over top of the CA fillet similar to the one between the pylon and main tube as shown in step 9. Next we will return to step 16 and attach the remainder of the dowel pieces to the warp engines and tail fin.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 17.5, Increasing the glueing surface area for the warp drive end cap pieces

In an upcoming step we will be glueing cap pieces onto the ends of the warp drive tubes. It occured to me that if we placed engine blocks just inside the tubes at both ends, we would increase the surface area for those caps to glue onto.

Here we see the engine block glued in place and the increased surface area for glueing the end cap pieces on. Next up, we finally attach the warp engines!

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 17, Attaching cardstock panel details to the warp drive tubes

In this step we attach the little cardstock panel details to the warp drive tubes. I think these add a lot to the overall appearance of the warp engines, and they are extremely easy to glue on.

As in previous steps dealing with the attachment of small details, I'm using CA glue due to it's quick drying properties and good adhearance for paper to paper joints. In the above picture we've just attached the rear panel pieces.

Since we masked these panel areas off when we primered the tubes there is good paper to paper contact for the glue joint. When attaching these front panel details, their is an additional marking guide to align them symetrically with the support pylons.

And here we see the forward panels all attached. The next step is another one that is not in the kit instructions, but will make attaching the end pieces onto the warp tubes a lot easier with that time comes.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 16 (part 1 of 2), Attaching dowel details to the warp drive tubes

In this step we will cut our dowel pieces to length and attach the two short dowels that go towards the rear of each warp drive tube.

Since the other dowel piece rests against the support pylon, we will wait until after we attach the warp drive tubes to the pylon support before we attach it. This will ensure it is properly aligned with the support. We will also postpone attaching the dowel detail to the main fin. Next up, attach the cardstock panel details to the warp drives.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 12, Attaching the lower deck pieces...

In this step we will attach the lower deck pieces to the to their dowel supports.

One thing that I did not get a good picture of is that it's helpful when glueing a flat edged piece to a round surface to sand the flat edge to the contour of the round piece. In the above pic we see the left lower deck attached.

Now the right... One thing to make note of is that I again used CA glue for this step rather than the epoxy. It was just easier, especially if you contour sand the edges of the lower deck pieces. Make sure to check that they are straight as shown in the instruction illustration picture above. Even CA glue gives you about 5 sec of "wiggle" time which should be sufficient to make sure the pieces are on straight and true.

And that's it. We have a completed lower deck. Note that I chose not to create "fillets" here. I think the deck attachments look sharper when you see the joint between the dowel and the lower deck piece. From here on out we will be jumping around quite a bit in the step order. This is simply builder's choice for ease of painting and glueing on of small details. Our next step will be steps will be 16 and 17 which involve attaching details to the warp drive tubes.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 11.5, Masking and primering the warp drive tubes.

This is another extra step very similar to step 8.5 (part 3). All we are doing here is masking off the tube where glue joints will be and then primering the tube with 3 to 4 coats of grey primer.

Here we see that our tube is masked and ready for the primer coats.

When the primer is dry we can remove the masking tape and we are ready to glue on some of the detail parts. Next up is attaching the lower deck detail pieces to the main body tube.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 11, Marking the warp drive tubes.

This step is very simple and straight forward. All we are doing is marking up the tubes for the warp drives. The only trick here is that the direction of the marking guide is critical in order to get the details properly located on the left and right warp drives.

As you can see in the photo the "L" and "R" on the marking guide indicate which tube you are working on. For the left tube, the "L" is oriented to the rear, for the right tube the "R" is oriented to the rear. In this picture, we are marking the right tube.

Since these tubes are a bit small, I propped them up on a CD jewell case in order to make use of the door jam for marking the straight lines on the tubes.

Ok, so now our lines are drawn and labeled and we're ready for masking and painting just like we did for the main fuselage.

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 10, Attaching dowel details to main body tube

In this step, we are simply attaching some decorative detail pieces in the form of dowels to the main body tube. These details serve no aerodynamic purpose (in fact they actually create more drag) but they do give the model a more "sci-fi" look.

In the above picture, you can see one of the dowels that lays against the pylon support as well as one of the forward dowels already attached, and we are preparing to attach the other forward dowel in the area that was masked off from the primer to allow a direct paper to wood glue joint with no paint interference.

Also, I should mention that for this step, I chose not to use epoxy but instead chose to use CA glue. This is due to the fact that I don't want to fillet these dowel details and CA glue will provide a stronger paper to wood joint for the smaller surface area of the dowel to tube joint.

A foam cradle as seen in the above picture can be helpful in gently holding your rocket when adding details. This one is actaully designed to hold N-scale railroad cars and locomotives. Larger ones are also availabe at any model railroad store.

Step 10 complete! In step 11, we begin work on the warp drive tubes...

U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 9, Attaching pylon supports and fin

In this step will finally start glueing things together to make a rocket! Although the pylon supports and tail fin are different shapes the design calls for them to be equally spaced around the main body tube in the same way standard fins would be on a conventional rocket.

Above you can see that we have the main fin and 1 pylon support attached and are getting ready to attach the 2nd pylon support. I used a three step glueing process here. First I used epoxy to tack the fin on and get it precisely positioned.

Next, I applied a thin fillet of CA glue using an accellator to set the CA instantly. In the above picture you see that the pylon support has the CA fillet applied.

After sanding the CA fillet reasonable smooth (it doesn't have to be perfect) I apply an Epoxy fillet over the CA fillet. The epoxy fillet is smooth and will look better and be more aerodynamic than the CA fillet.

Here you can see the difference between the CA fillet (left) and the epoxy fillet (right) when held up to the light.

Finally, we "scuff up" the epoxy fillet with a coarse grade sandpaper so that it will better accept the final primer coat(s).

So here we have the pylon supports and the main fin firmly attached and the fillets applied and sanded (scuffed). Note that we did not apply epoxy fillets to one side of the pylon supports due to the fact that there is a dowel that sits flush against them. In our next step we will continue glueing detail parts onto the main body tube.