AMT's 1:537 Refit - The Flawed Legend

Comments · 315

• AR

  @ArthurPendragon1974 · 4 days ago (edited)

  Hi. At 25m41s  and 39m30s, these are my models!  I am "Arthur Pendragon ", the guy who made all the corrections at the "AMT Refit" model at Starship Modeler article. Thanks for using it as a reference. Not only the docking ports need to be corrected, but the viewports too, and lots of small details. But anyone can get a good representation of the USS Enterprise. It only need work.

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• LA

  @laughingskulls · 4 days ago

  I was never so caught up in accuracy as I was in sheer delight at just being able to see that ship sitting on my desk.

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• ED

  @edumaker-alexgibson · 2 days ago

  I absolutely count The Animated Series.  Wonderful to see characters from it in Strange New Worlds.

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• AL

  @AllClawsandTeeth · 3 days ago (edited)

  I actually bought the originally released kit back in 1979. I wasn't the best model builder back then but it came out decent. It's long gone now. But after watching the video I would like to take it on as I've gotten much better at the craft. Thanks for posting.

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• SC

  @scifi_shipyards · 3 days ago (edited)

  I was gifted the Star Trek VI AMT Enterprise-A kit for Christmas in 1992. That and the AMT Excelsior were two of my all time favourite gifts I ever received. Very happy memories constructing, painting and mounting them. I do remember the nacelles on the Enterprise-A having some issues with sagging, but otherwise it was a fantastic kit. I just remember being wowed by the sheer size of it -  and indeed, slightly underwhelmed by how tiny the AMT Excelsior was by comparison, especially since it was meant to be a much bigger ship than the Enterprise in-universe.

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• MI

  @michaelmiller3012 · 2 days ago

  About 5 years ago now, I built and painted a Round 2 1:537 Enterprise for my foster father for Christmas and I will never forget it. During early summer, I bought the aftermarket frosted resin deflector for the kit as my only aftermarket concession and got started. Despite not having a light kit, with some careful painting of the interior assembly with some highly reflective paint, that deflector caught ambient light pretty well for the glow effect.<br><br>Knowing that the nacelles are infamous for sagging on this model, decided to build the strongback with the pylons first. I superglued the strongback halves together and used 1 inch sections of a big, thick zip tie (stiff plastic) and &quot;green stuff&quot; model putty to reinforce the pylon/strongback junctions on the inside and plastic model putty on the outside to fill the gaps where they joined. After drying, the strongback and pylons were effectively a single strong piece and I felt really pleased with myself for how clever I had been (foreshadowing). I carefully sanded and primed the parts and set them aside for later, working on the saucer, secondary hull, and nacelles for a while -- well, a couple of months, actually.<br><br>While in the process of doing the final assembly of the model (putting the strongback and nacelles on last) disaster struck. I discovered that I had misaligned the pylons so that when they were installed as intended in the model, the nacelles were angled about 15 degrees inwards relative to the saucer. There was no way I could break the pylons from the strongback without completely destroying those parts. They were VERY solid so, in a way, mission accomplished? I was so upset that I had done all that work for nothing that I had to step away for a couple of hours.<br><br>I came back determined to fix it, and what I ultimately did was remove the two tabs on the back of the secondary hull that the strongback attaches to. Then I lay the model top-down on the desk and aligned the nacelles properly (pushing the back-sides of the strongback inside the secondary hull -- this left huge gaps at the back of the strongback where it joined the secondary hull, with the top-central ridgeline on the strongback sitting about a full 1/4 inch up over where it is supposed to join the ridgeline on the secondary hull), and then used superglue to &quot;pin&quot; the strongback to the secondary hull. I had to hold the model like this for several minutes to give the glue time to hold it because as you can imagine, there was quite a bit of stress on the strongback since it was effectively &quot;pinched in&quot; at the back but not the front by the deflector dish. After the glue had fully dried I applied a metric crap-ton of &quot;green stuff&quot; to fill in the gaps and then topped that with some regular plastic model putty for easier detail work. After giving that a solid week to dry, then came another two months of careful filing, sanding and shaping that included etching in new hull lines and creating a new section of of the ridgeline from scratch. I ultimately managed to finish the build entirely (build, paint, decal, clear coat) in the first week of December. Now the only tell this ever happened is that the ridgeline has a smooth, gentle curve where the strongback joins the secondary hull that does not even look out of place. <br><br>I certainly learned a lot building this kit, and I&apos;m glad I didn&apos;t just give up and chuck it. The model looks fantastic - I painted the round base blue with some land masses on it and used cotton balls to make clouds and the shuttlecraft is mounted to it like it&apos;s returning to the ship (this had the benefit of making the scale problem of the shuttlecraft not so noticeable). He was happy with it and I am immensely proud of my work.

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• ST

  @Stansman63 · 1 day ago

  I remember getting the original release of this back in the early 80&apos;s, reflective stickers, a sleek new design, lights, it was all very exciting even before I had seen the movie.

• ST

  @StarfleetGrad · 4 days ago

  I am watching this for a second time on a different account to made sure you get as many &quot;likes&quot; and views as possible. Just excellent presentation. I built the Wrath of Khan version when it came out. It was wrecked when it was packed away when I left home. I ended up building at least 3 or 4 of the &quot;Lights &amp; Sound&quot; kits. The Air &amp; Space Museum asked our local IPMS Club to build all of the Star Trek Kits for a display in the Gift Shop for the Star Trek 25th Anniversary Gallery. I built 2 of them at the same time, one for the Museum out of the box as instructed, and one for me with resin upgrade sets for the Shuttle Bay, Botanical Gardens, and VIP Lounge, added Fiber Optics for the Lower Hull and Model RR lighting kit for passenger cars &nbsp;to light those and the shuttle bay in addition to the kit lights. Used the Aztec pattern from a Fine Scale Modeler to paint it with the recommended paint mixes. All of the members got their kits back but me. I got a nice letter telling me it was now sitting on a desk in the offices in NASM. My build was displayed in my Hobby Shop and a customer just had to have it. So I built another in exchange for TNG Promotional items from the TV station he worked for. I think I did one more, I don&apos;t remember for who. I did get a case of these kits before they disappeared from production and have one left (6 in a case) which is why I think I built at least 4 +1 for NASM. Still have my detailed build in my cabinet but the lights are long burned out. I have all of the releases in my collection- and all of the AMT &amp; AMT/Ertl Star Trek kits as a matter of fact.

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• TO

  @tonydicker8961 · 2 days ago

  I had the Star Trek 6 version as a kid and I remember flying it around after watching search for Spock pretending it was inside a starbase until a pylon came out and it was impossible to glue back in.

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• DA

  @danmccann8813 · 2 days ago

  ​ I can remember building that original refit soon after the movie came out, when I was 16. I was excited about the lighting kit. I was impressed with the rub-on decals but yes the were fragile and didn&apos;t lend well to going on over complex curves. The lighting kit was underwhelming with only bulbs for the window sections around the edges of the saucer, and I had to learn for myself about light-blocking, the hard way. &nbsp;I think I took that saucer apart 3 separate times. Added lights, made my own brackets for lighting of the deflector dish, lower sensor dome &amp; spotlights, and bridge dome &amp; B/C spotlights. Ended up also removing some of the decals, and painting in all the details I could. Also got rid of flashy stickers and painted the grills on the nacells. &nbsp;I wish I could find the parts. Had given it to my son and after about the 4th time of it getting broken, (usually from a move) it got thrown in a box and may have gotten thrown out. I think I&apos;ve already been on a 5 year journey building a 1:350 with lofty goals and taking my time.

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• KE

  @kennethlee494 · 4 days ago

  I have the 25 th anniversery lights and sound kit, I spent about 9 hours spread over 4 or 5 nights carefully sanding away that texturing done to the hull, successfully converting it back into a smoothie version of the kit. I carved in the missing hatches on the lower hull and reworked the deflector dish to be a little more accurate. I also opened up the arboretum windows and added a set of accurate rec dec windows on the aft saucer rim. I spent weeks carefully painting on what I thought at the time was an accurate hull plating pattern using 5 different shades of very light blue paint. With my eventual access to the internet in 1999 I saw how far I missed the mark with my carefully applied painting. I keep saying that one day I will repaint it accurately but I am fast running out of &quot;one days&quot;.

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• NI

  @NickPoeschek · 1 day ago

  This was a great video. The first Trek movie I saw in the theatre was Star Trek IV and a few years later, got the Star Trek V version of this kit. I think 10 year old me did a pretty decent job, especially in masking the black grills on the warp nacelles and painting the deflector dish the right shade of blue. At least to my eyes based on the colour reference of a VHS copy of the movie played on a a budget CRT TV. I worked pretty hard on it and was beyond upset when the nacelles began to droop very significantly. I think I bumped the dresser it sat on top of and one of the pylons just broke off, which was well beyond my ability to repair at that time. I have the recent reissue in my model backlog to redeem myself.

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