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How Long Do Glues Hold A Kit Together Until It Fails ???

Mad-Modeller wrote:

And it's about time to do it again; it's been around two years. The ship itself only weighs around 15-20 pounds, but the base doubles its weight, and figuring out a way to crouch on the bed and lift it off the wall while kneeling on the mattress is always fun. Still, it has always had a lucky aspect about it despite its age, only bettered by the big "Romulan Advanced Bird-Of-Prey" which has so far fallen off the ceiling once, a bookshelf twice and a end table three times with only a couple of small cracks and paint chips to show for it. That monster, despite a near three-foot-wide wingspan, appears to be the damn toughest and luckiest thing I've ever built in my entire career. When it falls down everything it falls on is destroyed...but the damn ship is left intact. When it fell off of the ceiling the first time it went straight down onto my Radio Shack one foot diameter plasma sphere while it was running, made the thing implode with a noise like someone had set a grenade off in the room (my friend and I both dove for the floor; we thought someone had blown out the window with a shotgun) and neatly landed on its back, undamaged. So I stuck it up on a stand, and twice since the thing has fallen off of a bookcase from six feet up (and the end table thrice, but that's no big thing as it's rather like giving it a light tap as far as potential damage goes) and required a bit of supergluing to get cracks in the the wing pivot mechanism reattached to the warp nacelles, but other that that it's fine. If I have to take a Romulan Star Navy warship up against the Klingon Imperial Fleet, I can guarantee you it's going to be a Shandakar class Bird-Of-Prey. "Tactical! Damage to the enemy vessel!" "Six direct disruptor hits...three direct photon torpedo hits amidships." "Damage report!" "We have disabled one of its secondary disrupter batteries due to the detachment of the small Walmart green plastic ovoid cabochon that is its emitter crystal sir... I am also indicating minor chipping of the green metallic paint on its exterior." "Excellent! These Romulan pahtk shall soon know that it is like to defy the will of the Empire!" "Captain... it is now bringing the two large ovoid wingtip Walmart green plastic cabochons mounted on the Robotech knees and B-52 tire halves to bear...." "FULL SHIELDS!" :-)

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery
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Mad-Modeller wrote:

Did you ever notice there are "lucky" and "unlucky" models though? Some kits seem to be cursed, even though they should be straightforward to assemble and not particularly challenging. And even when finished, the bad luck hangs around them...if you are out of the room and hear a crash sound from somewhere in the model display area, you already have a pretty good idea of which one it is that fell. I lost two or three Airfix/MPC He-177's through fluky accidents after they were made. It was like the bad luck of the real aircraft stuck with the model of it in some way. The Romulan BOP on the other hand has got some weird good luck hanging around it. Maybe it's the old adage about how the bad guys seem to be almost impossible to kill. (I mean seriously...it gets stuck in a honest-to-God real plasma implosion and comes out almost unscathed? Who's down in engineering, the Romulan version of Scotty?) It was actually the second crack at building a model of that idea for a design; the first time around the metallic paint I used on its predecessor was Testors spray enamel, and when it was Dullcoted it caused the underlying paint to develop cracks. I have some JPGs of the new one if anyone wants to see what it looks like. It's a big flying dragonish looking thing that's considerably more streamlined than the Klingon BOP, but of around the same size in the "real" craft... the idea being that once the Klingon/Romulan alliance fell apart, they'd want something superior to the BOP design and technology they had given to the Klingons in case they got into a outright war with them. So the design reflects the Klingon style BOP, with the more streamlined look of the Romulan Warbird beginning to emerge. At rest on a planetary surface its wings outboard of the warp nacelles swing up ninety degrees to cut down on the storage and landing area it needs. It was tricky to do, but that works on the model.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

Them Romulans is tuff!

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr. ;)

Reply to
Mad-Modeller

sometime:

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I haven't seen one of those Aurora B-29s in around thirty years or more,

I'm guessing it was KAOS, not Spectre...

Craig

Reply to
crw59

Always interested in seeing fan designs.

Reply to
Jack Bohn

Hang on a day and I'll send you some JPGS.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

i always thought the klingons were deriviative, using other people's ideas and tech. they do indeed seem russian and while violent and militaristic, are still kind of f*ck-ups. the romulans are the ss in space, they'll kill your mother just for fun and exterminate a planet if you insult the grand gogul. (whatever the big stink was called.) where the klingons were having duels for "honor", the romulans were exterminationg planetary populations for a supply of cheap dilythium crystals. a kilingon would rape your sister; a romulan would eat her, alive, with no salt. i like the romulans, they're easy to to busines with.

Reply to
someone

post them in the pic group?

Reply to
someone

IIRC, 'Praetor' was the term.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Reply to
Mad-Modeller

To quote the book "The Making of Star Trek", the "Romulans are highly militaristic, aggressive by nature, ruthless in warfare, and do not take captives. The Star Empire is a dictatorship, with some similarities to the warrior-stoic philosophies of Earth's ancient Roman Empire."

I probably picked up the 'Praetor' title from one of the paperbacks I have. I know one author tried to change their name from Romulans to Rihannsu, based on the idea that 'Romulan' was the human appellation.

It's not in this book but somewhere I learned that the home system was dominated by binary stars named "Romulus" and "Remus".

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Reply to
Mad-Modeller

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two planets are what the bird is grabbing in its claws in their insignia:
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Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery
[Romulan Bird of Prey]

Got them, thanks. Interesting, it looks like you DIDN'T begin with the Klingon BoP kit. Maybe the wing, or is that also from something else?

Reply to
Jack Bohn

It's a Revell stealth bomber with the outer wing panels reversed:

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'd forgotten that the original kit was part of the "Birds Of Prey" series. :-)

Pat

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

Heh. Well, if anyone knows stealth... Are the "canards" from the F-19, then?

Reply to
Jack Bohn

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> I'd forgotten that the original kit was part of the "Birds Of Prey"

Those are the outer folding wing sections off of the Monogram "F-19" stealth fighter in 1/48 scale. For fun, see if you can figure out what they are attached to that makes up the basis of the forward bridge area of the ship. Here's a clue - Imperial Stormtroopers died on these by driving them straight into a tree. ;-)

Pat

Reply to
Pat Flannery

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