When I was a kid, my dad took me to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The year would have been 1979 or 1980. As a twelve-year-old, I didn’t much care about the story but was dazzled by the special effects, especially the way the Enterprise looked on screen. It looked like a real ship filled with people on a grand adventure. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to build a model of the thing but the kits of the time were junk. Eventually, a company called Polar Lights produced a wonderful kit of this fictional vehicle in 1/350 scale. That meant the model would be huge, nearly three feet long. That’s what I’m talking about! I bought it and, ironically, it languished in my stash until I got in the mood to deal with it. The build was straight forward; it was the electronics that added excitement. I used 50 LEDs from Evan Designs, an excellent company dedicated to the lighting needs of scale modelers. I completed the model in 2023 after nearly two years of work. I didn’t care about making the model look like the Enterprise depicted in the film and I wanted to avoid making the result look like a toy. I think I got it just right.
