AMT/Round2 Excelsior / E-B Upgrade Neck Parts

[Griffworks]

A friend of mine, Bob Morgan, is a CAD parts drawing madman. He’s a big Trek, BSG, and US Navy fan. Like many of us, he gets disappointed by soft or lack of detail on a kit - but Bob’s in a position with his skill set to do something about it!

In fact, Bob’s made many different parts for ships, to include the Moebius Battlestar Pegasus kit, and several 1/1000 Trek kits, specifically the Excelsior / Enterprise-B, along with a few other kits. He has these available for purchase on Shapeways.

Shameless plug for Bob’s Starship Shop on Shapeways.

Most recently, Bob has been working with Tracy Mann on an old 1/537-ish Lunar Models Excelsior Kit, originally released in the late 1980’s. He’s sized many of the parts designed for Tracy for the AMT/R2 kits, with the most recent being some accurizing neck parts - or parts to add to the old original AMT kits, as they have a “naked” rectangular “hole”.

Anyhow, Bob sent me a review sample of his parts for that section of the ship. The parts arrived late yesterday and I finally got them ready, then installed late today. I washed the parts in warm soapy water and used an old toothbrush to clean off any residual casting process yuck.

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Parts printed in FUD (Frosted Ultra Detail) before cleaning. Hard to make out any details....

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With Tamiya primer so we can see the fine details.

I then built an older neck piece I had in my Excelsior graveyard.

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Definitely not a drop-in part!

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Once assembled, I used an xacto blade to scribe the inner dimensions of one of the rectangular cutout sections, hand-drilled a hole in the center, then cut out the excess plastic with the xacto. I then used some jewelers files to square off the holes, all while test fitting the printed parts. Once I had the shape where I wanted, I installed them.

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Next, I built up another neck to use as comparison, using Tamiya primer to better show the details. This neck is from the new Round2 Excelsior kit.

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I think they look great and plan to buy several more sets of them.

[holt35]

They do look great but it's to bad he couldn't make them for the aftermarket neck they sell at SSM. I picked up his Excelsior NX parts for my build and they are also great I won't build another one without them.

[Griffworks]

You can still use the parts for the resin neck. Just carefully dremel out the hole to make it deeper. Or, very carefully cut or sand down the “back” of the part. That’s what I intend to do with the two resin necks I own.

[holt35]

You can still use the parts for the resin neck. Just carefully dremel out the hole to make it deeper. Or, very carefully cut or sand down the “back” of the part. That’s what I intend to do with the two resin necks I own.

I feel like you will lose to much detail. I've use the ones from DLM and the kit on the resin neck and I can tell you they have to be cut down a lot. as for trying to make the holes on the neck bigger I wouldn't even try it, those resin necks aren't cheep.

[Griffworks]

Alrighty then.