This past week the Jupiter 2 was fully assembled and completed! With all the electronics mounted I assembled the interior walls and details. This went together very well and quicker than I estimated. Installing the ceiling was a little tricky as the instructions recommend not gluing the support walls until the ceiling is in place. This was actually a nice note in the instructions. It did take some adjustments to get the walls lined up and into the ceiling slots. Once the ceiling was set I then glued all the supporting wall attachment points. I then installed all the ceiling and wall LED’s and then tucked the wires down.
I cleaned up the hull, primed it, and painted the silver exterior. For the battery case I used some sheet styrene and made a case. I added some photo etch handles and a hoist ring on the top. The box was painted aluminum and then I made decals calling it the “Fusion Core Emergency Recharge Unit” with some radiation and two man lift warning signs. I completed the hull by adding the windshield and the radar bubble on top. The client wants the ship sealed so I began the process of gluing the upper hull to the lower hull. Due to size, a slight warp in both halves, and a tight fit due to all the wiring this was a very tedious process. I had to slowly glue the halves at about 2” at a time. Due to the contour of the hull I could not use clamps so I held the halves together, glued the seam, I then held the section until the glue cured. A little final clean up on the seams and the Jupiter 2 was finished. I hooked up the power for the lights and the battery box for the sound board and performed a final check of the lights and sound.
Check out the video of the final operation of the electronic features in the build log link below!
This project was an interesting change from doing military aircraft. Moebius did a decent job with the kit instructions. They even have little helpful notes to aid in assembly. The only thing I would change on the instructions would be to organize the painting instructions better. Some of the minor assemblies painting notes are scattered within the assembly instructions. Some of the parts required some clean up due to mold marks. The kit decals had two issues. The green radar screens were smaller than the area where they go and the astro-contol station gauge ring decal was thick and cracked easily. Since the assembly fits inside a clear dome the thicker decal was hard to get in correctly. I ended up making my own which made it a lot easier to assemble. The Moebius light kit was ok. I changed the landing bays lighting and made mounts for some of the LED’s as the instructions wants to mount them by their wires and “floating” the LED into position. For the accessories, The Tenacontrols remote control board works very well and is easy to wire up with the enclosed instructions. The Starling sound board works well. It would be nice if they could add a power supply input so that you can use a different source beside the batteries. Using a different power source changes the input impedance which changes the timing of the sound causing the cycle to reset way too early. The resin figures of the Robison family were excellent. Clean up was easy and the figure details were great. I did not use the extra decals. The colors used on the decals seemed off and the resolution of the print was too low for what I prefer. Many of the panels looked much better painting them. Overall it was an interesting build and not as complicated as I first thought. I hope you all have enjoyed this project. Thank you for following along. Happy modeling!
You can see all photos and details from start to finish in my build log at: https://davidsscalemodels.com/build-log/1-35-jupiter-2-lost-in-space/
14 attached images. Click to enlarge.
