If you want to make more than one unit of any given prop replica, it is inevitable to make molds of all the parts you need. This way you’ll be able to make multiple resin casts of each piece. For the Neutrino Probe, this presented a few unique challenges I had to tackle along the way due to the special nature of the body, its prototype parts and the fact that I wanted to put electronics in there. In this blog post I’ll show you exactly what I thought would work, what did’t work and – most importantly – what I ended up doing.

If you remember, the main body of the Neutrino Probe (minus the emitter) consists of five pieces – some of them big and some of them rather small.

Let’s begin with the main piece, which was the trickiest to mold. Why was it so tricky?

Well, for one it had to be hollow for me to be able to install the electronics later. To do that I needed enough room inside to fit the circuit in. However, due to the large grooves on the outside it was difficult to estimate how much I could hollow out without risking to break through one of the grooves. Therefore everything had to be measured exactly.

The other aspect was that the master model for the main part obviously was round since I turned it from wood. The actual prop part however needed to have one flat side where the display panel would go. How should I approach this? Cut off the unwanted piece before molding? No. Being out of wood, the material could easily have ripped thus ruining the entire thing. Also, being round it would’ve been difficult to get a grip on it and make a clean cut. Lastly, it would have been too final a solution for my taste. Had I cut off too much of it, I would’ve had no way to correct that mistake. So, I decided to solve the problem by molding only as much of the prototype as I needed and not one millimeter more. I’ll explain below.

To be able to do precise work, the first thing I did was to mark a line on the prototype where I wanted the flat side to be:

My first idea was to suspend the piece in silicone rubber by hanging it from wires (that’s what the small holes in the picture above are for) and pouring rubber in the mold below, until the pencil line was reached. What I didn’t take into consideration however, was that wood actually floats, not only on water but also on silicone rubber. Duh! So when I poured the silicone inside the mold and it reached the master model, it slowly began to move upwards, sinking my plan (pun intended ;)) millimeter by millimeter.

So, I needed a new plan. And one was quickly found. It was slightly more elaborate, but worked perfectly. Here’s what I did:

Since molding only part of the master model didn’t work, I decided to do a full-blown two-part mold with a lid that I could later take off. And that lid should be exactly where the pencil line was. The first step to accomplish this was to use a scrap piece of cured silicone from the first try and use it as the “floor” for the new mold box. Yes, you can saw cured rubber quite well. On top of that I built the box walls using LEGO as I always do. Around that I put some plasticine to seal the box and fix it in place.

Having everything absolutely level is important if you don’t want to produce crooked castings. That’s why I always check using a water level before molding.

Next I placed the prototype part inside the mold box and secured it using two strips of tape. Any type will do. I arranged it in such a way that the pencil line on the body was parallel to the “floor” of the mold box.

I then poured a little bit of silicone in the box, just enough so that the master model was covered up to the pencil line.

And this is how the silicone looked like when it was cured. This was gonna be my lid.

In order to continue, I then had to clean up the lid a little in an effort to make it as flat as possible. So I removed the excess rubber using scissors…

… as well as cutting pliers.

As preparation for the next step I then applied (quite a lot of) vaseline on the exposed area of the silicone as a releasing agent.

In this next image you can clearly see the applied vaseline and the brush strokes on it.

Then I reinserted the master model inside the mold…

… and secured it again using tape to prevent it from floating up as it did before.

Then I poured in silicone once more.

Note that I only covered the piece by about half. Why? Well, I couldn’t leave the tape in there to keep the prototype in place, so I needed something else. That’s what this intermediate layer of silicone was for.

When it cured it acted as a grip to keep the part where it was supposed to be and I could extend the box walls (the white LEGO pieces in the next picture) and fill up the mold. Without any vaseline in between, the silicone became one piece in the end, which is exactly what I wanted.

After demolding I was able to seperate the two pieces of the mold without any problems.

Getting the master model out of the mold was a little tricky, since so much of its round form was inside the mold, but thanks to the flexible nature of silicone rubber that became no serious problem.

After a little cleanup I was very happy with the result:

Now on to the next challenge: Making the casting hollow. Since my “resin displacement”-technique worked so well with the ODN Scanner, I didn’t think twice to use this method again here. The idea is to manufacture a rubber displacer piece on a stick that can be lowered down into the mold before filling it with resin. Afterwards it can be removed, making the final piece hollow.

To create this rubber displacer, I prepared a wooden beam with three screws, only partially screwed into the handle. This is where the rubber would stick to the grip. Inside the mold I used some of the clay that I use to prevent mold boxes from leaking to form a temporary mold for the displacer. The tricky thing here was to estimate how thick the walls and how big the displacer should be. I ended up making the mold rather large, thinking that I could always remove some of the cured silicone from the displacer piece to make it smaller. No correction would have been possible in the other direction.

(By the way, that’s what I ended up doing – shaping and correcting the cured rubber by cutting and sanding away material until it was just right.)

This is how the displacer grip looks like lowered down into the mold.

In this shot you can clearly see the screws that will dip into the silicone and attach the displacer to the wooden stick.

All filled up with some RTV rubber:

And this is how the complete mold looks like after demolding and cleaning up:

A perfect fit!

Now, if you have paid attention, then you know that the very first sentence of this post after the break actually isn’t correct. The main body of the Neutrino Probe (minus the emitter) isn’t made up of five, but of six pieces. The sixth very important piece is the display panel, which closes the main body and houses the 7-segment-LEDs for the readout. I built it from three layers of sheet styrene, glued together and filed to shape.

Slightly thicker than the LED component I’m using. Why that is? You’ll see… in the next blog post.

Three layers of sheet styrene glued together.

The usual game: File, putty, sand, prime, sand, prime, and so on…

And here’s the finished panel. So why didn’t I build this piece earlier? Well, simple: I didn’t know the exact dimensions I needed before molding the main body element of the probe where this part needed to fit on. So, logically, I couldn’t build it until the mold for the main body part was done.

Molding-wise this piece was very easy. I attached it to a board, built the usual mold box around it, and filled it with rubber.

And the finished mold:

Now if you’re thinking “Wait a minute, aren’t those LED digits supposed to be installed into that element? Don’t you need a hole in there for them?”, then you’re thinking right. I’m going to show you how I’m doing that in the next blog post!

The next piece to mold with an interesting story is the emitter. As you might remember from this blog post, I built one using styrene, putty and primer way back after I did the main parts of the probe. It consisted of two very small pieces and looked like this:

And here it is together with the rest of the business end:

It looked very nice and I was quite happy with my work considering that these pieces are so tiny.

However, I came to realize that they were not precise enough and more importantly not smooth enough. Because here’s the deal: Of course the emitter had to be cast in clear resin so that it could be illuminated from the back. For the casting to be absolutely transparent and clear, two conditions had to be met: The casting had to be bubble-free (more on that in the next blog post) and the surface of the prototype had to be absolutely, 100% smooth. If it hadn’t, the silicone would’ve translated all the irregularity, texture and roughness – as subtle as it might have been – into the mold which would’ve produced castings with a milky, frosted surface and not a glass-like bright finish.

So I reached out to fellow prop-builder Myron Stapleton who has both the experience and the equipment to turn parts from aluminum to measure. I prepared some very detailed specs for him and what I got back matched those dimensions exactly:

I couldn’t believe the accuracy with wich Myron replicated my diagrams. This is truly the work of a master. Thank you so much, Myron!

The molding process for this piece was no different than the rest: Put it on a board in a mold box and fill it up with silicone. The one thing I had to be careful with was the speed with which I poured the rubber inside the mold. Pouring in a thin stream I carefully filled the box, paying close attention not to trap any air bubbles while covering all those ridges and crevices.

And here’s the final mold. While molding all the other pieces, I actually made a number of emitter molds so that I could later make several castings at once.

Molding the rest of the pieces was very straight forward. By now you know the drill, so I’m not going to repeat it once more. Just enjoy the pictures:

You’ll notice here that I sometimes used clay as a base for the pieces. The plasticine acted as a light adhesive and also prevented the silicone from creeping under the prototypes thus creating a thin rubber film which can make the demolding process problematic.

Looking at this last piece, which is the “end cap” of the Neutrino Probe, I realized that painting – or more precisely masking – this component would be quite elaborate since the disc at the top has a different color than the rest. Have a look at the original to see what I mean:

So I decided in the last minute not to include the back disc in the actual “end cap” casting, but to add it later and use the real deal (more on that in an upcoming blog post).

Instead of removing the disc from my original master model (the one which I turned from wood here), I used a resin casting of said master model to preserve the original.

If something had gone wrong, I simply had made another pull from the mold and started over. But, thankfully, there were no problems. First, I shaved off the majority of the top disc using my belt sander like this:

Then I used sandpaper stapled to a board to gently remove the rest. Wet sanding makes for a smoother surface.

After some priming and more sanding, the surface was perfectly smooth.

I noticed however, that the whole element was not tall enough and did not match the original prototype. I simply sanded off too much of the bottom of the casting to make the surface smooth.

So I used styrene to extend the element like this:

A few layers of putty and primer later, with a little sanding in between, the new “end cap” was finished and ready to be molded.

And here are all of the Neutrino Probe molds with their respective prototypes. Seven pieces in total, which is quite a lot, now that I’m looking at all of them together.

In the next blog post I will cover the casting process for these parts and the unique problems I had to solve to make that happen.

As always, if you want to follow my work more closely, you can follow me on Twitter (@trekprops) to get more frequent updates on what is happening in my workshop.

If you have any questions or observations, you can of course also E-Mail me or leave a comment below. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Following my recent “show-off” post presenting my Voyager Desktop Computer, let’s now have a detailed look at how I built this prop, going through every step, from the raw parts all the way to the finished unit, covering the concepts of different aspects of the prop, the construction of several custom parts, the installation of the electronics and the assembly of everything to bring it all together. Although I didn’t snap an image of every step along the way, it’s more than a hundred progress pictures, so I hope you brought a little time…

It all started with a kit that I got from a fellow collector, which contained three items: The screen, made from vacuformed styrene plastic (pictured in the following image), the connecting piece between the screen and the base, cast in solid resin and the black acrylic detailing pieces for the “keyboard/trackpad” and such.

Starting with the screen, the first task was to trim the excess plastic to make sure the display had the correct depth as well as cutting out the middle part where the actual screen would go. Since the plastic used to vacuform this part was quite sturdy, this was no easy thing to do. A sharp X-acto knife and a bit of patience did the trick however.

Next I had to make a cover for the back of the display that had to fit as perfectly as possible on the vacuformed part. This is where the light source for backlighting the display graphic is going to go.

Next I had to figure out a way to attach the actual display to the screen from behind. As mentioned in my “show-off” post, the display consists of a large photographic slide laminated on a piece of smoked acrylic. Because I didn’t want to damage the plexi, I decided not to screw it into the housing, being afraid of cracking it in the process. Instead I decided to glue it in place, which meant that I needed some kind of frame on the inside to act as a surface for the glue to stick to. To that end I glued in four solid beams along the edges of the screen and filled the remaining gaps with putty. By the way, glueing in the display was not the best idea. Even though I used a very strong two-component epoxy glue, it didn’t stick firmly in place and partly came off later. Luckily I was able to repair it and bond it (hopefully) permanently, but in hindsight I should have tried to carefully screw it on for a foolproof fixture. Oh well, live and learn, right?

Going forward I then looked after the backlight and tested different ways to position the LEDs behind the screen. I also experimented with different light diffusion options. Needing a lot of light, I decided to use two LED video lights – namely those which normally are used while filming with a DSLR. They don’t need a lot of power and are very bright yet inexpensive, which was exactly what I needed. Each one of the lights I used have 160 ultra-bright white LEDs, which gave me a whopping 320 LEDs to work with. Here’s one of those lights stripped of its casing:

Trying to spread the light as evenly as possible inside the screen, it quickly became clear that I had to physically detach the LEDs from each other and scatter them over the available area on the back of the screen a bit. So I cut each of the circuit boards in two parts to be able to put some space between them:

Here you can see some early lighting tests. Looks pretty good already!

The neat thing about the combination of real photographic film and a smoked plexi in front of it is that the screen appears almost completely black when the backlight is turned off. The reflective qualities of the acrylic make it look very shiny which I especially like.

Having the lighting all figured out, I was ready to install the display and move on with the screen as a whole. I wanted all of the inner workings of the prop to be completely serviceable and that of course included the electronics inside the screen. To make that happen I had to cut a panel out of the rear cover like so:

And here’s the frame clamped in place together with three wooden strips for support. These strips will later also hold the magnets which keep the back cover in place. Additionally they will secure the main diffusion panel, which will be glued to the underside of them.

Next I glued the display screen onto its frame.

The white film you can see behind the plexi here is the first layer of diffusion by the way: A translucent film laminated to the back of the display slide, which is in turn laminated to the back of the smoked plexi.

To protect it from primer and paint, I covered the front facing side using masking tape:

With the screen panel in place, the next step was to install the additional layers of diffusion and to attach the back frame to the rear of the chassis. First however I had to create a lip on the upper inside of the screen as support for the back frame. I used a strip of styrene for that. Without it, there would’ve been no way to attach it properly.

Next up was the main diffusion panel which is composed of a clear piece of acrylic, laminated from both sides with more translucent adhesive foil to spread the light even further on its way from the LEDs to the display. To attach it inside the screen, I used two of the wooden strips mentioned above, which I glued to the sides inside the casing. I glued the diffusion panel onto those strips first, however, and upside down. Then I rotated both and glued all of it inside the screen. Sounds complicated, I know, but hopefully the following pictures will make my process clear.

Diffusion panel rotated and back frame placed on top:

Here you can clearly see one of the support strips for the back cover, which will later house some of the magnets to keep the lid from falling off.

Test fitting the screen and the resin “foot”.

After everything was glued together I filled the outer seams with putty…

… and after a lot of sanding and priming the surface was nice and smooth.

It turned out, however, that the lip I had created inside the screen (for the back frame to rest on) wasn’t enough to ensure a strong bond. So I filled some putty inside the screen after the fact to reinforce the structure.

Then I glued the resin piece connecting the screen with the base inside the screen.

Even though I had carefully measured all the parts and test-fitted them for the best possible fit, the back surface was not as flat as it should have been after the glue had dried. So I had to do quite a lot of sanding to correct the situation.

The irregularities were so severe even that sanding by hand just didn’t cut it. I ultimately had to use a belt sander to make it work.

After having some time spent sanding, filling and priming, the surface was perfect. Notice how I masked the inside of the screen so that no dust, debris or primer could get inside. Also notice that all of that didn’t necessarily help…

Time to take care of the base unit for a change! The first task was to cut off a good portion of the found item, which is an APC power manager.

Not having access to some of the fancier equipment like a laser- or water jet cutter, I used a circular saw, which naturally generated quite some heat caused by the friction between the blade and the plastic. The unfortunate result was a very scruffy edge which I painstakingly had to clean up afterwards.

The base unit comes apart and can be disassembled very easily. So I was able to comfortably work on the battery holder without any problems. I decided to hide it inside one of the former power plugs on the right side and devised a sliding mechanism to be able to replace the batteries effortlessly. The holder is made of styrene plastic and a few wooden strips, glued together in such a way that it can accommodate two 9V block batteries.

The counterpart on the inside, which makes sure that the slide stays where its supposed to be, is also made from strips of wood and styrene. The tricky part was to get the fit tight enough to prevent the holder from sliding out by itself (even with the additional weight of two 9V batteries), but at the same time make it loose enough to be able to easily pull it out. That took quite some fiddling, I can tell you…

How one is supposed to pull this thing out, you ask? Well, I installed two strong magnets on the inside to be able to slide it out by letting a battery attach itself to the door from the outside and use it as a grip. That way I was able to avoid having to mount some kind of distracting handle on the outside.

Directing my attention back to the outside of the prop, I then took care of the spot on the front where one of the black acrylic plant-ons was going. Since the “trackpad” part had a flat plane on the back and the body of the base unit had a curvature, there was some filing to do to make it fit:

Before:

After:

I wanted the “trackpad” to comfortably rest on the base body, so I had to manufacture a lower lip for it to sit on like this:

A thin strip of styrene and a bit of putty did the trick:

After the usual seemingly infinite game of filling, sanding and priming, the front finally looked how I wanted it to look.

Later I noticed that those small label indents under the knob holes that I filled in were left untouched on the original props, probably due to lack of time. So strictly speaking I went through more trouble than I would’ve had to, but I’m happy with my idealized solution nonetheless.

Remember how I shortened the base unit using a circular saw before? Well, now it was time to fabricate a new rear end for it. Here’s how the open end looked after I had thoroughly cleaned it. Note the small hole I drilled into the top. This is where the wires from the power supply in the base are going to go into the screen section.

I used a simple piece of styrene as a new back for the base.

A good fit all around was essential for this piece. After all, I didn’t want it to scrape on the desk every time the computer was moved, so it mustn’t be too tall. But it also had to be large enough so that the backside is completely covered. So I took my time fitting this component until it was just right:

After I had glued it on, it was time for some putty again to fill the seam along the top.

Also, I wanted to reinforce the inside to make it a bit sturdier, so I applied some putty there as well.

This of course meant that I had to bevel all of the supporting structure inside with a saw to make room for the “putty edge” I created inside the sliding top cover.

All sanded and primed to the final finish. That’s always the best part.

In between I worked on the remote control on and off. Here you can see the board for the transmitter:

And here is the whole circuit installed in one of my ODN Scanner bodies. As you can see it’s pretty simple: The power source, a button, the transmitting circuit, a LED and an antenna. Pressing the button triggers the receiver inside the desktop viewer and activates the display backlight. Nothing too complicated. The building process for the remote wasn’t any different from my usual ODN Scanner builds, except that I had to build a custom holder for the exotic battery this circuit needs and the alternative color scheme I decided to use to set it apart from my standard DS9 version.

Why a remote control to begin with, you ask? Have a look at my “show-off” post, where I explain it.

A very special challenge was to get the edges of all the black acrylic pieces (“keyboard”, etc.) rounded and smooth and to make them look as shiny as the the rest of the surface. The crux was that I couldn’t prime/sand/paint these pieces to get rid of any imperfections, which presented a seemingly unsolvable problem:

The first step was to round the edges using a file and rough sandpaper. This of course produced an equally rough edge.

Next I used a fine grit sandpaper and wet sanded the crap out of the edge. Afterwards it felt smooth, but still looked frosty and dull and I just wasn’t able to make it shiny using sandpaper alone, no matter how often I went over it.

Here you can see all of the parts preliminary treated with sandpaper.

So, how to solve this problem? The solution is a technique called “flame polishing”, where you quickly go over the edge with a butane torch. The heat from the torch partially melts the plastic and the surface tension evens out the surface which makes it look shiny and glassy. It takes a bit of practice, but works very well. Excellent, just what the doctor ordered!

Check out the difference:

Time to install the electronics into the base body! As you can see here, it really isn’t a lot of stuff: On the left you see the receiver for the remote control, right next to it is the power converter which makes sure that the circuit always gets the same amount of energy, no matter what power source you use (batteries vs. power outlet). I used hot glue to fix everything inside the casing. On the right you can see the battery holder all wired up.

To switch between battery power and mains supply, I installed a switch inside the body. Its normal position is to let the circuit run off the mains adapter. When you trip it, it switches to battery power, bypassing the remote control receiver unit and turning on the backlight at the same time. Since the receiver needs quite a bit of energy to keep “listening” for the trigger signal, it made no sense to keep it active while on battery power. The batteries would have run out of juice too quickly otherwise.

To have access to the power switch and the power cord, I created an opening on the underside of the unit. To get through the thick plastic, I drilled a series of holes first and then cleaned up the jagged edges using a file. To get to the switch and the cord on the inside through this door, you have to lift the whole unit up and tilt it to the side. This is a bit cumbersome, but necessary to make it invisible and a small price to pay in my opinion.

You can also see the cable roll here which lets you unwind the cable and retract it back inside automatically when you’re done. Neat!

Here is the final layout of the components, neatly arranged and masked from the back side in preparation for painting.

Everything was coming together now. The last big step in construction was to mount the “foot” of the screen onto the top cover of the base unit. Once more I used two-component epoxy glue for a stable bond. The tricky thing is to apply just the right amount of glue so that it is enough to make it sturdy, but keep it from oozing out all over the place.

Masking the electronics prior to painting.

Time to paint! I used a PK 7173 equivalent (MOTIP 51084) to match the standard Starfleet issue metallic grey color.

Be sure to always prop up your parts when you cannot hang them up to avoid ugly marks.

With the base coat on, let’s take care of the details. For the ridges under the screen I used a matte black color for a cool look. Notice how I use masking tape for intricate masking and newspaper pages to cover large areas.

Masking tape removed. Nice!

On to the details. To give the black plant-ons the final touch I used chrome adhesive foil for the decals.

Here you can see the magnets being inserted into the back cover frame using epoxy and hot glue:

The LED boards were hot glued on to the inside of the back cover.

Fits like a glove!

Here’s the inside of the main body again, with all the masking tape removed. Note how I neatly I arranged all the wires inside. The black one running along the left and top side is the antenna of the remote control receiver.

The last step was to glue the remaining plant-ons on to the unit:

And voilà, all done! Here she is in all her glory:

For more pictures of the finished prop, check out my “showcase” post. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or to drop me a line at info@trekprops.de. You can also follow me on Twitter (@trekprops) if you like.

Sometimes, you want to finish something as quickly as possible. You desperately want to make progress, feel the urge to get back to it continuously and yet you can’t find any time to do just that. You just can’t, and every step takes forever as a result. That pretty much sums up the situation I’m in right now with this project.

Anyhow, as you can see I finally did manage to take the next step by finishing another important part of the tool – the business end! It’s a very detailed piece that consists of four separate parts right now (I’m not sure yet how I’m going to mold it though). And four very tiny parts I might add. The smallest one is only 5 mm in width!

This is by the way the part of the probe that was originally made from a disassembled nose hair trimmer. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts I wasn’t able to identify the exact model or even manufacturer of that trimmer, so I couldn’t use the original and had to scratch-build something instead. It was one hell of a lot of tedious work, but – to be honest – the result is probably nicer and cleaner than any found item, which makes the whole thing worthwhile in my book.

But, judge for yourself. To refresh your memory, here’s the front part of the original prop as well as the schematics I did as preparation for this project:

And here are the pictures of my finished multi-part piece:

So, let’s get down to business. How did I create these parts? Here we go:

It all started with some more or less precisely cut pieces of styrene, my material of choice when it comes to scratch-building stuff.

They would make up the body of the largest piece. Which is round. Which meant that I had to sculpt it somehow since I didn’t have anything that I could’ve used as a base piece.

So I marked an appropriate line for the outer curvature on all pieces and cut them with an X-acto knife.

As you can see, I also cut some material away at the top to make it easier to create a recession there later.

Then I arranged them in a circular way to build a kind of skeleton structure and glued them together using plastic glue.

The next step was to fill the spaces between the “ribs” with putty to “put some meat on the bones” as it were.

Then the sanding began. Oh, boy. The sanding – that’s the kind of work that I’d like to have an assistant do for me or something. On the other hand it gives you great control over the final shape of your piece. The downside is that it takes a long time. A very long time. And especially so if you’re only one bit as anal about a perfect surface as I am…

While sanding the outer surface of this part I also paid some attention to the top side of it where I needed to have a pretty substantial indentation with a thin lip around it. To achieve this I used a mini-dremel with an appropriate attachment to remove material from both the surface inside as well as the “walls”.

Here is an intermediary result. Looks pretty nice already, doesn’t it?

On to the next part, which is essentially the same deal as the first one, except smaller and with a more straight profile. And when I say smaller I mean like 9,5 mm tall! That’s pretty tough to even hold in your hands (depending on what kind of hands you have of course). But holding it while trying to leave some room for sandpaper to work on it? Yep, you guessed it – that’s not easy to say the least. To illustrate: I even had to use tweezers to glue the “styrene skeleton” parts in place, which were only a couple of millimeters in width.

Here’s another preliminary result, this time a bit smoother. As you can see, I used spot putty on the smaller piece to fill in tiny holes and gaps.

And this is where Murphy came into play. It turned out that I had miscalculated something or simply had visually misjudged the proportions of this small piece. Anyway, it was evident that it was too thin and I had to somehow make it thicker – or wider if you look at it from the side.

Sounds easy, but how should I do that? Well, after thinking about it for a bit I decided to simply add material by gluing small strips of styrene to the side of it and fill it with putty as before. Yay, more sanding! Not exactly what I wanted to do but it sure did the trick:

After that small setback, I moved on to the next part, which is a kind of add-on to the first, “big” base piece. I made it basically from four small strips of styrene, which I glued together and sanded in shape.

A little putty to hide the seams:

A little sanding – done.

So, here are all of the three pieces that had been done at that point:

Next, I had to make the small, narrow part fit into the bigger base. So, I cut a piece out of the side of it and added some putty back in to make the new surface nice and smooth. Again, I used my mini-dremel to do that, this time with a small circular saw attached to it. I also used various small files to work on that slot.

While working on any of these pieces, by the way, I sprayed light coats of automotive primer on them all the time to reveal small blemishes, scratches or any kind of unevenness that needed to be fixed.

It wasn’t until I had created this slot that I noticed how deep I had carved the indentation into that big piece from above. Clearly too much! When put together, the final element of the prop would not have looked very good like that. So I had no choice but to improvise again and insert a round piece of styrene to raise the level of that surface a bit. This of course meant that I also had to putty it to blend it to the “walls” inside:

A lot of sanding later – and I mean a LOT of sanding later – the mistake was corrected and the surface both inside and outside was smooth as an androids butt. Also, the small add-on piece fit in its place perfectly.

To finish this piece off I had only one thing left to do and that was to create tiny grooves on the outside as a bit of detailing to give it some structure and make it interesting, not to mention match it with the original of course! To do that I cut tiny pieces of tape and put them on where I wanted the grooves to be.

Then I applied several coats of primer to add some material to the outside.

Then I removed the tape and voilà – micro-detailing!

Last but not least I had to tackle the emitter tip, which proved to be extra challenging. What I needed was a very small piece with very specific measurements and three tiny rings around it. At first I had no idea how to achieve this, but then decided to try to sculpt the tip from air curing clay which worked out quite well.

The three rings around the tip gave me a headache though. How the hell should I sculpt those by hand? It seemed impossible. Then I had the idea to wrap a bit of wire around it to at least get an approximation of what I wanted. It would be a short spiral instead of three separate rings, but that was the best I could think of. And it turned out that it worked really well and looks very nice even if it’s not perfect. After all, it’s only a very small part of the final prop…

So, here’s the final result again:

Note that I added a small indentation on top of the middle sized piece as well, similar to the one on the big base piece to create a small lip and a place for the emitter tip to fit in.

Seeing those four parts together now that they’re finished, I’m very satisfied with this part of the probe and I think it goes very well with the main parts I did a while back:

I’m sure it’ll be a great prop when it’s all done. And I sure hope that I’ll be able to make some more progress in the near future, too!

What do you think? The good, the bad and the ugly – I’d love to hear back from you in any case, either via a comment below or via eMail!

Also, if you want to watch my prop-related activities more closely you should follow me on Twitter. Every time I’m in my workshop, you’ll know it instantly and see what I’m doing in real-time before anyone else can read about it here on the blog. Sounds like something you might enjoy? Follow me @trekprops and get the inside scoop!

Also always useful: Scissors, different screwdrivers, a pencil to mark dimensions, a ruler (preferably equipped with a metal edge), a protractor, a calculator to compute mixing ratios, differently sized saws and a water level.