On The Bench 74c: Alex Amaral’s Excelsor

from 1999 – low res photos

Alex Amaral is scratchbuilding a large Excelsior

After building so many plastic Star Trek kits, I decided to venture into the world of scratch-building. Since my favorite ship is the Excelsior, I decided that this was the ship I was gonna build. After a long time of finding the right conversion scale so as to not make it too big or small, I started cutting and sanding my styrofoam. I took this comparison shot of the ship with the nacelles and secondary hull mostly complete alongside my Enterprise-B, but without a saucer, it comes nowhere near showing just how big it will be.

This is a shot from the front. It shows a frontal view of the ship, along with the deflector ‘tunnel’. I have yet to make a Dish for it. Creating the 17.5 inch saucer isnt gonna be easy, and it will be tricky to secure it to the rest of the ship without it drooping, but I’m up to the challenge =) The styrofoam I use is the very cheap ‘bubble’ stuff where it looks like tiny bubbles if you snap it open. Its very hard to be clean when working with this stuff, especially when sanding. I’ve made it look like a blizzard hit my room many times……More pics to come as progress continues.