Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:- "Delivering Humpbacks" Diorama - micro build log

   I thought about having the cetacean probe overhead in this diorama, but it's length was estimated to be 17km - that would make it 8.5m long even at my scale! I found Golden Gate Bridge plans on skyscraper.com and I've started on them. I considered cutting round the girders for all of 2 seconds - I would be drawing my pension before I finished that. The two supports will be 4" high giving a total length of around 0.75m. I'll be using spaceagent-9's Klingon bird of prey for the Bounty. I was thinking that I would need a couple of 5mm humpbacks until I remembered that George and Gracie weren't released until the Bounty crashed in the bay. So this will be a long, thin diorama of the HMS Bounty swooping under the central span of the Golden Gate Bridge. It starts like this:-

and continues like this:-

   An aerial photo of the sea stretched across 3 sheets of A4 paper should give enough length, and I have an empty champagne bottle box to mount it on (parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary).
   This is the main structure, mounted and awaiting the addition of suspension cables:-

   To keep things interesting I've also started working on spaceagent-9's bop:-

   If I was a glutton for punishment I could also simultaneously build the probe, but I need to work out a few logistical details before that ;-).
    Work on the bridge is painfully slow. I have a guide to position everything and I'm using tape to keep the wire and thread roughly in position. Each thread has to be tied off individually and secured with a dab of PVA. Once the top is dry the bottom also has to be secured with PVA. So far I'm about half way along the first side:-

    It's also excruciatingly boring so here's some more of the bop:-

   Thankfully spaceagent-9 has posted a build log for this on Zealot and I'm taking advantage of that.

   I'll be fitting two insulated LEDs inside this one - assuming that I can wrap the neck around the wiring - so the torpedo launcher and rear engine (and nothing else!) should be red-lit. 
   
I've finally finished one side of the bridge! There's a lot of extra wraparounds to hold it in place just now; they'll come off when I have the other side running parallel. I'm going to try attaching the thread directly to the other side. I thought that using wire for the upper cable would be a good idea, but if anyone decides to build one of these I would recommend using embroidery or darning thread instead. A suspension bridge needs weight to be suspended from it and the card road spans are nowhere near heavy enough to pull wire into the right shape. I would also recommend attaching the main support cable directly to the buttresses to avoid all the tangles that would inevitably be produced when moving a mass of threads.

   The bop is progressing nicely as well. Spaceagent-9's build log has been a huge help:-

   The second LED has still to be wired in - I had to disconnect everything and start again as the wires + tape were too thick to wrap the neck around. 
   I scrunched up the warp drive gubbins (another highly technical term) and glued them so that the wings are raised, leaving the other bits - guns and... I haven't a clue what they are - to be attached:-

   I then used a green pen on all the white join lines before attaching the guns/disruptors:-

   ​A final touch was the renaming to HMS Bounty:-

   Let there be light!

   I pretty much packed the body with garbage - offcuts of card and insulating tape - to cut down light spillage, and I'm really pleased with the result.
Now I need to find some texture for the probe and mibbe a soundbite - I'm sure I saw one somewhere... 
   I spent an hour building the probe. The most fiddly bit was the ball since I had to cut loads of tiny, tiny rhomboid bits of blue coloured card and stick them on a globe of blu tac:-

   I rolled a tube of card and cut a hole in it near the front before running some white thread through the ball and the top of the tube. I printed off some pics of the probe and stuck sections around the tube then inserted three clear LEDs in a card cone glued over the hole, and finally stuck another printed texture section across the front end - the back had to be left open to give access to the wiring. I suspended the finished probe from a standard lamp (just for the photo - it'll hang from the bottom of a shelf in my room) using black thread. The bop was placed on two wires pushed through the base, with the LED wiring forming a tripod for extra support.

   The bridge looks like it's in the middle of an earthquake, but I'm going to take poetic licence and say that that's the disruptive effect of the cetacean probe.