Land of the GIANTS
SPINDRIFT
The ship from Land Of The Giants. I loved that show as a kid. The fun part of this model is that the top comes off and you build the interior of ship, not just the outside. Overall a simple build but lots of details to do. Also, it helped that I bought the aftermarket Decal Set from Starship Modeler {www.starshipmodeler.biz}. You get a lot of wood grain and air vents and ducts etc. Nice details to an otherwise very simple interior.
I’ve completed the inside and here’s a front view with Captain Steve Burton walking into the cockpit.
See that hallway behind the cockpit? If you turn left you go to the passenger compartment. If you go right you’re in the cockpit. But then it dead ends. I didn’t like that and though what a great place to put a toilet! Every passenger ship, bus, train I’ve been on has a bathroom so I scratch built a toilet, sink and wall. Fortunately, the aftermarket decals came with a spare pair of wooden doors which really helps it look like it was meant to be there.
In the photo below is co-pilot Dan standing in the passenger compartment talking with stewardes … I mean Flight Attendant {Space Attendant?} Betty.
And here’s a picture of Betty sitting on her bootie.
After putting the people in I realized I’d forgotten to paint their buttons and Company Logo patch! DRAT! Well, nothing’s perfect.
Exterior… the only thing to do here is glue to pieces together. Did that at removed the seam. But the dorsal fin… I didn’t want that to just pop up out of nowhere. I wanted it to blend with the body as though it were airstreamed. Do I did some putty work to make it smooth into the body. Not to paint…
paint paint paint! Because it’s round I have to paint this in two shifts. Never had so much trouble in my life. I got a slight run and had to sand that down, but then the paint was uneven and I could NOT get it smooth tone no matter how many coats. So had to primer again and repaint…. and got a run on the other side…. *sigh* As I recall this thing crashed on the planet. I may be doing a bit of landing damange to hide the run. I don’t want to sand, primer, paint again.
All done. After putting this aside for months to deal with my husbands cancer and many related health issues, I finally got back to it. I just finished as fast as I could. I was ready to move on from anything from last year… Annibus Horibilius as Her Majesty said.
Gerry's Blog 
September 1, 2010 at 3:29 pm |
Duffy… the link you sent didn’t work so I don’t know what you were showing me. But thanks for stopping by just the same.
September 2, 2010 at 9:45 am |
It was just a shopped Spindrift.
September 6, 2010 at 10:59 pm |
that looks really good, and I like the idea for the bathroom, although I think in the first episode, there is actually a coat closet there, seen when Fitzhugh goes for his gun.
Makes more sense to have a bathroom there, mind you the flight was only going to take an hour…..
March 19, 2011 at 4:29 am |
That’ll fly!
March 25, 2011 at 2:54 pm |
Nice creative use of my decal set. If I remember correctly, there are two “doors” on either side of the back reactor wall. One of them went into a workroom / radio room, and the other supposedly went into a small kitchen / galley. Perhaps the bathroom was indeed located in one of those rooms, but who knows! Where you put the bathroom is actually where the luggage closet / coat rack is. Where you put that bathroom, though, makes sense to me, as it’s a better place than in the kitchen, and would easily be available to the flight crew as well as the passengers.
It really is kind of a hard kit to put together — the interior is great, but does not always fit in the hull very well, and you have to be constantly checking the interior as you assemble it and make sure it is going to sit properly in the hull and still allow you to “close up” the model. However, once it’s done, it usually ends up being a nice looking model kit due to it’s interesting overall shape.
Moebius just put out another (smaller) version of this model kit that corrects some innacuracies. The most notable being the round dome that comes with the polar lights kit is now correctly represented with a teardrop-shaped dome. The moebius kit does not come with a styrene interior like the polar lights kit does, but they did have me do up a folding cardstock interior for the kit that is included. And it’s very inexpensive! I have since put out a supplemental decal set with a revised slightly more accurate cardstock interior. All of this is available in the SSM store, too!
Thanks for sharing!
–Henry
December 2, 2012 at 5:03 pm |
An “Irwin Allen” classic ship!!! This looks absolutely GREAT Gerry!!!!