Lighting Adds Life to Grissom

SAW Custom designed printed circuit boards made the work easier.

Round 2/Polar Lights’ new Star Trek kit of the USSD Grissom from The Search For Spock was a model I’d wanted to be done for decades. Finally, this kit was produced and I was hired to do the prototype buildup for the promotion and box art photography. The model was a joy to build as parts fit exceptionally well. But lighting it was complicated by the fact that it needed a strobe circuit that made all the anti-collision lights had to strobe in unison, and the ship is divided into two separate parts with minimal space in the supporting pylons to admit wiring.

A couple of years ago I had a local electronics guy design me a strobe circuit for just such a model. This new circuit along with the bus boards I also had designed would be used extensively. Below is the general layout of how the boards would get used. Why so many boards? Well, there were two types of current that needed to be distributed. One for the strobes and one for the constantly on (red and blue navigation and saucer cabin) lights. The strobes in the lower body could be fed directly from the strobe board, but for the upper body, there needed to be a new circuit tied to that board.

Testing the lights before final paint and assembly.

Painting and detailing under way…

The finished model…

The model you see here was used on the box art of the kit you can now buy at hobby shops and web sites.