Parts You Get

Item Description

Directly from the PNT Website:

"This four piece all resin conversion kit assembles easily with the Polar Lights* U.S.S. Enterprise kit to turn it into the Franz Joseph Hermes Class Tug Starship. This bagged kit also contains a fully illustrated and detailed seven page assembly, detailing, painting, and decaling manual for finishing your model with professional results. The decal sheet includes three names for marking the Hermes Class starships.
1/1000 scale, 7.5 inches (16 CM) long when assembled.
Item #4046
$5.95 + shipping and handling."

Parts Preparation

This kit was easy to prepare, since there are so few parts. There was very few flash to sand off, and there were no crooked parts on this little conversion like there were on my Scout/Destroyer.

Also, the spire base for the deflector was too wide in one direction and needed sanded to fit. Not that difficult.

Construction

The hardest part of construction was the modifications to the warp nacelles and the two piece pylon support system from the PL kit. The instructions say to flip the entire assembly, cut out the section made to fit the curve on the spine of the PL engineering section, and make adjustments to the nacelles to compensate. This means that the rear of the nacelle and the front nacelle cap have to be removed and turned 180 degrees. After this was done, the rest was a cinch! I put the saucer together with the deflector mount in place, chose the taller-standing bridge (for the heck of it), glued the pylon in place with the nacelle supports attached, and then attached the engines and the connector. I let the superglue stand about an hour each time something resin was attached, just for good measure.

Paint & Detailing

You can tell that this model was not painted the typical starfleet way. I decided to do a little experiment on this one to see what kind of contrast I'd get using a grey primer base and a silver aluminum overcoat. I masked a few spots with masking tape in order to see what kind of contrast there would be. It's not quite what I expected, but that happens. Also, the weathering doesn't show up as nice with the silver aluminum overcoat as it did with the pewter gray. Not my best finalling, but I wanted this one different from the others. The weather ing was done using graphite from a pencil sanded on fine sandpaper and painted on with a wet paintbrush.

Decalling

The model comes with a decal sheet and 3 specific names for the tug class ships. I chose the USS Cassini for my scout class ship. The ship is named after the recent NASA probe sent to Saturn. The decals that come with the kit need to be complemented with the decals that come with the PL kit, and there are some slight differences, so it is difficult mixing them. Make sure that you do not have the "NCC" from the PL decal and the "3824" from the PNT decal sheet next to each other. You will notice a difference!

After the decals were chosen, carefully placed, and let sit to try in place for a few days, another two coats of Krylon clear matte finish were sprayed over the top of the entire kit for an overall sealant.

Conclusion

It's not the easiest of the three conversions from PNT to put together, but it's still not all that difficult. Except for the paintjob, I'm very pleased with the kit as a whole. The only nitpick is a small space between the "neck" pylon and the saucer underneath it, but it's easily filled with model putty, sanded, and cleaned up. This kit would have been easy enough to kitbash, since there's not all that much to it, but for the price (which is practically what the decals would have costed me alone), it was well worth it. PNT has put off selling these conversions in order to make more molds and to get a stock built up. I have heard that PNT will again sell these conversions. I am not sure, though, if this is true. Don't quote me on it. If PNT does again sell these kits, I know several folks that will love getting their hands on them, and I'll probably buy more of them myself. I do a lot of grades every day as a high school teacher and college professor, and I'd give this little conversion kit an A (95%).