Construction

Here's another kit I bought in 1994 and immediately started to build! But, once I test fitted the hull parts together, I knew this kit needed an interior, AND Lunar Models promised me they were going to make an interior kit for this monster of a kit. Year after year I waited patiently, but no kit. Soooo....

I'm attempting my first scratch build. I decided on balsa as my medium. It's cheap to buy (and you will make mistakes, so why pay good money for stuff you're gonna break?) and easy to work with. Since the interior requires no real curves, I started my year long design efforts. I finally broke down over Christmas 1999 and started to move forward on this kit.

	I love those little clamps from Sears and now I have a reason to buy more! I'm attaching a raised panel detail on the wall of the main control area of the Jupiter 2 in the shot on the left. The original instructions for the 24" kit gave me patterns to make walls out of. Originally, they called for a partial floor and only 2 walls. The floor is two plywood balsa sheets glued together and then cut to fit inside the hulls. I reinforced the floor from the bottom so it wouldn't sag or need support.
	In the middle shot, you can see my modeling mess, plus the fusion core light kit sitting inside the fusion core itself. The Central Astrogator is made out of a tiny wooden flower pot. The dome is a plastic ball from craft store. Inside the dome is a bottle cap from a 24 ounce Mountain Dew (which gets me through all of my modeling challenges), plus a tiny 1 inch model of the Jupiter 2 from Lunar! I always wondered what I'd do with such a tiny Jupiter and now I know!
	In the third shot, you can see the switches and power input for the lighting of the ship and that the fusion core is installed and wired for power. Plus the interior is primed and ready to be painted. I'm going to use decals as the main source of detail for the ship. I am using Adobe PhotoShop to create the needed artwork. I am going to seal up the hull halves and I'm going to concentrate my detailing to the rear of the ship, which is all you'll see through the main view port.

I'm going to use a Polar Lights Johnny Lightning Robot, plus Dr. Smith and Will from the Trendmaster's Jupiter 2 Playset as my main figures. Seems Dr. Smith is having some problems with his crotch! (See the piece on the ground by his foot!) You can see the 1 inch Jupiter in this shot, waiting to be painted.
This is a shot of the hulls dry fitted together with the interior inside. I am still working on the decals, which is the final stage to assembling the interior. I'll add shots of the finished interior once I'm done with it. This kit is a great kit and it's huge! The interior kit gives it some needed weight and stability. Where I'm going to display such a large kit is still up for grabs.

Photo 1 is of a cheese ball can being used to "mask" off the center area so it remains tan.

Who said fatty snacks aren't good for you?

I really hate using masking material, because, for me, it never seems to work all that well anyway. The can worked great as you can see in Photo 2!

Photo 3: I decided, after seeing all the competition of writing up this kit, I was NOT going to put in the lower level and instead modify the kit to have landing leg wells. Besides, with no lower level, you have more room for electronics! You can see I started to put in the lighting holes in the landing wells as they appear in some blueprints, but I drove the drill into my hand on the third pass, got mad and stopped the drilling! Therefore, only 2 holes instead of 5.

	Photo 4: These are the modified legs, which have to be longer now that I have landing wells. I drilled the existing legs out and inserted some wire, then used some standard styrene tube to make the top halves of the hydraulic cylinders that would be used in the landing legs.
		Photo 5 shows them installed with the new landing pads.

Photos 6: shows the new seats and all the walls sitting in place, not yet glued in.

Photos 7: I had to constantly "dry fit" the kit to make sure none of my modifications would get in the way of the final assembly of the outer hulls.

Photo 8: This is the first of the electronic units being put in the kit. This dome light kit flashes several LED's in a circular pattern in the navigation bubble on top of the Jupiter. I also have the fusion core light kit. Both of these kits are from D. F. Howard's site.

Photo 9: This is here just for fun to share the mess that, hopefully, most modelers have while building. Since I do not know how to use an airbrush well, I generally hand paint everything and here you can see I've started the interior painting. I'm using the 16" Lunar Models Jupiter 2 interior kit as a painting guide, since I spent dozens and dozens of hours pouring over photos and videos to paint that kit, I figured it was a good guide.