09/13/01

     It's been a busy time of things - I've laid in all the fibre (except the conference room and ready room on Deck 1) on the entire upper saucer section.  I've sacrificed half the micro-drill bit (good thing it's long, but I'm not sure if it's long enough anymore) and have made a couple more scratches on the outside of the hull from careless re-drilling of holes for re-gluing broken fibres.

 

      The first thing I did was to circle the internal holes with a black Sharpie marker so that I could see them better.  I then used that to figure out where to lay in plastic "staples" that came from the Enterprise-D kit to guide the fibre optic cable.  Those little things are kind of hard to handle, but I managed to get them into place without too much trouble.
 

 

     I then began the arduous chore of running the fibre.  Imagine if you will, threading a dry, fragile hair through guides to a needle, then gluing it in place with super glue.

     Now do it seventy two more times.

 

      I missed a few holes and needed to back track, and caught a couple fibres that had broken.  I needed to trim flush (as best I could) the broken fibre and drill a new hole, then re-run that fibre.

     I've spent so long working on this single part of the project I've practically forgotten the scope of the whole thing, and what the next steps are!  I'm not done with the upper saucer section - I need to finish putting the conference room and ready room lights on Deck 1.  With the drill bit broken in half, I don't have the length to do what I had in mind - I'll need to drill the holes straight, then run those fibres.

     After that's done, I need to figure out placement of the white LEDs that will shine on the larger windows and mask that off, then paint the entire inside of the saucer section silver, then flat black.  Remove the masking, glue the LEDs onto a 'tree' made for them, glue the 'tree' in place, run the wires, then I can start work on the lower half.