All of this has happened before...

...and all of this has happened again. 

Made a lot of progress on the Viper. First, I built a very simple circuit with five LEDs in parallel; two for the cockpit and 3 for the engines. 

Next - and an often overlooked step - is to paint the inside of the hull with black paint for lightblocking. I also glued some foil in to make sure. 

Next I installed the cockpit and the start of the wiring loom:

And a test of the cockpit lighting:

Next step is putting together the rest of the hull and arranging the engine lights:

And, as you can see, the overall shape is starting to look rather familiar. 

Hopefully I'll be able to get it primed and start airbrushing next week. 

I also discovered a new little thing which has definite possibilities if applied to miniatures: I'll pop a product review up tomorrow. 

ADHD

It turns out that lighting a model with fibre optic is a very tedious process, so I got on with a few bits and pieces at the same time. 

So, here is the viper cockpit painted and done with all fibre in place. 

And here's the lighting test. 

You can't really see but the fibre ends have been tinted with inks. 

And while all that palaver was going on, I've been working on the Carnosaur which is about 80% done. 

Next up will be soldering the lighting circuit together for the viper so I can assemble it. 

LET THERE BE LIGHT

I've done some LED lighting before but never experimented with fibre optic. So this time I've decided to fully light the cockpit and backlight the various dials. 

So I've built the cockpit and drilled the various holes. 

Next a base lick of paint

And then threading the optics

This, it turns out, is immensely time consuming and boring work. So while waiting for glue to dry I painted the viper pilot ( those of you who've seen the show will understand what a sod the iridescent green fligh suit was to get right:

And also did some detail work on the carnosaur. 

Hopefully tomorrow will see the fruits if my labour.