Trek Ace said:
The bottom saucer had pencil lines as well. These have now been covered over with an inaccurate hull color and half-inch wide airbrushed heavy black grid lines.
If you are copying the Smithsonian "refurbished" look, use the finest and faintest mechanical pencil/compass that you can find for the top saucer grids. Use a thick, black sharpie for the bottom saucer, secondary hull and warp grid lines. That should reproduce the look well enough - maybe even do it freehand, without benefit of a straightedge or compass if you truly want it to be a close match.
Also, remember to paint the saucer top a greener gray than the rest of the ship, as the "new" paint is much paler than the original color. The bridge and B/C decks are the paler gray as well.
Several years ago, after reading an article in the September '96 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models magazine, had gotten a quart of the GM Gray 4539L that was allegedly used on the original model mixed at a custom body shop nearby. I painted it on styrene and a couple of years ago compared it to the mixture outlined on Culttvman's website article "What color was the original Enterprise?"
They are both WAY different. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the refurbishing team found a note written on or in the model that the original crew had left indicating that they had used the General Motors color. The original team that built the model might have started out with that color, but I don't know how they didn't notice the difference after repainting the A/B decks... Since the hue and palor are so different they couldn't have just chalked it up to aging paint.
Apparently by the time they finished the entire model and realized the coloring wasn't going to change after drying they felt it was too late to do anything about it...
However, they just flat out state in the article that the right color was allegedly that GM Grey without explaining the source or the info, or the fact that it ended up looking so different from the unrepainted saucer.
Now that I've gone back over the pictures in the article again it's struck me that the only pictures that show any of the upper A/B and saucer sections together is PRE-restoration.
All of the POST-restoration shots in the article that show any of the top of the primary hull are side shots that are carefully angled to show the A/B decks and the rest of the new colored ship. The one shot that shows some of the saucer as well is taken from an distance and heavily overlit from above, washing out the picture and making it impossible to see that the color is off as well.
I always wondered why that of the three shots they took of the model post-restoration, all were profiles from roughly the same angle. Now it makes sense.
Thank you for letting know that there were originally gridlines on the bottom of the saucer as well, although I don't remember them ever being visible. Anybody have any idea at what point in the series these were added? I remember reading somewhere some lighting technicians decided to ad them after some photograhers had problems getting a proper depth of field setting during a publicity photoshoot.
Were there ever any gridlines on the secondary hull and pylons? Those seem more exaggerated than the primary hull.
