06-01-2014: The picture above shows a papercraft U.S.S. Defiant, built by Shy from one of the repainted versions that Bill Perry and Bones McCoy made from my original hand-drawn and water-coloured version.

But this one picture doesn’t tell the whole story: Shy built over a hundred paper models already, and despite having some problems buildings it, he wanted to make his papercraft U.S.S. Defiant light up with LED lights! ;o)

Have a look at these pictures with all the papercraft parts laid out, and the wiring for the LED lights:
picture 2 | picture 3 | picture 4 | picture 5 | picture 6

And here are a few more pictures with the lights activated in the end:
picture 7 | picture 8 | picture 9

The switch for the lights is on the stand that Shy made for his papercraft U.S.S. Defiant, here’s a link to the video he sent me showing me how it works: http://youtu.be/3hOt-E7T0ig

It looks really marvellous, don’t you think so too? ;o)

07-01-2014: Shy sent me some more pictures of the first “real” papercraft project he used LED lights in, a little diorama of a Battlestar Galactica Re-imagined Cylon Raider and Viper Mark II (from “Jay’s Box of Sci-Fi CardToys” I think?): picture 1

He made it as a birthday gift for his brother, with a light-up Battlestar Galactica logo in the middle of the styrofoam base, and of course, the little spaceships themselves have some LED lights too:
picture 2 | picture 3

The engines are illuminated (which caused a little bit of a problem because Shy couldn’t find any purple LED lights for the engines of the Cylon Raider; so instead, he used blue LED lights covered in red cellophane ;o) and of course the red “eye” of the Cylon Raider: video ! ;o)

Surprisingly, Shy didn’t think the trickiest part was building the paper models or all that soldering, but masking the interior of the paper models (with black tape and paint) so the light would only shine out where he wanted to:
picture 4 | picture 5

There are some things he learned to do a little bit differently on his newer models though, like that he doesn’t have to use cellophane, because the LED lights are bright enough to shine through the paper parts themselves, and he doesn’t have to use such thick wires:
picture 6

And a real learning experience was not to use too many batteries…! ;o)

Because although normally, the more lights you want to use, the more battery power you need, he found out the hard way that you do need to be careful not to use *too* much power…

Most of the LED lights he used needed 3.3 Volts to work, and 2 AAA batteries only have 3 Volts; but he used a 4-pack of them, which gives 6 Volts, and many of his LED lights burned out, so he had to replace them and solder in new ones from the inside which was very difficult… :o(

So he used resistors to lower the voltage, and he grouped together the blue lights and the red lights in parallel circuits (because they use different Voltages) so he can light up the whole spaceships! ;o)

So this was Shy’s first papercraft project incorporating LED lights, but as I said before, he already built many other papercraft models as well; if you want to see some of them, you can do so on his Behance portfolio: link ! ;o)

Thank you for building a Ninjatoes’ (and other peoples’! ;o) papercraft model!

22-08-2012: The Star Trek runabout that Neil built, is actually the repainted version that Paragon made from my original, hand drawn one.

But Neil went even a little bit further than that: the runabouts are kind of the workhorses in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and one of their features was that they could swap out the middle-section of the ship, so that they could always bring the right tools for the job (although I don’t remember if they ever really used that feature on the show?)

Neil wanted to recreate that feature in the paper model, and he used magnets to do so! Unfortunately, the magnets that Neil used were just a little bit too weak, so only the cockpit is removable on his build.

But I think the idea is solid and with stronger magnets, it should work great! ;o)

For more pictures and to see how he did it, you can check out the post on his own weblog here: link

And if you want to see some of Neil’s other Star Trek posts and papercraft models he built, you can use this link: link

Thank you for building a (repainted ;o) Ninjatoes’ papercraft model!

17-01-2007: As you can see, it’s another Star Trek model: the U.S.S. Defiant NX-74205, built by Nathan Dumont from England.

It’s actually the redraw version with improved textures, done by Bill Perry. My original version has “watercolored textures”, and although I actually like the effect, the redraw version looks really great as well.

Nathan has his own website about all kinds of stuff at http://www.nathandumont.com/, and he has uploaded a few more pictures of his paper Defiant there.

Thank you for building a Ninjatoes’ papercraft model!

16-06-2006: with all those “Trekkies” around, I was wondering when somebody was going to send me a picture of one of my Star Trek models they built.

Well, here it is: Deep Space Nine, built by Martin from the Czech Republic. The photo was taken with a mobile phone, but it still looks better than most of the pictures I took with a regular camera… ;o)

Thank you fo building a Ninjatoes’ papercraft model!