YES, I am still here. I had a flood in my basement where my work area is, and we had to replace the whole floor. Nothing was really damaged, but it took forever to get started. Luckily the guys that actually did the work were fantastic.

With that out of the way, I'm working on repairing another 1/500 Nebulon-B Frigate from Nicholas Sagan. This one is in better shape, but I am having to replace a lot of panels. I also have his smaller 1/1000 Frigate in the first pic. It is nice having a smaller reference nearby.

Also, you owe it to yourself to buy a Proxxon Precision Vise. This thing is amazing and has helped me so much with adding the details to it. It's the only mini vise that I know of that bends toward you (instead of to the side). This makes it much easier to get the angle you need to work on whatever area you want. On the Amazon link, there's a guy that suggests gluing some #10 tooth washers inside to add resistance to the ball joint, which I DEFINITELY recommend.

Well, technically, I'm done. I finished painting over the weekend and added just a few hand-painted windows. But for now, I'm showing off some pics of the progress right before the finish line. Firstly, here's a pic of the primed model with some more styrene rectangles added to cover the cracks and splits. Then, I routered out some road wheels from an AMX-13/90 to create new engine rings. Not only did these cover the broken ends, but they really helped the overall look.

Finally, I have a few in-progress shots of the forward hull. You can see all of the modulating colors that I used, mostly MRP lacquer paints and a few Tamiya paints. The trick here is having a few index cards with sections or little rectangles cut out. Then, I can simply place the index cards on the model, lightly spray, and you get some neat effects. One other trick is spraying along the edge of an index card (or tape), which creates a subtle streak. ILM used this trick with a lot of their models. It may seem fast and dirty, but it looks effective if you are careful when airbrushing. However, I did use tape for the red lines to make them sharp. After, I sprayed some light grey over the red markings to soften them. Note, the contrast went way up for those pics, so the colors are much more muted on the real thing.