USS Buran
This is the USS Buran from Mastercom Data's Ships of the "Star Fleet Volume Two/Number One." It's the Akyazi class perimeter action ship, from McDaniel Models. The ship design has always been one of my favorite. I really liked the third variant but the one released was the first one. McDaniel Models is not exactly open now, but he's planning on re-opening the company.
The model itself was actually something of a let down. I was expecting a few large-ish pieces to glue together and maybe a few detail parts that would not have worked well for the molding process. But what I got was several parts. Instead of using two part molds, like most resin model makers, they decided to go with one part molds. One part molds can be good for small things, but this should have been done in two part molds. The saucer halves had uneven 'bottoms' and had to be sanded smooth so I could get a good fit. The warp nacelles ended up with different thicknesses because the mold was over filled for one set. Two part molds eliminates these problems, gives you about half as many parts, and eliminates a bunch of seams.
Putting it Together
Actually putting it together was straight forward, minus all the sanding I had to do. However, there were many pin holes through out the model. This is a result in air in the resin. It wasn't just one or two areas, but almost all the parts had them. And some of the raised details ended up with air bubbles in them. The air bubbles I can live with, but the pin holes are hard to clean up. In addition, the model had very few decals, but I've been told he's since improved on that.
Another problem I had was that the resin was soft. I don't mean bend-it-with-your-finger soft, but the weight of the nacelles would eventually bend the pylons. Either it was a bad mix, or the resin he decided to use wasn't that great. I've had a few batches of resin come out soft because of age or not getting the proportions right. But I'm just me working for fun. If you are going to be selling models, you want to have some good quality resin. I've gotten models that have good resin, and you can see the difference.
The one last thing that really got me was that it's not in scale with the Enterprise-A model from Ertl. It's in scale with the rest of his ships, which is 1/650. So I can't really display it with the other ships from it's supposed time. All these problems are really a shame because the master for the molds really looks nice and if all these problems were addressed, I'm sure this would be a really nice model.
I didn't go to great lengths to super detail this model. I just slapped on some paint, put on the decals and called it good. The disapointment I got from the model itself didn't make me want to go to great lengths to make it super good. The decals were also pretty sparce. I would have expected more. It's too bad too, because done up nicely, this model would look very nice next to a USS Enterprise in the same scale.