The kit came in a heavy corrugated cardboard box with a label and photograph of a finished, painted kit. Larger parts were in their own separate bags, smaller parts separated into two smaller bags and one bag contained the fuel pods which would be lined up along the ship's spine. The 3 long spine parts were wedged into the box diagonally, un-bagged.

   The spherical "Command Section" had its problems. The middle of the three pod-bay doors showed signs of some serious mold deterioration. There were some resin lumps and berries that were so bad that it became necessary to grind out the entire door with a Dremel rotary tool.

   Fortunately, the kit came with an extra bay door to build the kit with the pod-bay open. I used it to replace the removed door. A hold-down jig was made for the sphere to make it easier to mill a flat seat for the new door. The 3/8 inch thick resin of the part was milled to just under 1/8 inch and the new door was glued into place.

   Overall, detail looked klunky and a little exaggerated with many air bubbles in the resin. Some panel lines were at slight angles and others almost looked as if they were scribed freehand. Most of the detail was filled with putty and sanded smooth until the part was nearly featureless. Instead of scratch-building the lost detail back onto the sphere, I decided it would be added back to the model as painted-on features.

    Probably the most obvious problem with the Command Section was that the part was short by 1/8 inch which caused a mismatch between the sphere and the flange behind it. A spacer made from 1/8 inch thick sheet styrene was glued to the back of the sphere which corrected this problem.

  Click here to view the instructions that came with the kit. (Adobe Acrobat Reader required.)

   Lunar's instruction sheet has a diagram showing the locations of the 62 fuel pods which come in three sizes and are positioned along the spine.  Though confusing at first glance, the instructions were helpful in arranging the fuel pods in their accurate configuration. In order to ensure that all the pods wouldn't look uneven when glued to the spine, a jig was made to hold each one down on a milling table and they were all milled to the same thickness. When glued to the spine, the pods lined up fairly straight.

   This hollow cast part was almost problem free with an easily cleaned up mold parting line. One of the three engines looked as if it were cast during another run of the kit. While two of them were cast in light tan resin with very sharp detailing, the third was a darker (maybe older?) resin with very soft details. These details were sharpened with a Dremel and the addition of sheet styrene.

    The 32-inch long Discovery was mounted on a scratch-built display stand. The stand's forward support post is topped by a 1/8 inch phone plug which connects to a phone jack below and behind the Command Section and provides the 9 volts necessary to light the Command room. The EVA pod is mounted on a 1/8 inch piece of acrylic rod.

    Though I didn't keep a record of my work on this model, I'm sure that with all the part cleanup and additional scratch-building the Discovery took at least 40 hours to complete. Though this kit is considered by many to be one of the more difficult resin model kits to build, I'm satisfied that the amount of work I put into it paid off with a very impressive model. It was impressive enough to win awards in competition and to be sought out to represent the Discovery in a television program on the Discovery Science Channel called Mission Control, 2OO1: A Space Odyssey which chronicles the simultaneous writing of the novel and the screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. My experience with the preparation of the model for the show and other fun stuff can be found HERE.