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I'm finally back, with a small update.

Remember that I said the nacelle aft end caps were keyed wrong? Here's a photo showing how I glued them on originally, the way they were keyed to fit.

But you can see from this screenshot that this was upside down (and I believe, on the wrong nacelle.)

What I ended up doing was to cut the caps off with a razor saw so I could re-attach them right side up and on the correct nacelle.

While I was at it, I decided to correct another issue, one that I was originally planning on just letting go. As you can see below, the series of parallel ridges are spaced differently on either side of the end caps. On one side, the six ridges were more or less evenly spaced, while on the other side they were properly spaced, with a larger gap in the center.

I decided to chisel them all off and use aluminum tubing to replace them. I'm pretty sure this isn't canon, but they seemed to me to be either heat sinks or coolant conduits, so I decided to portray them as metal conduits. I used 1/16" aluminum, as this seemed the closest match for the original ridges.




Here are a couple of pictures of a mock-up. I won't glue any of this together until the paint has been applied, but you get the idea of about how it will look. One benefit of this is that I won't have to paint the 'ridges' silver.



There's a lot more to be done, but that's all for now, and I thank everyone for their encouraging comments.

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Thank you for the compliment, but there are several important things to consider:

First, I have to actually finish modifying the 'bulb' and get it looking right before I could possibly consider such a thing. This is still a WIP.

Second, I have never made molds or cast parts before, so don't really know how much work or expense is involved in such an undertaking. However, since I'm interested in lightening up the front end of my model a bit, I've already contacted someone who is very good at that sort of thing to see what it would cost for me to have my bulb cast, and recreated in fiberglass. As expected, the cost would be very high for a single copy.

Third... IF I decide to have mine cast and a fiberglass copy made, and IF the person doing it is willing to make more than just one, I have no idea what the cost per item would be. I have no idea what "reasonable" is, or how many people would be interested in paying a "reasonable" amount for a fiberglass replacement 'bulb', so it's not really possible for me to say right now if this is feasible or not. At this point in time, I think it's probably not going to be.

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