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About Khyros

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    Advocate of A & E Wings Everywhere
  • Birthday 11/04/1988

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  1. Pretty easy. No glue, just a few edge clips. It goes back just fine. I've test fitted sections as I put LEDs in various sections.
  2. Using my method, the hooks don't get cut, you just disengage them.
  3. Just for you, I did a quick download from my phone and grabbed a clip just for that. Sorry for the watermark, I figured doing it from my computer would be easier than my phone, but now I remember why I do it all from the phone...
  4. And to explain the thought of multiple batteries... The max size I can fit under a base is a 1000mAh 3.7V drone battery. There are 13 engines, so 13 red LEDs. Each one pulls 20mA, so they will pull a total of 260mA. Which means if there are no other lights, the battery will last 4 hours powering the engines. Not bad, but I don't know how many LEDs I'm going to have for the fiber optics. My preliminary estimate is around 10 LEDs to power the fiber optics. Which means that the largest single battery will only last for just over 2 hours - not even a full game. That's unacceptable to me ;). So what I'm thinking is making two unique circuits, one for the engines, and one for the fiber optics, and having a battery under each base to power those circuits, which should give me more like 4-5 hours of play time on those batteries. Alternatively, there's more space inside the ship, I could put a larger battery in the ship. But as I'm looking at how much space there actually is, and forward thinking to how many strands of fiber optics, and wires and LEDs, that space is going to very quickly get used up. Putting a battery in there is going to be a really tight fit with everything else.
  5. I am likely going to put the battery(ies?) Under the base(s) as has become normal for my Armada ships. And those batteries are 3.7V drone batteries, but require quite a bit of soldering. If you were to go with an internal battery, I would recommend a rechargeable battery such that you can seal the ship up and just have a usb port showing. In this case, I would probably recommend one of those cell phone battery backups, though it will still take some soldering to complete your circuit.
  6. Depends on where you want to put it. There are places where I'm having to remove materials just to make space for the bundles of FOs. But then there's the centerish area that's relatively open. My question when people talk about 9V batteries is always the same - how do you plan on changing/charging it?
  7. Stealing a screen grab from @Crabbok's unboxing video (because I forgot to take pictures of the underside before I started tearing it apart), I circled the 12 screw locations. Starting at the front of the ship, there's an insert that has tabs on the left/right side of the ship. The next two also have the tabs at the left/right side. The two right before the engines are front/back tabs. There is a tab facing the front of the ship for all 4 engine sets. The entire center area of the ship with the 3 big engines easily comes out via tabs once the front half of the ship is removed. And the rearmost one has tabs left/right. I found the easiest way to disengage the tabs and free the covers is to slide your hobby knife down 10mm or so such that it disengages one tab (but not too far or you'll poke through the top side of the ship). Then grab a pair of vice grips to tightly hold onto the blade (take the handle part off), and quickly rip it straight out. Once I figured this out (on my 4th one), the remaining covers all came out with ease and no damage to the ship (the first 3 have very very minor damage as I worked the knife around prying it out). The triple engines I recommend just leveraging and popping them out, and the dual slide your knife down and disengage the tab. Once that is all opened, you still have a ton of stuff to disassemble the city center, but it's all straight forward. Having screws though and gaining access to them is a brand new thing for the SSD.
  8. Ordered Thursday, received today.
  9. If you have about a week's worth of patience, I'm going to be doing another youtube series on lighting up the SSD, and part 1 is always disassembling.
  10. Perhaps, but when I was serious about this as a side business, I was offering ISDs for 400, and just engines for 150. I didn't have a single order for just engines. And that expands to all of the other ships as well... with one exception, every order I had was for every option I offered. And that single exception was because he didn't like the appearance of one option I offered (cockpit on XWM Gozanti). Again, perhaps it'll be different talking about $500 for engines vs $1000 for everything... but then again, I know how much work goes into doing this, and I still wouldn't pay someone what I charge to do it =P.
  11. Based off of what I saw at Gencon last year, I estimated it was going to be about 3x the area to actually light. So without any massive headache working on it, I was estimating ~$1,000-1,200 for it. But thats based on around 1,200 fiber optics as well. I told those who were interested that I'd have a finalized number after I do my own first... But the interest at those prices is really limited. PS, to the person talking about .1mm drill bits- two comments. 1) No, just no. They break SO FREAKIN EASILY. And 2, I haven't seen FO cable less than .25mm, where are you finding your <.1mm?
  12. Looks good. Do I see a wire running along the stand? What did you decide to use as a power source?
  13. Looks good. Short of the Home One, the Liberty is the hardest one to do imo. Good job with the engines - they're almost completely symmetrical (moreso than mine was). I was thinking that the hull piece above the engine isn't fully inserted, but I'm not 100% sure. Looking at the side pictures, it looks similar to mine, but when looking straight on, yours looks to hang lower. Sadly, it looks like the only straight on picture I have isn't focused on the tip of the MC80L.
  14. Ha, I've kinda forgotten about this thread. I've been busy over in the Armada world, and haven't done much XWM stuff in the past year. But I do have a properly colored A Wing and HWK to share (in the same instagram post, just scroll to see the HWK).
  15. Looks cool. I see you're running wires down to the base, and your breadboard is setup using a 9V power supply, but it also looks like you have it on the base connected to a LOSI connector, so I'm assuming that you're actually using a 3.7V LiPo? If so, might I suggest only using a single resistor to drop the source voltage from 3.7V to 3.0V into the ship, as it's a common voltage for both blue and white (or really 3.2V if you want, I haven't found much of a difference between the two). Math shows that both end up using the same power from the battery (.7W in this case), but then you only have 1 resistor to package and solder compared to 5, which then means less places to go wrong or short it out, or when you're trying to figure out why it's not working, less joints to test. Also, you're only consuming 1 resistor, which if you're like me, you bought them in a variety pack with a count of 25 of a specific ohm value or something... And by using a single resistor, you end up using various values instead of consistently using the same one, so when you light up the ISD with 6-7 LEDs, you use a different resistor. It also looks like you're using 1.5mm FOs for the secondary engines - are you planning on doing the same for the ISD or stepping up to 2mm FOs? If you're stepping up to two, I highly recommend using 2 LEDs to power them. I've done it both ways, and I almost always regret using a single LED, as it's really hard to get all 4 to glow at the same brightness. In any case, congrats - it looks great!
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