Metal Earth Voyager Spacecraft 3D Metal Model Kit Fascinations

Very good kit. Metal is thick enough for some forgiveness from mistakes. I would recommend that if you are brand new to this hobby to build the Boeing Starliner and Hubble Telescope before doing this one. Otherwise you will be building a Voyager 2 as well. Make sure you have a small metal molding set, regular needle nose pliers, round needle nose pliers and a set of tweezers before beginning. Also have a magnifier visor on hand as well. Happy modeling!

Looks a lot harder than it is but I also used the tools sold by Metal Earth. Also used magnets and hot glue to keep parts where they were meant to be until the assemblies were ready to be put together. It now sits on its own turntable. It draws attention.

This is a nice little model that is 21cm long and can be spray painted using black, gold and white spray cans (and red for the infrared instrument if you like). I had problems benfing the insert tabs as they have no bending marks like the ones that help in round objects like the dish. It would be great if they make laser bending marks on tabs. To solve this it is best to first bend tabs once and straighten them again before inserting them in place. If you mistankingly bend a side in the wrong side and have to straighten and bend to the other direction the part will brake! So no mistakes are allowed. I used crazy glue and calcium bicarbonate to hold some parts in place as I was not able to bend those tabs.If one part falls on the floor, as it is so tiny, I used a magnet and scrolled it all over the floor until it catches it. I displayed model on top of a base that I found at a dollar store using a tiny magnet as it is metal.

The only other Metal Earth model I built was a Millenial Falcon years ago. The Metal Earth website lists the difficulty rating of the Falcon I had as challenging. I don't recall having near the trouble with it I did with Voyager which has a moderate difficulty rating. I broke 3 parts, but was able to fix them with a little ingenuity and JB Weld. They were as follows: 1) There are 7 panels that fold over on the main body, then a lot of the other parts are folded and assembled. During this I flexed one of the panels too much and it broke. I never flexed it thru a large angle, but I guess I flexed it too many times thru a small angle. After that I placed a foam disc inside the body to prevent the rest from flexing until I put the bottom plate on that holds them. 2) The 2 wire-like antennas that come out at about a 45-degree angle are really delicate. 3) The optical calibration target & radiator panel that connects to one of the 4 triangular legs that come out the back. This was probably mostly my incompetence. In addition to the circular foam disc I recommend the following items to aid assembly: 1) Small rectangular or square neodymium magnets to hold some of the items in place while tabs are folded/twisted. 2) There are a few YouTube videos of people assembling a Voyager that are quite helpful, especially the part about bending the radioisotope thermoelectric generators into a semi-cylindrical shape before bending their support rails. 3) Metal Earth has a great 360 view of a completed model that I found helpful. There are a few spare parts on the sheets, but I wish Metal Earth had made some spare parts of other parts. If you're not experienced with Metal Earth models and you're not passionate about Voyager (which is the reason I got it), you may want to build some of the easier models first.

Not sure how Metal Earth rate this model as "moderate" difficulty. Some of the pieces are absolutely tiny so this is definitely a challenging build. You will definitely need a small pair of needle-nosed pliers, some small nails or drill bits (for molding some pieces into circular shape), some tweezers and lots of light for this one. The model turned out very nicely, but if you are a beginner or not very experienced building these - avoid this model.

I wanted to like this. No. I wanted to LOVE this. I've been building miniatures and models since the early 1960s and the whole idea of these models looked compelling as heck. However the first of these I bought, the Voyager spacecraft, is so deeply flawed that I've simply trashed it and moved on. The first image shows a typical laser cut for this model. That image is a piece of the subreflector support truss and the circles superimposed on it are 145 and 115 pixels in diameter each. The nominal width of that truss member is 700 μm wide with the problematic portion being a little less than 80% of that or around 555 μm wide. Those measurements are more relative than absolute as my calipers just barely work at that small of a scale, but regardless, the difference between 700 and 550 μm is substantial and the weak point generated by the missing material crippled the build. Every single point where what would be a sprue connection point on a plastic model has a similar negative flashing issue (important material is missing, cut away by the process that delineated the parts in the first place). Even absolutely perfect, stressless severing of the parts from the panels still results in a severe weak spot at the contact point to the degree that the very narrow parts are almost cut in half by the missing material. Additionally, the reference model and the instructions disagree in important matters. The instructions symbolically indicate that the dish of the high gain antenna be assembled with the non-etched side as the concave surface, but the reference model, the photograph in both the Amazon ad and the Fascination site show the etched lines on the concave surface. In the opinion of a modeler with more than 50 years in the hobby, this is unbuildable as is. Now, it's possible I got a model from a bad batch - a batch where something went awry with the cutting process or . . . I don't know what. I'll accept that if I get an answer from the manufacturer explaining that this is the case (and replacing the model - although as mentioned, I tossed this one - I'm not in the habit of keeping trash lying around). But I would not recommend this model to anyone unless you're just going to cut the parts out and use them in some sort of collage (that actually sounds like a not-terrible idea - makes me kind of wish I hadn't junked it, but the trash is gone already).

This model was so much fun to make! The details are very accurate and it was a really cool research project to look at old photos of the real thing so that I could paint it accurately. It's not usual to paint these, but I saw a couple other reviewers do it and I am extremely satisfied with the results! Metal Earth models aren't for everyone but if you have the dexterity for it, and tweezers and a few other tools then it's a really cool project which doesn't take up much space.

The item arrived quickly, the packaging and the material inside (metal sheets and instructions) were undamaged. The rest is personal opinion, but wanted to share I was not happy with this, I did read about bending and what it was, but I was unprepared at the small size (even with reading glasses I was having trouble with seeing things with the metal parts/sheet). Also, if your interested in this, go watch some YouTube videos on Metal Earth, there are some awesome ones out there, and while I got the tweezers and pliers and snips, they recommend other items (like different size rods to roll.bend parts) and I strongly suggest you do this. While I like the look of the finished items shown, I was not able to complete this successfully myself and feel this was due to the ability to see/deal with the smaller parts. So if your eyesight is not great, you may want to think twice about this product line.

Easy to build, somewhat finicky to get all of the parts together. Looks really great. Good value for the build

Perfetto

O produto é muito bom. Representa perfeitamente a realidade

Ich hab das nicht bei Amazon, sondern beim Müller gekauft - deshalb steht da nicht "verifizierter Kauf". Es stehen da aber so viele Ein-Stern-Bewertungen, dass ich mich zur Rezension veranlasst fühle. Für rund 10-13 Euro ein wirklich erstklassiges und erstaunlich feindetailliertes Modell. Vollständig aus Metall. Allerdings (!) überhaupt nichts für Kinder oder Anfänger im Modellbau. Versierte Modellbauerfahrung und Feinwerkzeug ganz schwer von Vorteil. Weil es a.) mikroskopisch kleine Bauteile gibt, die gehalten, gefalten, geknickt oder auch Laschen durch Ösen geschoben werden müssen. Und dadurch b.) Kraft in den Fingern und Feingefühl gleichzeitig von Nöten sind. Sonst wird das nix. Also kleine Zangen, Pinzetten und Krokodilklemmen-Modellhalter. Die Fingerkuppen sind gerne mal zu groß - zumindest bei meinen Wurschtfingern. Kleber wird nicht zwangsweise gebraucht, ist aber in homöopathischen Mengen von Vorteil (es könnten erst falsch-, und dann nochmal geknickte Laschen abbrechen). Das Gros der Wenig-Stern-Bewertungen stammt ganz offensichtlich von Personen (schon auch am Rezensionstext erkennbar), die die notwendige Modellbau-Erfahrung noch nicht aufbringen konnten und dann ihre Enttäuschung zum Ausdruck brachten. Sie haben insofern auch nicht ganz unrecht, weil der Schwierigkeitsgrad nicht auf der Verpackung steht. Aber die Qualität eines Bausatzes sollte trotzdem nicht an den Fähigkeiten des Benutzers bewertet werden. Bei ambitionierter, erfahrener Herangehensweise mit dem richtigen Werkzeug entsteht ein wunderschönes Modell. Da wackelt auch nix.

Excelente figura para armar