The AMT Starship USS Enterprise Model kit

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Today, we reach back into my childhood for . . .

The AMT Starship Enterprise model kit, which was originally released in 1968. This is quite probably the best-selling sci-fi oriented model kit in history, as it was essentially in continous production from 1968 until about 1993. I'm sure I've built at least 5 of these.

Pictured here is a copy of the kit from the late '60's or very early '70's, which I purchased on eBay some years back. This example features engine nacelle caps molded in translucent amber plastic, as well as a grain'o'wheat bulb lighting kit to illuminate the engines and the top and bottom saucer lights. While kits popped from the original molds for this kit yielded a decent-looking replica, starship Enterprise sticklers will quickly find several detail flaws. There is also a MAJOR structural defect in the design of the kit where the warp engines attach to the engineering (lower cigar) hull. It was very difficult or impossible to get these things attached and aligned in the first place, and once they were attached, they were extremely fragile.

Klingons were not the chief nemesis of this model. Mom's feather duster presented a much more grave threat.

The original version of this kit was built and "battle damaged" to represent the USS Constellation in the second season episode, "The Doomsday Machine." The difficult-to-align engines were probably actually helpful in this instance. It was also built "stock" to appear in the window of Space Station K-7 in the episode "The Trouble With Tribbles." In several years of Googling, I have found no evidence that the "Constellation" miniature is still in existence, but a picture of the "Tribbles" Enterprise showed up sometime back after having been purchased at an auction.

The kit was re-tooled in the mid '70's. This led to several detail improvements as well a much more sturdy, easier-to-build replica, but for every detail that was improved, another one was compromised. An excellent and comprehensive history of this kit can be found here, so I won't spend many keystrokes re-hashing that in this post.

AMT never did release an "accurate" version of this kit, and a cottage industry has long been in place to make resin replacement parts to improve the model. It's fair to say the if you want a replica with excellent accuracy from this kit, you will literally need to modify or replace every single part in the kit.

These pictures depict a version that is very close to the first Enterprise kit I had as kid, though by the time I got one, the lighting had been discontinued, and the decal sheet had been replaced with one containing names of "all the ships in the fleet." This would have been a desirable improvement had AMT not switched to a font that looked totally wrong. I imagine there were some kids who bought and built a full fleet of 14 of these kits, but I was never quite that crazy.