Building the Ahwahnee

Building the Ahwahnee - Cheyenne class construction

Available reference photos

Cheyenne ventral Copyright Rick Sternbach	Cheyenne angled Copyright Rick Sternbach The same image was used for the Behind the Scenes Card Game and was, for over two decades, the only image of the ship we had.	Cheyenne dorsal Copyright Rick Sternbach

What you need

2 AMT 1/2500 Enterprise-D kits (e.g. AMT 662)
1 AMT 1/1400 Enterprise-D kit (e.g. AMT 656)
Revell Typhoon class submarine (Revell 05138)
4 Stabilo Swing Cool highlighters
1 styrene sheet, thickness ~ 0.8 to 1mm
2-3 styrene sheets, thickness ~0.3 to 0.5 mm
Putty for the fillings

From the AMT kits, you only need the two saucer bottoms (25D02) as well as parts of the 25D01 (the neck, you have to cut that one out). From the 1/1400, you need two impulse engines and the bridge module. (These small pieces can be cast and molded quite easily, if you don't want to use the originals). From the Typhoon kit, you only need two small pieces.

The highlighters gave me a little headache. The original Stabilo Swing used on the model in 1990 seems to be out of production. If you happen to have some still lying around, concider yourself lucky. The Stabilo Swing Cool on the other hand is easy to get. It seems to be the successor of the old ones. The only notable difference are the missing finger grip rings (the copper rings on the nacelle), the dimensions and shape are virtually identical.

The 1 mm styrene is used for the two "wings" as well as the phaser strips. The 0.5 mm styrene is used for smaller details like the escape pod hatches. You don't have to model all the small details, but I always prefer my models (especially the smaller ones) to have as much texture to them as possible. The filming model most likely used thick tape for the effect, but depending on the quality these tapes have the tendency to come off after a while.

AMT656 1/1400
AMT662 1/2500
Revell typhoon
styrene sheet
Stabilo swing cool

image sources: stabilo.com, hobbylinc.com, scalemates.com

Workload and skill level

I would concider this the easiest build, therefore I suggest you start with this vessel. The construction is relatively straight forward; there is some styrene tooling involved, but very little filling.

Building the ship gives you a good idea of the various techniques involved, and you really cannot do any damage to the parts (e.g. if you cut in the wrong place). Just be careful with the impulse engines.

Setup

The saucer section is made of two 1/2500 saucer bottom pieces. As both saucer halves have the pins that would normally snap them together with their respective upper halves, you can use the pins as spacers as orientation for the thickness of the saucer. That way, the spacing is even. On the 1/2500, the neck is molded into the saucer, which means the basic structure of the ship is already in place without any effort.

One big question mark is the back of the saucer. we have no aft view of the ship, so all we can do is guess. As the part would be difficult to cover with styrene, I assumed that the two neck pieces that are still attached to the saucer tops were used here. It would make sense, considering that the saucer tops were used to build the Challenger, and that ship has no neck anyway.

The pylons are custom made from styrene sheets. From the only angled reference image we have, I estimate the thickness to be 0.8 to 1mm (for my build, I settled on 1mm sheets). Styrene is easy to work with, the only difficulty is a slight curve of the pylons (basically, you cannot cut in a straight line with a razor blade knife and break it off, as you would do with straight lines). The nacelles are 10 cm apart, but the piece itself is 11 cm wide (0.5 centimeters are used to attach the pylon to the nacelle).

Four highlighter pens are attached to the the tips of the wings. The highlighters are slightly shortened, the cap is glued to the pen, and I removed the pen reservoir.

Cheyenne with highlighters I printed the reference photo in scale to test the arrangement.
Cheyenne saucer halves The pins give a good impression of the saucer rim's height.
The neck The image illustrates how to cut the neck. To the left, the blue line shows how the main hangar will transition into the secondary hull. To the right, one of the Cheyenne saucer parts with the neck attached.

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