The kit went together in 4.5 hours. I did a little of my own extra work to correct some of the flaws. Once you start, you just keep going and moving along until you finally click the display stand into place. Speaking of that, I had the same problem with the stand as everyone else. It failed to make contact after all the hull pieces were on. I just sanded the piece blocking it down a little, patched it with Gunship Grey paint, and it works perfect.

Assembly is straight forward, and everything is perfectly detailed. I still don't know how they got all those windows cut so sharply! The corners of all the windows are clean, sharp, and look like they cut it with a laser, or maybe even molded that way.

I ran into only a few problems. First was the fit of a few parts due to the fact that the outer hull panels conform to clear internal pieces that literally fill the interior of the ship. The only places I had gaps were on the underside of the warp engines (not bad at all) and behind the shuttlebay (noticable)

At the very tail of the ship, the two halves leave a good sized gap behind the shuttlebay. The shuttlebay doors are a separate piece which cover a lot of it, so that was a saving grace. But where it says "Enterprise" under the doors, mine says "Enter prise" It's a little thing in the overall scheme, but it's annoying. I still need to find a paint to match the tan/grey of the hull. Once I do, I will fill and paint that. Then I will use an "Enterprise" decal from the Enterprise-B AMT kit to replace the printed name that has a big gap inbetween two letters. Don't let that turn you away though. I read the main review here before buying this and almost didn't because of the gaps that he had on his model. I suspect that internal parts were not cleaned up enough, or for some rare reason had too much mass to them. In my example, my parts had a difficult fit until I removed the burrs from where they attatched to the trees. And on a lot of those internal parts, you can easily take an exacto knife and shave them down a few millimeters. If you do that, then you get a spectacular fit. A friend of mine looked over the model and could not find the seams on the sides of the Engineering hull, or on top of the ship. Mine totally disappear. I have literally no light leaks on mine. I credit that to careful observing of part fits, and a little luck. The gaps I mentioned above, do not leak light despite being noticable to the eye. They have overlapping parts on the inside, so that helps a lot.

All in all, this is a really good kit. Don't let negative reviews dissuade you. Patience and work to find the solution to any problems that may crop up will pay off bigtime. If you put in a little of your own work on this model, it can turn out truley fantastic. Remember; any problem you face with this kit can be solved.

So enjoy this nice little project that takes a lot of strain off of your painting hand ;)

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