After twenty odd years, I’m embracing my inner geek—and my secret starship of shame

This is the bookcase in my bedroom.  It has items on it that connect to the kid still inside me, from the Indian drum on the first shelf, to my collection of horror & sci-fi comic book reprints from the 1950s on the bottom one.

There’s been a recent addition to this collection, on the very top of the bookcase on the left hand side.  That is a model of the Starship Voyager, from the Star Trek tv show of the same name that aired 1995-2001.

For over twenty years, that spaceship has been hidden away in my bedroom closet, with an old t-shirt draped over it.  (There’s a reason it’s been hidden, I’ll get to that in a minute.)  Anyway, around a month ago I was cleaning out my bedroom closet, saw it in the far back and thought “I should just throw that away.”

But when I fished it out and removed the t-shirt… why have I kept it hidden?  And up on top of the bookcase it finally went.

Here’s why it was squirreled away so long ago:  back in 1999-2000, when the internet was here but people still shopped in stores & the like, I’d spend my lunch hours downtown browsing various shops.  There was one store I was particularly fond of, that sold sci-fi collectibles.  And one day I saw this model ship on display and was amazed; for a model kit the attention to detail was startling. 

When I asked the salesman what I was looking at, he said “Oh that’s from Bandai, a Japanese company that makes high-end model kits.  They’re expensive, but have great resell value.”   When I asked how much the kit was, he said $76.00.   WHAT!

(Maybe that doesn’t sound so high today, but 25 years ago, the typical Star Trek model was $12-15.00.)   He told me that while the one on display wasn’t wired, the kits did come with wiring & lighting.

I didn’t buy it the first day, but returned a couple times to look at it.  Finally on the third or fourth day, the salesman told me “You should know I only have one of those left.”

I bought it.

You can still buy one today, but the price has gone up significantly

For the next couple of weeks, I’d come home from work and get busy with this model kit, in a thousand pieces on my dining table.  While I had experience modeling, I’d never worked with electrical wiring before and it was extremely daunting.  But eventually I finished, loaded it with batteries and turned it on.

Only some lights on top of the saucer came on, but they were yellowish and flickered, and made a buzzing sound.  After a few minutes, I smelled wires burning and those few lights blinked out.  It wouldn’t light again.

I remember feeling both angry & embarrassed, spending so much money on such a thing.  I was going to throw it away, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.  So up in the closet it went, where it remained for 22 years.

That is, until recently when I thought “Even if it is broken, it’s still a beautiful model and deserves to be seen.”  And for a couple weeks, I’ve been admiring it greatly.

But that isn’t the end of the story. 

A couple weeks ago, I reached out to an old friend of mine, Tom from Tom’s Sci-Fi Modeling and asked if he remembered me.  (We used to hang out on a science fiction message board in the early 2000s.)  He said he sure did, and we caught up on things since we last spoke in 2004.

I told him about my Bandai Voyager model, and sent him the photo above.  He said “It looks brand new.  Those are worth a few bucks.”  I said I thought so, but had no intention of selling it.  Further, I wanted to make it work like it was supposed to 20 years ago.

He told me I’d have to scout around for a .PDF of the assembly manual if I wasn’t comfortable opening it without one, but the good news was I wouldn’t have to break any cement seals.  He offered to sell me a small bundle of model wire and pack of microbulbs for $11.00 total.   I got them in 3 days.

I did write Bandai (for a copy of the manual) and left messages on a couple of sci-fi sites, but got no responses.  I wound up spending most of one evening figuring out how to open the model without breaking it, but found the issue right away; one of the main wires had been looped around a cluster of bulbs and melted through.  I replaced a couple sections of the wire and all of the bulbs coated in black, and made buffers using old corks.  

After I closed it up, I installed fresh batteries and said a silent prayer to Gene Roddenberry.  “Oh Great Bird of the Galaxy, make this damn model ship work again!”

I flipped the switch and light POURED from the model like I’d never seen.

(I’m sorry for the grainy photo, but I have an old camera and took this with no flash and all the lights out.)

Well, on the tv show it took Voyager 7 years to make it back home from the Delta Quadrant; as for my own starship, it took 3 times that long to be seen again.

But I’d say it was worth the wait!