AMT K-7 Space Station
AMT K7 art
Miscellany
AMT K7 Box Art

AMT Kit # S955
Scale: ?
Produced: 1976.
This model was never reissued by AMT.
It doesn't look anything like the shooting miniature.
Oh, alright. It has three arms and a hanger bay at the bottom.
But that's it!
Right: Side panel of the box. Click to see a larger image. AMT K7 Box side panel
This has to be the smallest production kit of the Enterprise! Small Enterprise
AMT K7 Parts 18 white and 7 clear styrene parts. No decals. No stand.
AMT K7 Hangar Here's the 2-part hangar bay. It looks flatter than it should be and would look good with a couple of styrene disks in between to thicken up this part. This is also a great opportunity to open up the bay doors and add a bit of an interior.
AMT K7 Main Hull Here's either the main energizer, or the cargo compartment at the back of the stations main hull. On the actual shooting miniature, this feature is a drum shape with a shallow domed top and a hemispherical bottom. As you can see, AMT chose to make it a soft cube shape.
AMT K7 small habitat 2 of the three smaller habitat sections. The one on the right is right out of the box. The one on the left I've sanded down the molded in grid work. This will better allow the windows to be masked off in painting and will help diffuse the internal lighting that will be added later.
AMT K7 Layout

I bult this model when it first came out and one of the great dissapointments was that the arms had a slight twist in them resulting in an obvious misalignment between each pod. It looked horrible! So I'm going to take steps to eliminate this flaw.

I've diagrammed the stations layout onto tracing paper using the center connector as the hub. Then I drew out 3 lines at 120 degree intervals. These are the positions for each arm.

AMT K7 Assembly After transferring the diagram to a thick piece of hardboard, I taped the parts down and glued them together with a solvent glue
AMT K7 Asmbling the main connector Here's a close-up of the hub. You can see the reference lines for each station arm. All I had to do was connect the arms and shift each pod around until the pod's center lined up with my reference lines.
AMT K7 Glueing down the arms After applying some epoxy glue to each arms connector, the arms were positioned and taped down. To ensure no movement while the epoxy cured, I weighed them down with whatever heavy objects I could find. In the middle is a hair dryer. I recall a stronger epoxy bond can be achieved by raising the ambient temperature during curing. So I didn't think it would hurt to give it a shot.
   
©2007 Steven Lee
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