The Classic Star Trek Phasers

Part two.. The 2nd Season Page 5

By Richard A. Coyle

 

HandlePlug.JPG (3523 bytes)Sadly, this effort and cleverness was not carried through to the system to make these handles removable. They settled on using a plain simple old two prong twist locking electrical extension cord plug and socket. This was so "household" and everyday familiar that I am sure it is why we never see anyone unlock and change the power pack. (Having tried to make this feature, I understand how hard this simple trick is, here is nothing I could find that would work either.)

  

 

GPh2MainPlug.JPG (5315 bytes)While we are talking about these special features let's go over them. The working features of the pistol body were: the rotating ring (discussed in the beginning of this article). Then there was a twist knob on the side of the pistol body with the five settings. Of course, there was a working trigger which operated the tip light and the feature that moved the tip in and out. 

 

Gregmainbodytop.JPG (5522 bytes) What happened was that as the phaser one is loaded into the pistol body, the front of the phaser engages a pocket that it has to push forward. This socket connects to the tip so that when the socket is pushed forward, the tip telescopes out of the muzzle. When the phaser one is removed, this action would, of course, retract the tip. As a point of interest to nitpickers and fans of bloopers, there are a couple of scenes where you can see were this part failed to engage or failed to hold and the tip pocket has slipped under the phaser one and the tip has withdrawn into the muzzle. Check for this in a scene from "The Conscience of the King" and other episodes.

GrayBluerRear.JPG (4019 bytes)Next moving rearward and up behind the phaser one but still on the left side of the main pistol body, we come to the little brass rod that sticks out from the side. When I first watched the shows, I remembered Captain Kirk telling the crew to lock the phasers on stun. I believed that was what this button was for, to lock the setting knob into place. I was wrong.

 

  

GregKnobDetail.JPG (6274 bytes)  In the real world, it was the lock release for the removable phaser one. The others simply had the cast phaser one glued into the pistol body and dummy brass rods which were inoperative.   

 

TipKnobs.JPG (5074 bytes) The next stop is up on top at the rear we find the pistol setting knob. On the these later models they found a great little knob with markings and numbers. It had a aluminum cone shaped ring with the numbers and, with a little cutting and work, a small knob to twist it with. These came off radio gear ten turn knobs and so costly, so a few were replaced with simple machined copies.

TenKnob.JPG (2197 bytes)

  

RadRemove.JPG (6484 bytes) The final detail to describe is the rear radiator section. On the back ground far shot models there was a little detailing most that consisted of cutting six lines into the side, back and around to the other side. Then painted them silver.     

On the "heros" used for the inserts and close-ups there was a hand made radiator made up of four and only four aluminum plates sandwiched with three smoked plastic plates for spacers.


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