David O'Brien Spindrift Build

David O'Brien has built a customised version of the Polar Lights Land of the Giants Spindrift kit with lighting. Below you will find a gallery of pictures of the Spindrift build, a presentation on the build, and a video.

Spindrift Model Build Summary

This page features a gallery of photos and a video of my extensively customized model build of the Spindrift, the sub-orbital transport from the "Land of the Giants" television show. The basic model is the "Land of the Giants Spaceship" kit from Polar Lights, which itself is a re-issue of the original kit made by Aurora. In order to achieve a higher degree of model accuracy relative to the design features of the Spindrift visible on-screen in the show, essentially all components of the model were either scratch-built or heavily modified reworks of the model kit's stock hull and cabin structures; no third-party aftermarket components were used. The teardrop-shaped navigation dome was vacuum formed around a custom hand-carved wooden mold. There are 46 LED lights installed on five separate circuits, illuminating the dome, cockpit instrumentation and monitors, ceilings, passenger cabin spotlights and seat displays, intakes and cabin power status panel, exhaust, and landing lights, all of which are controlled by switches in the customized display base. The distinctive red-orange hull color was enamel acrylic automotive paint, professionally color-matched to screenshots from the show. The blue and gray livery stripes on the exterior are airbrushed acrylic. All other markings and interior design elements, including the cockpit instrumentation station panels, are waterslide decals which I custom designed, mostly by eye, in Microsoft PowerPoint. The upper hull remains fully removable to retain the original kit's unique visual access to the inner structure containing the cockpit, entryway, and passenger cabin. The entire build took me the better part of four years to complete and is fully documented in the linked presentation. I hope you like it and that you may find it a useful reference for your own modeling project. Thanks for looking.

- David O'Brien

Spindrift Build Gallery

Spindrift Build Presentation

Spindrift Video