When I first built the TOA NUVA CUBE, I wasn’t happy with the fact that the symbols were all mounted to trans-light blue plates. They don’t look right with the TAHU NUVA symbol. I then had the idea of seeing how well they’d glow under blacklight. There are two similar looking light blue shades of transparent plastic. One glows, and the other doesn’t. Guess which one was used for the 8×8 plates? The next idea was to look at filling in the gaps with things that would glow. Fortunately, I was able to prove that the 1×1 round plates are made from the glowing plastic. A few orders on Bricklink and some scrounging of my personal supply ended up with the result of 31 orange, 44 green, and 36 blue plates, which were all added into the gaps in the symbols. The transparency between symbols is still present, though the mismatched trans-colors don’t look quite as nice.

So then there’s the other problem. The orange and green pop right out the instant they get even a tiny amount of UV radiation exposure. The blue ones…don’t. In fact, if you look at the upper right row on the GALI plate, you can see that the middle plate is even less brilliant than its neighbors. Still, if you don’t mind not looking at the GALI and KOPAKA sides, it’s pretty cool looking. The final problem that results is that the TNO plates tend to blend in very well with the red of the TAHU NUVA symbol when seen at a low angle, so without the blacklight, that surface is best hidden from view.

All in all, it was an interesting experiment, and it really is cool to look at in a dark room, but I’m really hoping to see a more glowy version of the blue plates show up at some point.