Beta obviously suffered substantial damage since it was last seen in the show.  When found, the original aluminum moiré bezel rings, the radial pattern disks, the brass winder tube and rubber connecting hose were all sadly gone.  The now non-working Minerva 30-second stopwatch was simply loose inside.  The right knob on the control panel was missing, and a tiny clear rhinestone was glued to the top of the surviving left knob.  The two original outer jewels were lost and replaced with aqua-colored chatons (pointed-back rhinestones).  The antenna now sits even more skewed to the left than what's seen in its Catspaw (closed) close-up, whereas the top shell sits further to right on the midplate, indicating the shell once was detached and was glued back on:

(2292 x 1290 - from YouTube video)

The bottom shell also incurred a bit of heat damage, with the long sides showing some warping.  Lastly, carved into the flat underside's haircell texture is "E 48," whose meaning cannot be known - perhaps it was a stocking number assigned by the facility where the prop was shelved for a time after the show.

(1744 x 1348)

(2782 x 1451)

(2187 x 1249)

(1764 x 1138)

(1608 x 1569)

(2224 x 2038)

(1969 x 1849)

(1522 x 1514)

(1757 x 1443)

These "original find" photographs above were first posted on this blog.

Of course as you saw further above, the wounded little guy was given prior to its sale a makeover...
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(1560 x 1656)

(3024 x 4032)
from RPF member dremeldemon

Despite having key parts absent or altered when first found in 2023, it wasn't hard for anyone early on to know pretty much exactly what this communicator was.  It came out of the same shoe box that also contained the blatantly authentic Finney/TMOST hero Phaser 2, it had all the distinct hallmarks of a Wah-built comm, the bottom shell had a hole for the winder stem - and a stopwatch was inside!  Still, the auctioneer wanted to be rock-solid 100% sure, so some preliminary photos of the find were sent to our Expert Emeritus (the world's foremost authority on TOS communicators who, besides contributing most of the content on this site, two decades ago singlehandedly proved Alpha's legitimacy) for independent corroboration.  Here are a few small excerpts of some specific details he looked at to render his full assurance for Julien's...

The Shell

The small-pit haircell texture is a match to the 1960s-era Kydex (note - Alpha looks to have more of a shine due to different lighting):

Also the prop has no Velcro or trace of glue for such on the back - which is good, as Beta never actually did have Velcro.  Screencaps from "Elaan of Troyius" show the comm is not elevated that extra ±1/16" like it would be if it originally had it:

The Antenna

Here we have a clear match-up of every full or partial hole, wire gap and solder mark:

The back end of Beta's antenna is especially unusual due mostly to the prominent angled gap between the sheet and wire adjacent to the right hinge wheel (the red arrow below):

The Mic Grill

This small detail provides the ultimate fingerprint test.  It was unexpected to see the radio mesh inverted (like in only Epsilon), so that its embossed diamonds point inside rather than outward:

In an earlier study of Beta's mic grill, where we tried using "Day of the Dove" screencaps to locate exactly where on an intact radio mesh sheet those unusual dark diagonal stripes (between the green arrows) appear...

... the possibility of the mic grill being inverted was never explored.  Thus a new lighting test was required here.  So standing in for the real prop is a nearly identical radio mesh placed behind a nearly identically-cut control panel, positioned so that the diamonds and holes also match the newly found comm:

When we lit our re-created mic grill similarly to how Beta was when filming "Day of the Dove," all the bright diamond facets, separated by those odd dark diagonal stripes, sure enough appear:

A mere two lit facets in our re-creation (in the upper right corner of the mic grill, circled in cyan) are not seen in "Dove."  Since those bright spots should be there regardless where on the radio mesh the piece was cut from, their absence can only be attributed to a bit of dirt once lodged there.

To conclude, there is not the slightest bit of evidence to suggest this prop isn't fully authentic.

In addition, and not to tease, but as mentioned elsewhere on our site, there is also a "secret" tell, a tiny but observable feature seen ONLY in Wah-built communicators that is not published anywhere on HeroComm, as a deterrent to forgers.  It was happily reported to Julien's that the tell was indeed clearly visible in the photos they supplied.
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2024 Auction Details:  Of the sixteen screencaps on the Julien's sales page for Beta, oddly half show not the actual hero prop but instead some of the hollow dummies:

If they felt the need for extra images of communicators beyond those from "Dove" and "Catspaw," why not use the additional screencaps of the actual item from "Dagger of the Mind" and "Elaan of Troyius" cataloged at the bottom of this page since 2021?

Also this second paragraph in their "Screen Matching" section...

"This screen matching revealed this piece in the hands of Captain James T. Kirk in the episode "Day of the Dove," one of only two instances where the movement of the central dial can be seen on screen and it is the ONLY time a hero is ever shown in close-up. It has also been matched to the classic episodes "Catspaw" and "Friday’s Child."

... shockingly contains three factual errors.  Firstly, Beta's central dial (moiré pattern) is seen spinning only once, in Day of the Dove*.  Even more daffy, it ISN'T "the ONLY time a hero is ever shown in close-up."  Alpha is seen in close-ups twice, and both are of better quality:

(mouse over for the full HD cap)

That's why, after all, we named way back that one the primary, or 'Alpha,' hero communicator.

* Some slight fluctuations in Beta's moiré area are seen from a distance in "Dagger of the Mind" and "Elaan of Troyius" as Kirk and Scotty each hold the comm, but both times it's only shifting reflections off the top transparency.

Lastly, and sure, this might be a bit nitpicking, but while Beta does appear (barely) in "Friday's Child" it's so out of focus that no details useful for screen-matching are visible:

Summary... that a major auction house got so many easy facts wrong with a marquee item like this, then didn't bother to correct themselves even though our above critique was posted well before the sale; this after also botching the prop's restoration, is depressing - and, frankly, a little disquieting.
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As for the wax on the back cover, it can be reasoned that Wah, as a final step in building the comm, put a small glob of warmed, pliable (and lightweight) beeswax on the installed stopwatch's backside and pressed down over it the bottom shell, smushing out the wax while it conformed to the gap, thus pushing the stopwatch tighter against the top shell.  However, the same later heat (likely from bad storage) that warped the bottom shell's sides must have also altered the wax's original shape, as it looks to have since flowed a bit to one side.

One other lost inside part (that hasn't been mentioned yet) was a thin spacer that needed to be placed between the shell and the stopwatch face - this to elevate the watch over the bit of the hinge axle epoxy that ended up at a spot where the watch would otherwise sit.  This spacer very possibly took the shape of a wide, flat washer, around 1/16 to 1/8" thick, likely held on in part by the long bead of glue that still partially circles inside at the edge of the shell's moiré hole.  It cannot be known what the part was made of, but our guess would be something humble (and lightweight), such as cardboard or sheet balsa.

By the way, if you're looking to build a super-accurate Beta replica and want a stopwatch just like what's in the original - but you can't find a Minerva - try seeking a Meylan, as they can have a similar construction with the hinged back lids.

2024 Refurbishment Details:  It seems the stopwatch's miraculous existence was not enough to inspire the auction team to find a way of returning any part of it to the prop's inside, where you'd no doubt agree it belongs.  Near criminal, since at a minimum the failed watch movement alone could have been easily extracted from the original casing with the removal of just three screws...

... and swapped out with a fresh, working movement.  This would have at least allowed the preservation inside the comm of not just the original casing with Wah's unique beeswax pad but the winder knob with its remnants of the rubber tube.  An even better option would have had the failed movement instead repaired by a jeweler, thus allowing a near 100% of the original watch to be reinstalled, but clearly this high-minded (but less cheap) possibility was never pursued.

It's at least hoped the replacement stopwatch now in Beta is also a Minerva, but since no photos of the refurbished insides were ever released, we don't know.  We also don't know if the replacement watch is like the original without a reset button, or like the pictured extra watch with (which don't snap back to zero on the third press - they just continue running where they last stopped).  You can figure the new watch also doesn't have on its casing a copy of the beeswax pad.
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Left

20ss Emerald AB

20ss Blue Zircon

16ss Hyacinth

16ss Crystal AB

16ss Light Amethyst AB
16ss Violet AB
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To know what Beta's original moiré pattern looked like, we fortunately have very good data from "Day of the Dove," albeit for a very short length of time (about 2½ seconds).  Still, that snippet contains just enough data for us to make a concise assessment of what was there.  Of course, just like in the Alpha hero, it used two overlapping Edmund Scientific #4 radial line patterns; the top transparent layer glued in place while the 1-inch diameter white cardstock layer - attached to a 30-second stopwatch - rotated below, creating the famous "spider" effect that's actually an ever-moving whirl of growing and shrinking arcs:

To see if Beta's spider pattern originally behaved like Alpha's - rotating clockwise with the stopwatch, 360 degrees every 30 seconds - we started with the two sharp caps you see above; one early and one late in the shot.  The goal in each was to "re-circle" the moiré bezel ring, accurately restoring its circular shape and orientation; this to then compare them.  Nicely in these images we have two consistent reference lines at a near-exact right angle to each other and on planes parallel to the bezel ring:  1) the top edge of the control panel, and 2) the right bottom fold of the control well.  These lines, when copied and moved to form a box (in red below) around the bezel ring, eventually allowed us to correct for the changing viewing angle and camera-zoom while Kirk lowers the comm in his hands...

The resulting red parallelograms were righted, meticulously skewed back into rectangles, and the bezel rings contained within - at this point ovals - were reduced in the long axis to return them to their original circles.

Note that while in 2.4 seconds the stopwatch would have rotated the bottom layer nearly 29 degrees, the spider pattern turned only about 9 degrees:

So what's going on here?  To figure it out, we sought to reproduce in Photoshop this strange motion by shifting around the position of two Pattern #4 layers while rotating one of them.  And indeed one positioning closely replicates what's in the screenshots, when the bottom rotating layer is a tiny 0.008" off-center and the top transparency is 0.023" off-center to the right (the cyan crosshairs mark the stopwatch axle beneath):

According to our study, over the course of the full 30 second stopwatch rotation, the "spider" roughly maintained a vertical orientation but with a bit of wobble, leaning first to the right and then to the left, then back again.  The first two images in the simulated sequence below, at 0.0 and at 2.5 seconds, contains the portion captured in "Day of the Dove":

Remember this whole time the spidery arcs are also quickly expanding towards the top and shrinking from the bottom.

In real life, disks cut to our exact specifications (along with the bezel rings - see below) would match up about like this:

Note - the picture above right is of a precision replica currently under construction by one of our friends that's aiming to perfectly emulate Beta's look in "Dove," and when done a video of its operation will be posted here, to inspire and aid your future builds.

2024 Refurbishment Details:  Beta's missing original moiré disks were replaced for the sale.  Its operation is seen in the YouTube video referenced above for a continuous duration of about eight seconds:

Since these clips in no way show the pattern or orientation seen in "Day of the Dove" nor any portion of our simulated sequence just above, it's clear the disks were neither cut nor positioned anywhere near our measurements, which were first posted here three years prior to the sale.  The new spinning disk also measures from photographs (using an easy pixel-ratio method, illustrated below) to be almost exactly 1/16" smaller in diameter than the 1.01" seen in both Alpha's and Beta's cardstock disks:

This means the surface area of the new spider pattern is only 87 percent that of what Wah installed.

!Moiré Pattern Vertical Gap

Next, was the original top transparency installed with the ink-side up, like in Alpha (so the lines are exposed to the outside), or down?  You may think this is a trivial aspect, but it's actually huge when the centers of both top and bottom patterns are very close to each other, as they were in Beta.  The variable at play here is the amount of vertical gap between the two surfaces with printed ink.  When the two sets are tight together (i.e. the transparency's ink is down, almost touching the spinning layer), the spider arcs appear uniform, dark, and with well-defined edges.  However, when the ink is up, the vertical separation caused by the mere thickness of the transparency plastic is enough to make room for a shadow to be cast of the top layer onto the bottom (especially when the prop is lit by a point source).  This "third" set of lines generates unexpected and even bizarre blotchy patterns like those below:

Since no evidence of these effects is present in the "Day of the Dove" close-up, it can be reasoned that Beta's original transparency was ink-side down, plus the bottom disk must have rotated level and VERY close - studies indicate less than 0.020" - to the transparency's underside.

2024 Refurbishment Details:  The vertical distance between the new transparency and paper disk is much more than that, which now creates the inauthentic blotchy moiré pattern when the prop is viewed under point source lighting:

Transparency Hole

Lastly, a cap from "Dagger of the Mind" tells us the original top transparency had the same hole in its center as does Alpha (which is 1/32" or 0.031" in diameter), and there's no reason to think Wah wouldn't have used the same drill bit on both:

2024 Refurbishment Details:  The hole in the replacement transparent layer has been sized from photos via the pixel-ratio method to have a diameter of ±0.06, twice the size as in Alpha.

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The subject of moiré patterns is discussed in greater detail on our A Moiré Story page.  And the means to print out clear, accurate Pattern #4 images can be located here.
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2024 Refurbishment Details:  Only the left knob survived, with the right having been replaced for the refurbishment with a more heavily worn Aurora slot car hub Type "C."  And there was also a surprise addition to the found comm - a small, clear, faceted rhinestone glued to the top of the remaining left hub (red arrow below):

Our guess is that clear gem on the left is a Swarovski 8ss Crystal chaton (pointed-back rhinestone) applied not by Wah but likely at the same later time the two aqua chatons were installed on the outer jewel bezels.  Now while it is true that screencaps from 1st Season's Dagger of the Mind seem to hint of such raised jewels crowning Beta's knobs...

... further study (below) shows those bright spots to be just that; glare from the studio lights reflecting off the hubs' chrome:

This, plus the fact that no other Wah-built comm has rhinestones seen there, nor have any of the rhinestones he did use been shown to be pointed-back, means the greenish (10ss Chrysolite?) chaton gem added to the replacement right knob is also completely inauthentic.  Had Julien's consulted us on this, we would have even suggested the removal of the clear stone from the surviving knob, thus returning the knob to the look it had in Season 3.
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