Andy Moore

Yes, Djarin acquires a new ship in the episode. I quite like the Naboo starfighter but I'm not sure yet about having one as Mando's new ride. It doesn't make much sense for a bounty hunter to have a tiny one-man fighter. Some of the mods to it are a bit much as well. The hot rod, carburetor-though-the-bonnet thing is a bit OTT. The natural metal finish is nice though. The script seems to half imply that he might be able to find a new Razor Crest at some point though, which would be nice. Okay, so on to the rear hatch. I'll need to keep this one openable, and fortunately it looks a lot better that the side doors and is fine without modification, apart form one glaring issue, that being the copyright info moulded to the outside of the door. I won't blame Revell for this, as it was probably a requirement from Lucasfilm to have the copyright info somewhere visible. It is a bit of a pain to clean off though since it's on a panel with raised edges around it. That makes scraping or sanding a bit tricky. In the end, I removed the lettering as best as I could, then covered over the area with two strips of styrene. There are no raised panels there on the real ship, so this isn't accurate, but it looks better than traces of the lettering showing through after painting. The fit of the door in the fuselage is pretty good, but it won't stay closed on its own, so I've added a magnet to the rear of the door to keep it shut. The door hinge is trapped in place by the back end of the floor panel but, as I won't be fitting the full floor, I cut the rear section off so I could glue that in place to secure the door. To hold the other magnet that'll keep the door closed, I glued a length of square styrene tube into the rear of the fuselage. The tube had a section cut out in the middle into which the magnet was glued. I did think about adding some kind of tab to the outside of the door that I could use to pull it open, but it's easy enough to just get a fingernail under the edge of the door and lever it down. I'll only need to open it to switch the light on and off, or swap the batteries. I've also added the rear landing gear hump. This is built up from two side pieces and a lower panel, and the fit is pretty good so long as you spend a few minutes cleaning up the slightly flashy edges of the parts. The gear bays looked a little bare, so I've added a few bits and pieces to liven them up a bit. Up at the front of the fuselage, there are a couple of short slots engraved just ahead of the side doors. These should be deeper and wider to match the (digital) studio model so I've drilled and reamed them out. They're a bit messier than I'd like because I couldn't drill all the way through the plastic as they're located right where the side curves into the bottom of the fuselage, and the styrene is very thick there. Hopefully they should look okay once painted and with a wash in them. In other news, I've just finished clipping together the little Bandai RC. It's pretty nice, although somehow not quite as good as I was expecting. It doesn't have quite the crispness of detail that we saw on the Tantive and SSD, although some of that impression may be due to the swirly twirly silver plastic. Not sure what I'm going to do with this one yet, but I don't think I'll paint it as Mando's Razor Crest. I might hold off to see if he eventually gets another one, or just paint it in a different scheme - Slave 1 colours migh look nice on it? Andy

It'd be a pretty close call between Slave 1 and a Gonk for me Thanks for the link Richard. They look like some pretty nice parts. If it wasn't winter, and freezing cold in my modelling room, I'd probably print up some parts myself for the RC. This is a bit of a slow build for me but, as mentioned above, I've done some work on the side and rear doors, which needed doing before I could button up the hull. Out of the box, the doors are hinged to allow them to be opened to show off the interior, but the hinges are very toy-like. I'll be having the side doors closed, which side-steps the need to keep them workable, and meant I could just concentrate on making them look better. The rear door will need to be openable though, so I can access the battery box for the LED I put in the cockpit. Fortunately though, the hinge on that door is almost hidden from the outside, so that one required less work. There were two main issues to fix with the side doors, the first being the over-sized hinges on the bottom, and the second is the little notch and tab at the top which is there to give you something to pull the door open with. In the closed position, the fit along the bottom of the door is quite gappy, and the slots for the hinge are far too clunky looking to be left as is. It doesn't look much better in the open position, although if you want to keep the door workable, there's probably not much you can do to improve it. The detail on the inside of the door is very nice though. The first job with the doors was to cut away the hinge from the bottom and slice off the small tab at the top. With that done, and the edges of the door cleaned up a little, the fit in the fuselage opening is actually very good. The door sits slightly recessed, which is screen accurate. That just left the notch at the top to be filled. After spending some time staring at slightly blurry screen grabs I, at first, thought that the horizontal top panel on the door (the one with the notch) was slightly recessed. As such, I was initially going to cut out, and replace that whole panel, rather than just fill in the notch. After some further blurry studying though, I came to the conclusion that, in fact, the two vertical panels that sit below it are actually slightly raised. That was simple enough to replicate with a couple of strips of thin styrene sheet, and an off-cut from one of the sprues was used to fill the notch at the top. You can also see here that I've filled in the hinge slots on the fuselage. That was done with a couple of fillets taken from a styrene tube that had a diameter that roughly matched the curvature of the hull. The fillets were then blended in with a little Mr Surfacer. If you look at the screen shot below, you can just about see that those two vertical panels have a slight highlight and shadow at the sides that certainly makes them look like they sit proud of the rest of the door surface. I won't catagorically state that the way I've done it is accurate, but if nothing else, it adds a little more surface texture. You can also see two little black squares on the curved fuselage below the door, right where the hinge slots were on the kit. They look like small holes, but I don't know if I want to try cutting them out now, so I'll probably replicate them with some squares of black decal after painting. That photo also shows what's going on in the gap directly below the door. There's a horizontal panel that appears to curve inward at each end, then rectangular openings at the ends either side of the panel. The horizontal panel also seems to have a little recess on the left side, but that might just be a weathering mark. On the kit, the first thing to do was cut off the lip that runs along the bottom of the door opening. The horizontal panel was cut form thick styrene sheet and sanded to round off each end. That was then glued to the bottom of the door. The length of the panel was just guesstimated from the screen shot. Before gluing the door in place, I did cut a little recess into the end of the panel. Again, I'm not sure if this is actually what I can see on the photo, or if it is just a smear of dirt. I don't really mind either way, as it adds an extra detail, accurate or not. The openings at either end of the panel were blanked off with styrene from the inside. The mods to the rear door will be coming up next. Andy

They... they blew up a quad. I'm mean, they actually blew up a quad. I can't believe they blew up a quad. What the frell... They. Blew. Up. A. Quad. There can be no greater crime, no infamy so... infamous. They blew up a quad!!! Apart from that, episode 4 was excellent Andy

I thought the first two episodes were great, the second one in particular. I'm particularly enjoying how they're deepening the lore of the Tuskens, something they began in Mandalorian. I loved the lizard-guided spirit journey Fett went on to find his Gaffi stick. The third episode was indeed a disappointment though. The chase sequence looked like something from Phantom Menace, and was made worse by the use of that horrible, juddery speeded-up effect. The quadrophenia speeders were a bizzare choice for Star Wars, and looked even more out of place on Tatooine. And, of course, adding a bunch of teenagers to any show always makes it better, right? Hopefully, this was a passing blip, and episode 4 will be better. Presumably Slave 1 will make an appearance at some point too. I've tweaked them a bit, just to bring them more in line with the show, and to remove those toy-like hinges. I do have the advantage that I'll be having them closed, so I don't need to make the hinges work. Apologies for the lack of updates. I just seem to have been very busy for the last week or so, and haven't found the time to post. Some further work has been done though, so I'll hopefully post an update later this week. Andy

He looks great Will. Nice work on the metallics. I've yet to see any of the McFarlane GW figures in the flesh, but they look to be well designed. GW really seem to be pushing the franchise at the moment, what with these and the crazy-expensive Bandai figures. Andy

Thanks everyone, Not at all Richard. Great ref shots - they'll come in very handy when I get to the painting and weathering. So, after taking a small break from the Crest over xmas, I've got a little more done over the last few days. Not a lot of build progress has happened, as most of the work has gone into prepping the upper and lower hull pieces before I can close them up. Before that though, there are a couple of additional points I wanted to make regarding the cockpit. Firstly, Revell seem to have put some thought into the design of the internal spaces, particularly in regard to adding lighting. I've gone a very basic route with lighting, just adding that single LED to the rear cockpit bulkhead wall, but if you want to take it further and add fibre optics to the instrument panel and sidewall panels, there's ample space between the cockpit sides and the fuselage to run the fibres and wiring through, all of which will be completely hidden. There's also plenty of space in the upper fuselage behind the cockpit compartments to hold the LEDs for the fibres. The other point is the dimensions of the cockpit. Revell have clearly had to compress everything slightly to fit the cockpit in the available space. You can see in the shot below that the back of the passenger seat on the filming set is roughly level with the back edge of the side instrument panel, and that there's a good couple of feet of wall behind the seat where you can see some pipes and pouches hanging up. On the model, the passenger seat is again level with the back of the instrument panel, but in this case it sits right up to the rear bulkhead with no additional space behind it. I think this is simply a case of Revell having to deal with the reality of fitting the cockpit into the fuselage space, whereas the filming set is a stand-alone area that's been designed to give the maximum space for filming, and probably doesn't accurately follow the real dimensions of the Razor Crest. Before I can finish installing the cockpit though, I've had to do some prep work and clean-up on both the upper and lower fuselage mouldings. The main thing that needed doing on the large lower fuselage piece was to clean up the off-set mould lines running vertically down the nose section. They're not overly pronounced, but they do run across a lot of panel lines and other details, and need to be dealt with. The left-hand window cutout on mine also needed some remedial work, as there was a large ridge of plastic that looked like it had been smeared out when the mould elements separated. This shot also shows the texture difference between the mould sections. The front area is quite smooth, while the texture left by the side mould element is quite rough. There's also a marked difference in the panel lines - those from the front section of the mould have clean, square edges, while those from the side section are more of a soft, rounded 'V' profile. It would have been nice to see a little more continuity in surface detail on these slide moulded parts. While cleaning up the mould off-set, the panel line that runs around the lower edge of the fuselage pretty much disappeared through sanding. That required some re-scribing, which was a little tricky due to the panel line being both on a curve and sitting at the edge of an angle. A length of insulation tape on the vertical side of the panel line, and a few light passes with a scriber got the job done. With the off-set cleaned up, the nose section looks a lot better. It's not perfect as those variations in the panel line width and profile are still there, but that's not obvious unless you look really close. I've lessened the plastic texture too with a light sand, and the styrene does seem to smooth down quite well without much effort - you just need to be carefull around the raised details. Just to point out too, there's also a mould off-set that runs along the bottom edge of the fuselage on each side, from the small conical reccess to where the rear landing gear bay attaches. I'd already sanded it down in the photo below, but you can just see a small remnant of it just aft of the bottom of the side hatch cutout, and small kinks in the panel lines where the off-set ran across them. That brings us to the side hatches themselves, which also need some work if you want to make the model look a little more accurate. I'll leave that for the next post though, to avoid this one running too long. P.S. if you've not caught the first two episodes of Book of Boba Fett yet, go and watch them immediately as it's as good, if not better, than The Mandalorian. Andy

Thanks for the comments everyone Depends on the model. Things like Games Workshop figures have official colour schemes that you can choose to follow, or you can go your own way. With other fantasy figures it's entirely up to you, although the manufacturer will often have a painted example or artwork to act as inspiration. This one was a 3D print and the original file was shown as a grey scale render, so it's up to each modeller to choose a colour scheme. The red skin tones used here were vaguely inspired by the Red Prince character from the Divinity Original Sin games. Andy

Really like the way this is coming together Pete. The combination of scratch building and 3D printing is something I've really come to enjoy. I know just how much satisfaction you will have got from designing parts like that component that attaches the legs to the body - something relatively simple, but which magically brings everything together once it's fitted, all from your head and the calculations you need to make so that it fits the way it should. Are you going with the colours from the illustration, or something different? Andy

Thanks for the comments everyone. Well, now that the festivities are over, I've had a chance to finish off the cockpit. It was only after I'd glued all the parts together that it occured to me to have a look at the decal sheet to see what Revell had supplied for the instrument panels. I normally ignore IP decals if the parts have moulded details, so I hadn't really looked that closely up until now. As it turns out, the decals for the panels are actually pretty good, and I wish I'd used a few instead of painting the controls. Most of them would be too awkward to fit now, and I'm fairly happy with the painted ones anyway, but I did decide to add a couple to the display screens. The ship is going to be on the ground, so technically the screens should be powered down, but the decals do add a bit of colour that livens up the interior. While the decals are very nicely printed, they weren't the best to apply. They tore a little at the edges, and kept curling up despite being on flat, pre-glossed surfaces. They didn't seem to have much adhesive, and it took several applications of Micro Sol to get them down, and I'm still not happy with the small square one on the left screen. They'll do however and, as I said, they add a splash of colour. You may also have noticed the not very inconspicuous wires sticking from the back of the cockpit bulkhead. Well, despite saying earlier that I'd got no intention of lighting the interior, it appears that I have done, albeit just this one LED. Given that the cockpit colours are quite dark, I thought that this single light would at least allow me to see some of the work on the finished model. It's a 3mm flat-top warm white LED sitting in a hole drilled through the moulded box above the door (which is meant to be a light anyway). It doesn't look particularly neat from the front, but that area's not really visible through the glazing. Likewise, the wires running through the rear vestibule are a bit messy but, again, they're goinng to be hard to see on the finished build. The battery box will sit inside the cargo hold, and I'll be able to access it through the rear hatch. Switched on in a dark room, it does look quite bright, and there's a bit of a glow coming through the upper fuselage directly above the LED. This should vanish once the fuselage is painted, and I'll add some light blocking on the inside to make sure too. Under normal lighting, it looks a lot better, and provides just enough light to make the cockpit interior visible. Now I've added this light, I may as well add the remaining exterior lights too. there's only a few anyway - just the two round things at the bottom of the nose, and one running light on the bottom of each engine nacelle. All four of those lights are red, and will be lit with fibre optics running to a single red LED inside the fuselage. Andy

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure it would work though. It wouldn't be easy to print a thin stencil, and even if you could it would be hard to align the inner and outer parts of the stencil without some kind of adhesive to hold them in place. You could easily cut stencils out with a vinyl cutter, but unfortunately I don't have one. Andy

Thanks guys, That would make a great dio Hunter. I guess there's a chance someone might make a 3D print of the lading gear for the Bandai RC. I've got most of the cockpit painting finished now. Some parts still need a little cleaning up, and I might add an oil wash around some of the raised details. Most of the filming set interior is shades of black, but I've gone a little lighter here to help keep things visible throught the cockpit glazing. I've done some very basic painting on the raised details on the cockpit sidewalls, but I've not done too much as most of that detail falls in the aft section and won't really be visible once everthing is closed up. Andy

End users are advised to follow at their own risk - original poster may be making all this up as he goes along, and bears no responsibility for leading others astray Well, macro photos can be so disturbing, can't they. When I was posting the previous images, I realised how scruffy some of it looked, particularly the shroud over the centre console and those two grab handles on the left screen. Last night I decided to remove and redo those bits. I needed to cut the left hand throttle lever off anyway, and would probably have knocked the grab handles off in the process. I also needed to reposition the holo emitter, and that was easier with those other bits removed too. The new shroud is made from a strip of copper foil and looks a bit more like the one in the filming set photos. There's also an angular handle-like thing on the bottom edge of the centre console and I've added that with bits of chopped up styrene. The shaft for the 'gear stick' lever on the right has been added from stretched sprue, but I still need to find something suitable for the ball on the end. The holo emitter has been moved further to the left above the side screen, and I've used styrene rod rather than brass tube this time. The cable and short pipe thingies have been added to the tops of the side consoles, along with the row of red lights. I've also made up the control sticks from scrap styrene and a couple of 1/35 machine gun grips for the joysticks - a bit over scale, and not quite the right shape, but close enough for what you'll see through the glazing. The right-hand one is sitting at a slightly steeper angle which is a bit annoying, but I don't really feel like snapping it off and re-setting it, so I'll just live with that. The throttle lever has been rebuilt on the left-hand side console, and I should really add another to the right side, along with two other levers, but there really isn't space for it all. I suspect the filming set is considerably wider than the actual cockpit space would be on the real ship, and Revell have had to compress the dimensions somewhat to fit everything in. Centre console with angular handle on bottom edge At the back of the right-hand side console I've add the droid connection port that Zero (Q9-0) plugs into during the prison heist episode. That was just a bit of random photo etch that happened to be about the right size. Zero plugging into the droid port, which rather embarrassingly is clearly a human hand in a glove There are still a few things to add, although it's not worth going crazy as you won't see a lot of it, even if it was lit, which it definitely won't be. Andy

I picked up Revell's new Razor Crest a few days ago, and while I was originally planning on starting the build next year, after going through the sprues and seeing how much detail Revell had put into the kit (something that's not always the case with their Star Wars releases), I had to make a start on it straight away. I won't bother with any sprue shots here, but I posted some in the discussion section, and there's also Mike's review of the kit. You get a fairly comprehensive interior included, and the build starts with the cockpit and upper deck area. There's quite a bit of detail here, probably more than is neccesary in truth, although that's not a complaint, just an observation. The main floor panel is a full length plate that also forms the roof of the lower cargo deck. The front of this is divided into two sections by bulkhead panels, the front of these sections being the cockpit, and the rear one is the small vestibule?, foyer?, landing? where you access the upper deck from below. Two side panels close these sections off, then the cockpit is completed by the instrument panel which also forms the forward walls of the cockpit. The rear vestibule section is fully enclosed, and will only be visible through two tiny windows in the upper hull, and will more than likely be completely invisible on the finished build. I'm surprised that they didn't mould the dividing bulkhead with open doors, or supply two versions, one open and one closed. You could of course cut the doors open yourself if you want the rear compartment to be visible from the cockpit. Most of the detailing here is very accurate to the cockpit set used on the show including the panel pattern on the door and the box holding three lights imediately above it (Apologies for the dinginess of these screen grabs, they're the best I've got) Moving to the front of the cockpit, Revell have done a pretty good job at recreating the various controls and screens on the instrument panel, although a few things are understandably simplified. There are however a couple of odd omissions. The lefthand side console has some piping running along the top, and a short tube at the front edge, and these have both been reproduced, as have the row of three red lights although they're quite faint. The throttle-type lever behind the left display screen is there, but quite a flat moulding, so I may cut that off and replace it. The holo emitter above the screen is also present, but again quite flat compared to the real one. To the right of these should be the main centre console display, and that's one of the omissions I mentioned. Where it should sit there's a rectangular recess that looks as if something should go in it, but nothing is included or mentioned in the instructions. Not a real problem as I can scratch something to go there. The two big clunky looking things sticking out from behind where the centre console should be are representations of the control sticks. The real ones are two columns that extend from below the console and end with a square block onto which the joysticks are mounted. These too will be better of replaced with something a little more refined. Interesting trivia: it appears that, in the photo below, the centre console has been removed, probably to allow better access for the camera when filming the scene. The photo below shows the ends of the control columns and joysticks better, and also shows the other strange omission from the instrument panel. While the throttle controls on the left and right side console have been included, Revell haven't moulded the famous lever with the round knob that attracts Grogu's attention throughout the show. Given how well known that feature is, it's strange that Revell don't include it when they include details that most people wouldn't notice. Again, no problem though, as it can easily be added. Revell aren't the only ones to forget though, as in some scenes the control lever (not just the knob) is missing from the cockpit set. The seats are all well done with the two passenger seats being quite basic as they are on the show, while Mando's chair has a lot more detail. The bands on the headrests of the passenger seats represent the straps hung over the back of the seats. They do appear like this in the show, but they can also be seen in use, especially when they're strapping Grogu in place. I'll probably sand these off and replace them with some foil straps. The hole in the back of Din's seat will also need to be filled as I won't be using the included figure. Well, what about some actual modelling I hear you say. Well, yes, I have managed to do something other that look at reference pics, although not a great deal to be fair. I've removed the moulded detail from the tops of the side consoles, and this will be replaced with some wire and brass tubing. I've also made up a simple centre console from styrene sheet with a thinner piece of sheet added to represent the screen. The base for Grogu's lever has been added as well. Oh, and the control columns have been removed ready for some replacements. The two grab handles on the left hand screen are made from thin stretched sprue, and will probably get knocked off before I even get close to painting If you look back up the page at the screen shot with the missing lever, you can also see that there's a folded metal shroud over the top of the centre console, and I've made a simplifed representation of that from some styrene strip (barely visible in the photo below, sorry). A bit of brass tube has also been added to the holo emitter, although now I look at the screen shots, the emitter should be further to the left hand side of the console, so I'll probably re-do this. Okay, that's about it for now. I should get a little more done over the next couple of days. Andy

Thanks chaps Andy

As Mike has shown, the mould offset isn't a huge issue, and is easy enough to clean up. Issues like that are fairly common when slide moulds have been used to create complex mouldings. The rough surface texture is also present on my kit, mainly on the large upper hull part. The texture is quite fine, rather like the surface has been acid etched, and it sands off pretty easily - you just need to be carefull not to damage the raised details. I'd guess it's something to do with the temp and/or pressure that the styrene is injected at. There are also a few (fairly light) burrs on some of the raised details on the upper hull, and some details are quite soft while other are pin sharp. I think they were probably pushing the limits of a two-part mould with that large upper hull piece. @The Chief Smeg, I made a brief start last night, and I'll hopefully get some photos up later today. Andy