Vanoyen

Brilliant work! I had no idea how small it was until seeing it next to the paint bottle. You've done an amazing job at making it look huge.

Watching with interest I'm working on one of these as well and they're awesome little kits for the price. You've done some amazing paint work.. can't wait to see the finished model.

Very quick update... So much for a nice quick build. I painted hundreds of tiny scratches and chips over the surface. I think next time I might try out one of the various chipping solutions available as this took hours. Another little thing i did was to mask off and paint the thin red markings at the rear of the fuselage. There are no decals for this with the kit and I think it adds interest so didn't want to leave it out. I've decided I'll have to scratch build the rear radiator as it's quite a prominent feature and another point of interest so I'll have a go at that tonight. I should have another update soon with a painted engine test and some more weathering on the body. I'm also still not completely happy with the blue and may re-do some of the markings. Cheers

This looks awesome. I've always wanted one of the DeAgostini Falcons but could never afford it. I went the poor man's route and got a Hasbro one with the intent to detail it and light her up. Looking great so far

Cheers guys. A small update... I painted the pilots in the blue/green shade seen in the movie. It looks sky blue in the pics but It's actually a nice deep blue/green colour. I also moved the seats forward a bit. The interior won't been seen too well but I wanted to make a few small adjustments anyway. I moved the seats forward a bit and scratched up a couple of hand controls. Placed next to a Vallejo bottle to show how tiny these guys are. The rear engine area was painted with a mix of 50/50 Vallejo Grey and Light Grey then given a wash with Starship Filth. After that had dried i gave it a second wash (more of a filter) with Flory dark Dirt then a little dry-brushing with Vallejo Gun Metal. in a day or two I'll do some spot-filtering with Flory Grime. I'm still undecided about weather or not to make up a radiator for the back. It doesn't really look bad without one but I know it should be there and it's annoying me. More soon

Love these spidey conversions. I feel your pain as well... ive got the same kit and WOW it could almost be used as a training piece for fit corrections. You have more patience than I sir. Excellent work so far.

Looking forward to what you do here. Anything involving the Falcon, Ties and X-Wings together is going to be epic!

Hey everyone, After watching Rogue One I fell in love with the U-Wing and I've decided to have a go at making a diorama with one flying low along a stretch of beach with some palm trees and water effects. Revell's U-Wing, while not entirely accurate, is a nice little model that captures the look quite well. The plan is to keep this build relatively short, simple and not worry too much about screen accuracy. I intend to build up the U-Wing first then work on the diorama on the side while I do a few droids, troopers, etc. This is the general look I'll be aiming for with the U-Wing... And the dio will be a strip of beach similar to this screen grab with the U-Wing a lot lower and rolling just slightly toward the port side. With the ship in a flying position, the first thing I wanted to work out was how to light the engines. The kit comes with a green cockpit light which admittedly looks very toy-like when lit but the upside to this is that a power source and switch are already perfectly placed just waiting to be customised. The goal is to clip off the existing green LED, place a white LED in each engine, run the wires through the fuselage then join the positive and negative ends to the matching ends of the cut off green LED. Here's the internals with the green LED and switch. The speaker won't be needed so I clipped the wires and removed it. I'm going to have the model sitting on an acrylic rod so the space can be used to install a mount. I cut a few squares of styrene sheet, epoxied them into the space then drilled them out. Instead of using blue LEDs for the engines, I'm going to try something different. The kits parts are not moulded in clear plastic so I made casts of the engines in clear resin which was dyed blue with a few drops of food colouring. Mould made of the engine. Clear resin.. under the supervision of my cat Captain Jack Sparrow Blue food colouring. Cast made. I'll only be using the engine nozzle (grafting it on to the existing engine). Test looks good. The outside will obviously be painted with the centre being left clear. The look I'm going for is to have the engines lit enough to be cruising but not full throttle. Similar to this pic... I drilled holes through the engines and fuselage then test ran the wires through. This actual step however won't happen until after painting and weathering. I primed the model with Tamiya white primer then did some very rough pre-shading with Vallejo grey. I REALLY need to improve my airbrushing skills I made up a base coat with a mix of Vallejo White, Light Grey and Deck Tan. It tuned out pretty well and pre-shading looks nice and subtle. Next up was the blue markings. I masked off the areas to paint then dabbed on a little Maskol to simulate chipping. I was a little heavy handed with the first attempt and not much of the blue went down so I kind of reversed it and used the same technique to add more blue into areas it was lacking. It didn't turn out perfect but I'm happy enough with it That's all for now. More soon

Looks awesome so far... I'd go with the dark version with the orange bay

Ah ok Thank you very much. Very helpful

Looks spectacular! Do you mind sharing some of your colour choices? I've said it before on FB but looking down at her like that she looks just like the 5 footer

Looking awesome. I have to ask... How the hell did you get such a neat, straight cut? Even with such a large scale that's a very thin slice. I can even cut tubing straight lol.

Very nice. The probability of people liking your work is high... It's very high.

Very nice. I love the pre-shading effect.

Wow! Beautiful model. I like how you've weathered it just right and didn't go overboard. makes a huge difference and large scale ships. Well done.

Yeah, i forgot to mention... After the problem with the wind shield, I thought I may have just used the air brush incorrectly so for the two round side windows I just hands brushed them but the results were even worse. I ended up having to black them out completely. It's confusing because the other clear colors went on fine.

Beautiful work. Love the weathering.

Very nice! Love the base and the laser

Wow! I love Star Wars but I've never really been a huge star destroyer fan. However looking at the work you're doing I'm quickly becoming one. Great job!

Cheers guys

Cheers for the generous comments guys

LOL Yeah I know... The mind boggles.

This one was a huge learning experience for me. Lots of mistakes made by me and lots problem solving required to get the look I was after. overall I'm pretty happy with though it did take a lot longer than I expected. The kit it's self is great for building straight out of the box but it's a little more challenging for any type of custom work. Thanks for looking

Apologies to anyone who was waiting on updates for this build. I've had quite a few delays due to work, life, etc. I also bought a copy of Star Wars battlefront and spent wayyyyy too much time playing it but it's out of my system now and I've gotten back into modelling . I've been completely humbled by this build. just about anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Some of the problems were due to the age and design of the kit and some were due to my inexperience and making rookie mistakes in planning and execution. Anyway onward and upwards. I'll try an explain the rest of the build as best i can. I used a potentiometer to adjust the brightness of the tail lights. This worked very well and gave me a lot of control when trying to find that sweet spot where the lights are visible but don't look like they're breaking. I used the same technique for the red, blue and green LEDs which lit the dashboard fibre optics. This was my first mistake. I originally wired the three LEDs in series with the potentiometer in front, controlling the voltage. The problem with that was the LEDs were different colours and had slightly different max voltages so when I got red looking just right, green was way to bright. If I got green looking good, red would turn off completely. I ended up scrapping the potentiometer and wired the LEDs in parallel, using different strength resistors to achieve a brightness level I was happy with. The fibre optics themselves were a mix of 0.25 and 0.50mm. I painted the windshield glass with Tamiya clear smoke. This was the next problem. I've never had an issue with any Tamiya product ever but for some reason it reacted with the plastic and frosted up leaving a nasty, sandpaper like texture. Luckily I painted the inside and it isn't too noticeable from the outside. Next were the headlights and I had problems here as well. The shape of the headlight openings are slightly curved but the clear lenses are dead straight and slightly too small to fit the openings properly. I ended up creating recessed headlights by making a couple of small light boxes (with an extra frosted lens inside to diffuse the light) then fitting the lenses behind the original kit bezels. I used 3mm white LEDs and painted the bulbs with a few coats of clear yellow. It's not very screen accurate but I think it works well enough. Next up I started working on the side air intakes. The kit supplied intakes have a moulded in mesh screen at the front of each intake which just don't exist in any version of the car anywhere. I puzzled over how to re-create the funnels even to the point of trying this... I tried several different methods but ended up using a couple of cake icing pipe ends. I placed them into the intake openings, marked them with a pencil then cut them to shape. This worked quite well save for one exception. the plastic was that horrible stuff that burrs whenever cut with a saw (even a razor saw) or sanded. I cleaned the parts up as best I could then gave them a coat of semi-gloss black followed by a few coats of Alclad Steel. They're not 100% but close enough for me and definitely better than having a moulded in mesh grill. By this stage I was just wanting to finish the model. It had taken a lot longer than expected and it was starting to feel more like a chore than a fun hobby. This was entirely on me and I realised my own perceptions were to blame... not the process. I worked out what was left to do then set about finishing and enjoying it at the same time. I assembled all the sub components and double checked the lighting still worked. All that was left was to attached the chassis to the body and create the flame for the exhaust. The chassis was a real struggle to fit (due to my own bad planning) but I managed it by epoxying and clamping small sections at a time. I used a small bit of cotton wool painted yellow/red for the flames and was very happy with how it looked in conjunction with the flickering orange LED behind it. Anyway, I'm calling this one complete. As I mentioned earlier, this build ended up being a huge learning experience for me. Probably the most important lessons learned where to test fit EVERYTHING at every stage and be a little more careful when planning custom work. I'll post up some proper completed pics soon. Cheers and thanks for looking

Nice! Very clean and skilled work.