StevenBills

Thanks for the comments, everyone. I did some more weathering with the Vallejo washes on the top of the fuselage. I think it's all about going slow and building the weathering up layer by layer. I didn't take any photos of it, but I streamed it and you can watch it here, if you'd like: And I was zooming it around the house, as you do, and just really liked how the engine lighting came out. So I took a pic of that. Just ignore all of the guts sticking out the back: I'm going to get onto weathering the bottom of the fuselage this week (maybe later today if I have some time). So stay tuned for that. Thanks for watching! SB

If you didn't post your WIP photos, I wouldn't believe that this X-Wing was 3d printed! Great job so far! SB

Okay, I got some paint in the mail, so I did some more work on the Y this afternoon, and I streamed it again, if anyone cares to watch the process. You can see that here: I turned the audio off so I could listen to some music while I worked 😀 I worked on the top of the cockpit. First I attacked it with the dremel to give it some physical damage, and then went back in and touched some of those damaged areas up with a fine brush and XF-53 neutral gray. Then out came the airbrush. I tried some XF-69 Nato Black, but it was spurting weird through my airbrush, so I dumped that and went with a highly thinned XF-1 mixture. Anyway, it looks a bit too stark and contrasty now, I think. The paint that I got is a Vallejo rust wash, which I have never used before, but I quite like it. I looked at reference photos of Gold Leader and applied some rust in the appropriate places, and then some. Also notice the decals that were added to the top of the cockpit as well as the body itself. I took some liberties with those as well. I looked at some more reference and hit some of the pipes on the body with the rust wash as well. It's still wet here, and from what I understand it'll look a little different when it dries. So we'll see about that. So that's where it's at for now. It's fun to see it with a bit of color on the body, rather than just light gray. Makes it look a bit used. Thanks for looking! SB

Sorry to hear about getting sick! Covid is no joke! Hope everyone recovers well. Sometimes it takes a while. SB

I started painting the bottom of the cockpit today. Attacked it with the dremel first, and then did some detail painting with a brush. Then some black in the airbrush. I need to let all this dry before adding some rusty washes to it, as well as a few more things. Also added decals today. Didn't get a photo of that, though. I'm also re-printing the canopy, as I don't like the shape of the Bibby canopy. I found the DaveG canopy (over on TheRPF) for his open-source studio scale model (thanks!) and scaled it to the appropriate size. Hopefully I can finesse it to fit once it's printed. Anyway, thanks for looking! SB

Little update from this morning. I masked and painted the Gold Squadron insignia(?) on the cockpit. This was my first time using Tamiya tape for curves, and it worked really well! I'm very impressed with the stuff. Need to clean up the edges a bit, but other than that, I'm pretty happy with how these came out. Also painted the base black color in the cockpit. Once that's all dry I'll back with a gray or silver and drybrush some of the raised details. I think the next step for this is to mask and paint the blue pinstripes on the sides of the cockpit. That'll be tricky because I need to match the color of the canopy and the stripes on the engines. OR I can just re-paint the canopy with the new blue color, since it's waaaaay too blue right now... Decisions, decisions... And if any of you are interested, I streamed the masking and painting session this morning on Twitch. You can watch it (unedited) here: Geez I hate the sound of my voice. And I'm not sure why the quality is so bad. Just shot on my iPhone. Anyway, you can skip through that to see how it all went. Or not. Whatever. SB

Thanks for the comments, everybody. @danbuoy I'm loosely patterning this one after Gold Leader. Loosely being the key word there. 😅 We'll see if my paint skills are up to snuff. Little update today. I did some soldering and got the engine lights going! And it's all self-contained in the back of the fuselage. Everything fit in there, so all of my work of making space earlier back there paid off. It's hard to photograph the lights, but they turned out exactly as I'd hoped. I don't think I'm going to put the bent pipes on the back there, as that would extremely restrict my ability to take off the hatch and flip the switch. I'm still debating that, though. I also worked on adding back a few of the chip panel things on the cockpit as well. These were sanded off when I was working on it the other day. I'm not even sure of the thickness of the styrene I used, but it looked close enough. I'm hoping they blend in a bit when more paint and weathering is applied. I ordered some Tamiya tape for curves, and I'll use that to paint the Gold Squadron markings on the head in the next few days. I also got the clamps on the L'eggs sections painted and glued on (no photos of that, somehow). It's really starting to look like a Y-Wing now! So that's about it! Pretty happy with the lights, and how it's all coming together. SB

Little update today. Finally had some time to work on this model a bit. I managed to get the head attached with the body. I strengthened the bond with two aluminum tubes that extend back into the body and forward into the cockpit. Didn't take any photos, but it worked. I think I might have made the head stick out a few mm too far from the body, but the pipes kind of hide that. And speaking of pipes, I think that I'm done with the plumbing on this one. It's not ALL of the pipes that are on, say, Gold Leader, but there's enough on there to get the point across. the canopy is just set on for the photos. It's not the prettiest of jobs, but it works. The next step, after all of this has dried, is to prime the body, plumbing, and cockpit, and see how it looks! It's been a lot of work up to this point, but I'm (mostly) happy with how it is turning out. Thanks for looking! SB

It's amazing how a lick of paint can bring something to life, especially when someone who knows that they're doing is wielding the brush! SB

Thanks for the comments, guys, it means a lot. Helps me going on the build, sometimes. Okay, so I managed to combine all of the cockpit parts together in Meshmixer, so that I didn't have to fiddle around with getting everything to fit right and use lots of putty, sanding, etc... This includes the seat and console and controls, as well as the landing gear pod on the bottom. Here it is lightly sanded, due to some finger-printing: 'm pretty happy with how this print turned out. I tried printing out the head piece as two separate parts, but I could never get them to line up correctly, and I think the head of the Y-Wing is a very distinct form, so I didn't want it to look too fat or tall or what have you because I couldn't get the parts to line up right. Really glad this print turned out. Next it's on to mating the head with the body. That means trimming a few of the pipes that connect to the rear cockpit bulkhead. I should have connected the head to the body before I did the pipes, but that's easy to fix. Thanks for looking, SB

Good luck with the prop decals! I binned mine because they were so small and I just couldn't get them to fit right. Looking great though! SB

Thanks @Pete in Lincs and @Tomjw. It's coming along. I ordered more 3/64 brass rod, as I ran out shortly after I took the pics above, and there are still a few more pipes to do. I also ordered a 1/8" square tube to act as an "armature" of sorts for connecting the cockpit to the body, that way the connection is more secure than just glue on resin. It's hard to explain, but the design for that area of this ship is kind of weird. Anyway. I'll update when there's something more to show! SB

Pipes! So I guess I lied about finishing the engine nacelles and then moving on to the body. I figured it'd be easier to do all of the piping without the brittle t-tracks and engine vane thing on the back. I mixed up some baby powder and some CA glue and made a CA paste. I inserted the paste into the fuselage and stuck the wings in. Then onto the plumbing. I'm using the Bandai Y-Wing instruction manual to see where all of the pipes need to go. I'm using 3/64 brass rod for the main pipes, and 1/16 for the larger stuff. There's a few smaller pipes around the back that I need to figure out, but this is where I am at as of this evening: This definitely isn't perfect, and there's a few areas I'm not too happy with, but I think it's alright for my first go at it. Maybe I should have attached the cockpit head before fitting the neck pipes? I'm figuring this out as I go along here. Thanks for looking! SB

Little update for today. I glued the rest of the greeblies onto the body and hit it with some primer. It really makes the details pop! I'm very happy with how the body is coming out. Then I did some masking and painting on the engines. Feels good to get some color down, finally. The blue is waaaay too blue. I'll knock that back with some thinned base color eventually. Hopefully lessen the contrast there. That's all for now. Next step is to paint the clamps and T-track, and stick 'em on. SB

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I ended up going with the bare LED bulb, set back into the engine a little bit so that it's less obvious. Okay, a little update for today. As I said earlier, I roughed up the edges of the slot in the engines where I had to insert the wing. Next time I will scale the wing part down by one or two percent so that it fits together more easily. So here's the gnarly edge that my dremel created: I used some Apoxie Sculpt to help reinforce and fill that joint a bit: And here it is after some sanding and a bit of primer. There's nothing like primer to let you know that your putty job is crap! I have begun assembling the little control vanes that are at the back of the T-tracks. Those parts are pretty delicate, and I'm lucky that nothing has broken yet! In order to make painting easier, I'm going to paint the L'eggs first, then the blue on the Saturn V cans, and THEN put the T-tracks over that. Unless anyone has any better ideas...? That's about where I am right now with this. Not really much of an update, but it's coming along slowly. Thanks for watching. SB

Engine lighting looks nice. Very good color for the engines. SB

Working a little on the LEDs today. The first shot is the bare LED bulb, and the second shot is with a little bit of sanded plastic added in front as some diffusion. Thoughts on this? Which one do you guys like better? I like how the bare LED has a white hotspot to it, but I really dislike seeing bare LEDs in model builds. I like how the diffused version hides it all a bit, but it does cut down on the light output somewhat. Thoughts? SB

Cool! Gotta love the Y's! SB

@Shin This model is going to be used for photography purposes, and yes, it will only be displayed in flight. The problem with a rod through the bottom is that I then can't photograph the model from the bottom side without seeing the wires, etc... Little update time: The sun was shining today, so to avoid filling my hobby room with resin dust again, I sat outside and dremeled out the back section of the Y. Got it large enough to fit in my trimmed battery holder. Also did some cleanup on the engine sections. The L'eggs cones had a weird bulge in them, so I filed that out. Now I need to fill the hole in the cone that I made so that the resin could drain out. Next time (if there IS a next time), it would be way easier to hollow out this back section in the computer. It'd save on resin, as well. I think for tonight's work I am going to get the T-track cut. At 1/48 they come out to 5" long, so that's easy. Then I need to add all of the other greeblies onto the engines before they get glued to the wings and wired up. Thanks for watching! SB

That's a good thought, but unfortunately it's still too big to put there. My plan was to use magnets to attach the back hatch on, and just slide in the battery with the holder into the back. Might have to re-think it? Hopefully I can figure something like that out. SB

Bit of an update today! I did some work on fitting the wings to the fuselage. The right side went first. Just filing and fitting, and filing and fitting, until I broke out the dremel and just made the opening in the fuselage bigger. I gummed up the edge in the process, but that shouldn't be a problem to fix later. And LOTs of friggen dust. So. Much. Dust. I ground out a notch out of the back of the wing where it is inserted into the fuselage, so that the wires have some room to bend. You can see in the photo above how it sits flush with the internal wall. I have used 24 gauge wire on all of my lit models so far with no problem, but the hole that runs the span of the wing is too small for two wires to fit through, so I ordered some 30 gauge. Hopefully that works. And here's the right wing and nacelle fitted: (again, I gummed up the edge where the pieces mate together. I'll fix that later) This was a big morale booster for me. This project got a little discouraging for me because things just weren't going together how I'd hoped (hence why I stopped working on it for a while). So I was pretty jazzed when this wing all came together! Rinse and repeat for the left side: It's starting to look like a Y-Wing now! Then I thought a bit about how I'm going to power the two engine LEDs. I have a little coin-cell holder, but it's about 1/4" too wide to fit into the back end here, even after dremeling out a lot of the internal structure (AND LOTS OF DUST!): Here's the coin-cell holder I have: It's only an inch wide, but it's still too wide to fit in the back, and I don't want to remove too much material just for structural reasons. So my question is this: is there a smaller way to power (have the model be self-contained) some 3v LEDs? This is pretty small to begin with, but I'm hoping someone here knows a bit more about electronics and wiring than I do. So that's the update for today! It feels good to be moving along with this one. Thanks for looking! SB

So I keep deciding to reprint parts, but instead of separating the parts out, I am combining them together and THEN printing them as one piece, like I did with the body. So I was working on the engines, and the way that I printed them left their joining surfaces a mess (that's where all of the supports were), so when I put them together, they looked like this: This is after a bunch of filing and sanding. There would have been a lot more sanding in the future to get these two parts to fit properly. So I combined them in MeshMixer and got this: I think the distortion is just from the photo. It looks all bendy here, but it's not that way IRL. So there we are. I'm going to see if there are any other parts that need to be reprinted, and then go from there. SB

Thanks everybody! The 3D model for this model is certainly something to behold. I have compared my printed body part to the 1/72 Bandai model, and it seems like all of the detail is present on my model. I'm pretty jazzed about how well these new parts have been coming out! Another update is on the way, this one regarding the engines and nose cones! SB

@Tomjw thanks for looking! I'm a believer in showing the whole process, warts and all. Don't want anybody to get the idea that it just magically fell together! And besides, that, I'm learning a LOT from this experience. My prints have gotten substantially better even since I started this project back in the summer. So I hope others can learn something as well! My 20 hour print finished! And it looks pretty good! There are a few areas that peeled away because they weren't supported properly, but I'll take what I can get at this point! And a detail shot from the bottom: Now I think the next step is to start mating the different parts to the body. Stay tuned for more. SB

Wow, thanks for the in-depth answer! I'll have to take a look at other options, though. I've heard the cricut software is a bit janky. It seems like the various manufacturers would make their software compatible with .ai files, as that's pretty much the standard for the graphic design industry. Interesting. SB