Models Bandai 002 X Wing Starfighter 1:144 Scale - 001

My first go at documenting the build process for the Bandai 002 X Wing Starfighter in 1:144 Scale. 

These models are remarkably tiny and detailed. The beauty of these things are the plastic quality is high as is the craftsmanship. The sprues are designed in such a way that after trimming, there is very little sanding or smoothing. 

Every part is so tiny. But Bandai designed these kits with keyed parts. The keys prevent you from placing the wrong piece in the wrong place. One word of warning. If you dry fit some of the pieces, they are very, very hard to get apart. Just skip dry fitting. 

I'm decades out of practice, so mistakes were made. I'll detail those last. 

1 / 11

Laying out the first wing

2 / 11

Engine detail

3 / 11

The mess

4 / 11

Wing with one engine

5 / 11

Second engine

6 / 11

Wing 2 with both engines

7 / 11

Wings ready

8 / 11

The X in X-Wing

9 / 11

Close S-foils

10 / 11

Main body

11 / 11

Done!

❮ ❮Back Forward❯ ❯

A few details were hard to work on. Those two wings snap together on a pivoting hinge. It requires a lot of force on a tiny model. I found I couldn't do it with my hands and no tool seemed correct. I end up using a pencil sharpener by lining up the hole in the sharpener with the center of the hinge and pressing down hard. 

It worked so well that I added that little sharpener to my tool box. 

Now, the mistake. 

This image should have been a clue. That pivoting hinge runs down the back half of the main body. Somehow, I missed getting the hinge in the back hole which supports it. It felt right. 

Yeah, no. As you can see the wings don't close. Nor do they open all the way. They have a springy feel to them and the right side engine naucell presses against the side of the body. Taking pictures at a jaunty angle hides the mistake, but I'm going to give this model another go. 

(I might try the freezing technique to break the glue and refit it. We'll see.) 

Launch the Fighters!

This is a preview of my spring modeling series. I am short a few TIE fighters, but I shall press on. 

All fighters launch!

What are we looking at? 16 Bandai Star Wars model sets, in 1:144 scale. I really like this scale for gaming. In reality, this is 26 different models, not counting the 2 I already completed. 

I figure I'll kick out 2 a week for 13 weeks, then revisit when I paint them. Behind the scenes, I'll be building one of each first, then painting them as examples. As I said, I am rather light on TIE fighters and heavy on TIE Advanced models. 

I really wish they made B-Wings in this scale. 

Like I mentioned the last time, unless these models are on sale on Amazon, you are better off elsewhere. My personal preference is Hobby Lobby due to the 40% off coupon. But they only have X-Wings and TIE's. For a bigger selection, try The Big Bad Toy Store. They are super consistent with pricing and shipping, but I go with Amazon for the random price drops. 

I do get remuneration from Amazon and DO NOT get anything from the Big Bad Toy Store or Hobby Lobby. It's just straight shooting on good prices.

Ooo... Shiney.

I'm stuck in mainatence mode right now, I'm cleaning up the basement and getting ready for my spring Model series while trying to figure out where my campaigns are going. I have to decide if we are doing Star Wars or D&D tonight. Since the players are the same, I guess it doesn't matter. 

It's a good thing it doesn't matter because I had to take a spin to Hobby Lobby for a model and Home Depot for a shower head. One of those was more important than the other, but both where wiped from my mind when I found this excellent R2-D2 ceramic figure my grandmother made for me. 

It stands about 9 inches tall and has a fitting to hold a light. At some point the single flasher bulb was replaced with Christmas tree lights. It lit my bedroom from 1978 to about 1998. I am really sure my grandmother had no idea what R2-D2 was at the time. It's dated 1978 and bears my grandmother's initials, TV.

Putting it away was an odd but glorious moment in my life. My girlfriend at the time said, "Ooo. Save that, the kids will like it." That was about 2 years before I proposed. I didn't even notice. From about 2002 til now the kids did like it. But now they are Star Wars'd out and it has been returned to me. 

It really never left. 

1001st Post (or not) - The Countdown Is On

Edit - It turns out I goofed. This is not the 1001st post, its actually 950 something. I have 43 draft posts for upcoming reviews I planned for this year. Sorry about that. Carry on...

I have couple of projects coming up. As promised before, this spring I will be doing a series on the Bandai Star Wars Models. These are 1/144 scale models, except for the Falcon which seems to 1/350. I almost have everything I need, I want to get a few more TIE Fighters and X-Wings. 

The list so far is: 

Y-Wing, 
4 A-Wings, 
2 First Order TIEs, 
2 Classic TIEs, 
2 New Style X-Wings, 
2 Falcons, 

2 AT-STs, and
2 Snowspeeders. 

I'm going to be real honest, Amazon's prices are not the best at first look. They fluctuate so some days they are a steal and others they are a rip off. If Amazon isn't working for you, try out Hobby Lobby or The Big Bad Toy Store. They are super consistent with pricing and shipping, but I go with Amazon for the random price drops.

Spring is 47 days away and summer is 91 days long. That puts me on a schedule of one or more models a week. I figure in fall I can do a series on painting models. 

In the meantime, what am I doing with those 47 days until spring? I am getting seeds ready to plant. I'm doing a garden this year. I hope to do some gaming garden side as I really enjoyed my outside posts last year. I figure the garden will be a suitable place to play some D&D. All I need is some chairs and a small table and we'll be set. 

Now I have one more mystery picture to share. 

What are they? 1440 3 mm rhinestones. What on earth could I do with those? You'll see. 

The Last Package Arrived Today

My last package from Amazon arrived today. Now I am almost ready to start a second series of post on modeling. I'll be working on these Bandai 1/144 scale models over the summer. You can find them at many hobby shops, but I've had the best luck on prices at the Big Bad Toy Store. 

One of the snags with series posts is they start strong and either come to an early conclusion or they just peter out due to a lack of inspiration. 

I hope to change that this year by having a spring/summer series ready to go. I also have a couple of things in my back pocket. My Star Wars campaign looks good to restart and even more exciting (for me anyway) it looks like my gang is ready to go back to the Peninsula of Plenty campaign, perhaps as a hexcrawl. That's two more series to update for the Blog. 

The only problem now is time. I've had my basement flood and defy all attempts to remedy and I recently started a new job which takes up my evenings. My weekend is now Tuesday-Wednesday and I work every holiday for the foreseeable future. I'd know how things will work out, but they will. 

At this point, I am thinking of retiring the Podcast. I really can't see how I'll have the time for all of this. Time will tell. 

The Modelling Post - Figures for 1:144 scale models

I've been building some 1:144 scale models by Bandai. I have a snowspeeder and AT-ST built. I also have a couple of X-Wings, TIE fighters, two different Millenium Falcons and a few other things to build. 

I can't wait.  

I want to make some ground crew figures and have had difficulty sourcing them. The best I could find was 1/75 architectural figures. They're not a bad fit for the scale, being just a little too tall. I am going to end up modifying them, so I don't mind the off size. I'll be cutting and painting them to look like Star Wars characters. 

To get a sense of scale, I stood one up next to the models. They aren't too badly scaled. (Ignore the tape I used as a base.) For less than 10 bucks, I picked up a 100 of them. For the price, they're great. 

AT-ST and Snowspeeder in 144 scale Part 2

 Today, I started my Snowspeeder. 

I'm down to just 3 sprues of parts and one is just the base. 

Again, the parts come off very cleanly. On these three parts, I needed to use an arced motion along the wings to remove the extra plastic from the clipping. 

The third part is the engine on the top of the image. It is slight recessed into the body and sticks out. I found it was easier to place it in the top half and use a dot of glue to stick it in place. 

And I made my first mistake. I miss a tiny bit of plastic when cleaning up the clip points. You can see that it is now keeping the wings from meshing together completely. I couldn't see that without some really bright light. 

I was able to fix it by running a razor along the seam and cut it off. In the next picture you can see that seam is better but not perfect. 

And this is what it looks like from top down. 

Next comes the canopy and the root of the the gun pods plus a good way to confuse yourself. In the picture below, I have the roots of the gun pods swapped. 

By flipping the pieces, everything becomes obvious. 

In the last image, you'll note some recesses in the model. That will catch spillover from the gluing. It's a nice touch on these models. 

The next part is the gun and barrel. The thin barrel made me nervous, so I cut a chunk of sprue off with it and trimmed it off with a razor. 

The barrel has a C shaped part on the end to connect with the gun. If you don't align this part correctly, the barrel will look zig-zagged. 

Now, the gun rests against the previously attached root section. If you're brave, you can put a dot of glue there. It isn't necessary as the gun itself has a two point, box shaped connector. It won't flex or go out of skew. 

I think this image shows the connection between the gun and barrel better than the last one. 

Of course, no Snowspeeder would be complete without the tow cable gun. This part is even smaller than the main gun barrels, so I took a piece of the sprue with it and trimmed it up with a razor. 

And for scale, here we have both models. 

No flyer would be complete without a base. This is another item I didn't glue together. The connections are very sturdy and the base has 3 different slots for positioning. There is a ball pivot on the top. Glue would remove the adjustable nature of the base. 

I wanted to show the the different slots on the base. 3 different positions. 

And one final image of these guys together. This one captures all of the fine detail on these two tiny models. 

Tomorrow, I'll start painting. I can't wait to work on the A-Wings I have.

AT-ST and Snowspeeder in 144 scale Part 1

 I haven't done a modeling post in a while. I haven't had much time. 

I started on my first plastic model in a long. I picked a good one, Bandai's Snowspeeder and AT-ST in 1:144 scale. 

They have good detail, but low requirements for skill.

The "instruction sheet" fits on the inside of the box lid. 

You'd think the parts would be very tiny, but as you can see with the first image, they look "beefy". The pieces come off the sprue easily and hardly require any clean up. 

I left the clippers in view for a sense of scale. That black strip is a piece of sandpaper I used for cleanup. The parts are too small for a file. 

Each part has pegs in the middle so you don't end up with glue blobs on the edges. There are seams visible, but there are more parts to cover them.

Update: I'll be finished tonight and will paint tomorrow. 

This is a jump from the prior image, I forgot where I left off. There are 3 panels that fit on the head. They are wonderfully designed to cover any seams. The tiny body gave me some trouble. The piece on the right (A4 27) needs to go on the large head support deck (A3 17 and 13). Unfortunately, I couldn't SEE how it should go. 

I resorted to enlarging the instructions. The piece has a support that fits into the deck, but it looked like it could go in several orientations. The two "tines" go "down" into the deck. When completely assembled, this part is on the bottom and almost hidden by the two shield guards on A3 13. You could leave it off, but it's great little detail. 

This is what it looks like assembled. At about this point, I started regretting not painting it first. 

The neck that connects the head to the deck has a ball joint. 

You put one side on first. 

Then the other. 

Again, this is another jump in the steps. The legs simply attach to the pins and the ball joint snaps together. If you wanted to place this model on a base, you could adjust the leg positions and the head angle. However, if you are full of gumption to try this, I suspect you'd want to cut the knee joint. 

Notice the hemostat in the image. My sausage fingers are too big to hold the smaller light on the side of the head. Again, the light and the gun mount are on pins, so they can be adjusted, too. 

And, here we are. All done. 

I'm not sure if I'll paint tomorrow. I have to teach a class online, so I might be making a template for model building so all of the images are neatly organized and the same dimensions. 

Check back soon for the Snowspeeder.