A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

In the past two weeks, I’ve started and completed a little model-building project. I’ve researched the original filming models used in the Original Trilogy for some years, and I’ve wanted to build, paint and own a replica of a few of them for quite a while. With the excellent and accurately detailed Star Wars model kits available from Bandai, I finally dove into it.

The kit represents Red 5 – Luke Skywalker’s X-wing – and since I wanted to build and paint Red 2 – Wedge Antilles’ X-wing – I not only needed to paint it differently, but also had to modify the lower half of the fuselage between the cockpit and the nose cone a bit. On Red 5 the lower half of the fuselage is a bit more narrow leading into the nose cone than it is on Red 2, so I had to widen it a bit. I did this by seperating the front half of the lower fuselage, cuttin it in half along ist central axis, and then spreading the font ends roughly 1.5mm apart. I then filled the resulting gap with a paste of molten plastic. This was left to set for a day and then sanded down to achieve the original flat smooth curve of the bottom f the fuselage. Then I re-scribed a few panel lines lost in the process.

With that done, I seperated the model into sub-assemblies for easier paint:

Now it was time to start painting. I used a few good photographs of the original studio model in order to accurately replicate not only the correct markings, but even tiny and nuanced details including dirt stains, chipped and discoloured paint and combat marks. As for R2A3 – Wedge Antilles’ Astromech – I did not paint ist visible head silver with red markings as on the studio model, but rather red with white markings as on the prop used on the Cockpit set when they filmed all scenes with Wedge in his cockpit: