Echo Base, this is Rogue Two

[Revell-Fan]

My Star Wars friend's BD is approaching and like last year I have chosen a new model for him. The first plan was to make Imcold's X-Wing. The parts are printed but I won't have enough time to finish it. So I chose Julius Perdana's Snowspeeder as an alternative which you can find here.



To ensure that he can display this model together with the other planes nicely I have resized the plans to 1/32 (the original ones are 1/20). Two pages could be printed on one page which was very nice.

However, I encountered a tricky problem. Julius must have added a blur filter layer which could not be opened by InkScape. The texture became jagged and did not look very good. Hence I used PDFill to turn the pages into *.jpgs - with the same result! I tried Gimp and it worked finally. If you look at this picture you can cleary see what happened:



The first print is the one with the jagged texture, the second is the smooth one created with Gimp. Of course I'll be using the latter one.

Stay tuned for updates!

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out!!!

 

[mijob]

Nice RF how you fixed this again. :Coffee:

 

[Revell-Fan]

The parts for the canopy:









One side effect of every downscaling: The parts get tiny - again.





Wherever possible and needed the edges were painted with markers.







And this is the current state:



Stay tuned for updates!

 

[lyter1958]

off to a great start..love it

 

[Revell-Fan]

Thank you, Mark !

The side pieces must be flush with the bottom of the fuselage. Otherwise the wings will not fit.







The wings are made of two pieces. There is a small gap between the halves which will be addressed later when I'm refining the bottom.

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

This is really coming together nicely!!!

 

[mijob]

Looks verry nice

 

[Revell-Fan]

Thank you!

This is the first mod of the kit. I knew I should have reinforced the wings during assembly but I wanted to see how stable they are. Well, the front half is OK but the back half tends to bow in the middle. I cut a hole into the part and pushed some card inside. It fitted well and made the wing piece really strong.









Next I assembled the parts for the cannons. You have to cut out several holes. These are very small, so I used a holepunch. This is the result:



Nice and clean. And YES, I used a HOLEPUNCH! There was no magic in effect but a small trick which I will not tell you. :Grin:

OK, I WILL tell you, but not here. I'm preparing a small and dirty thread in the tutorial section, so stay tuned!



Of course this kit gave me my daily dose of self-torture, represented by this small cannon tip.

There are two of them, so I had twice the fun.



All cannon parts in one picture.

So far, so good. The build was coming along very nicely - until I noticed something which made me seriously reconsider the whole project.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Next was the canopy.



I printed two versions but edited the pattern slightly to get all-grey plates without any markings.



I attached some windows made of clear plastic.





A strip of left-over card was used to make a hinge.









Then I covered all faces inside with the grey plates.



OH, I forgot to show you the thruster caps! They were pretty straight forward.



And of course, another dose of self-torture..!

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

You are making great progress on this project!!!

 

[Revell-Fan]

Thank you very much but brace yourself for this post.

I continued with the detailing of the cannon and thruster mounts.



Julius really surprised me with this technique. To beef up the pieces he added flaps to the edges which have to be folded and glued to the back side. Usually you would simply laminate the pieces to another layer of card but I think Julius chose another approach to save paper. I haven't seen this on any other paper model. I had my doubts but amazingly it worked!



Another trick learned.

However, now I encountered something which caught me off-guard.

When I attached the canons and mount pieces according to the instructions and glue marks I got THIS result:





Do you see what I mean? If not, please take a look at this top view:



There is something seriously wrong here! And this was not the only issue.



The braking flaps at the rear are the same whereas you should have one left and one right piece. Here you get two right parts.



Whilst we are at the rear, the radiator block is suspiciously thin. I wondered why and turned the model around.



There is - nothing! Just grey all over. I was shocked. This was truly disappointing! :frak:

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

You are making great progress on this model!!!
Your evaluation is very informative!!!

 

[mijob]

Nice update RF, I wil stay Tuned

 

[Revell-Fan]

Correcting the wrong flap was easy. I printed a mirrored version of the right side and laminated it to the flap:



Correcting the bent in the cannons was a bit trickier. First I ripped everything off.



Then I realigned the position of the middle piece:





This image shows by how much the correct position deviates from the mark: almost 3 mm!

I moved the mark position in Gimp and restored the grill texture. Then I printed the front and back piece again and laminated it to the shoulder piece.

The wrong alignment marks on the wings had to be covered by a cleaned up version of the texture. This was printed on regular paper and glued to the surface. As a side effect this covered up the seam and combined both wing halves securely.











Now the cannons are straight!

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

You are doing a GREAT JOB on this project!!!

 

[Revell-Fan]

Thank you!

And here is the tutorial explaining how I used my holepunch to get such great results:

Using a holepunch

This is a holepunch. Its purpose is to punch holes through various materials such as leather, card and paper. But the way it operates often leads to no holes punched. A holepunch can be both, a blessing or a curse. In most cases it is a curse because it will not punch through a single layer...

www.zealot.com

 

[mijob]

Looks Berry good

 

[Revell-Fan]

Looks Berry good

Strawberry or blueberry good?

 

[micahrogers]

Strawberry or blueberry good?

Both! This build is looking Great.