OT: Building AMT Millennium Falcon Kit

[Albertese]

Hello!

I thought I'd share my current project with you guys, it's not quite Trek, but it's still in the genre. I'm sure I'm not the only Star Trek fan on this board who also is a Star Wars fan.

Years ago (back in high school...mid-90's) I built this model of the Falcon. I thought I did all right. Here's a picture of what remains of it:



Not too bad for a teenager, but I figure I could do better now, and I want a whole model to display. So I have begun to build another one of these kits.

My goal is to detail it so it looks like one of the ILM models. I'm not doing any real measurements, just eyeballing the details and trying to give it the impression of being detailed like the five foot studio model. But I'm not slavishly devoting it to that particular version. I'm sort of averaging the 60" model and the 32" and the "full-size" mock up the actors interacted with in Elstree Studios. Besides some excellent photo reference of the 60" model that is available on line, I was able to get numerous photos of it myself when the Star Wars models were toured around four or five years ago. The kit's proportions are wrong in a lot of areas, and some of them I don't think are worth addressing. However, some others I'm going to correct.

My plan of attack is to detail the parts as far as possible as separate parts. i.e., doing as little assembly as possible of the kit parts before they are detailed. I started with the portside docking port. Here's a pic of the finished port-side part and the as-yet unmodified starboard part:



I've finished with detailing this one part. The white material is Evergreen brands styrene. There are quite a few little chips of plastic and lengths of rods. Also there are some little brass ferrules and lengths of brass wire.

I don't know how long it took exactly, but it was most of my free time so far this weekend. Somehow cutting, handling, and gluing down the teeny tiny parts is oddly comforting to me and I enjoyed every minute of it. A buddy of mine says I'm crazy and I ought to just get the Fine Molds kit.... but that would be missing the point!

Assuming that the other parts which require such detailing will take as long, then this will be a slow going project. But I'll keep posting what I get done. Maybe having an audience will motivate me to finish this thing instead of boxing it back up and revisiting it three and a half years from now like I usually do.

--Alex

[blssdwlf]

Wow, now that's some detailing! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

PM me if you want some more pics of the Falcon model (I think it was one of the larger models) that came touring last year.

[Albertese]

Thanks for the offer blssdwlf. Check your PM...

--Alex

[Albertese]

Here's a bit of progress. I've been working on this an hour or so most days. Here's a couple pics. I've made them thumbnails as I took these pictures on my phone and I'm too lazy to figure out how exactly to resize them.

The first is the access bay on the upper left side of the hull. I added a bunch of paperclips for the piping and conduits, as well as more scratch built details. Unfortunately, this pic kinda sucks, I'll do better ones later.



I've also been working on a replacement for the cockpit interior. I put this together using graphics of the set-interior put together by some dude named John Rohde that I found with some Google-fu. After printing the images out on some glossy photo paper, I cut them out and assembled them so they fit into the "window frames." I think the effect looks pretty good.




More to come...

--Alex

[Patrickivan]

Nice! Good job getting the scale on the interior.

[Bernard Guignard]

That brings back some memories I built one a very long time ago with some friends help. it was a nice build I think we even lit her up.

[Albertese]

Yeah, I understand the original release of this kit back in the 70's came with some lighting stuff. I've never lit a model before and I think this would be a good one to experiment with. I'm still undecided, but I'm considering the possibilities...

--Alex

[Ziz]

The original lighting from the 70's was very basic - four incandescent grain of wheat bulbs. Now there are whole pre-designed, pre-assembled kits for lighting all kinds of models. Check out the Starship Modeler store and CultTVman's store.

[Albertese]

Here's a bit more progress. I've been working on the forward... hole? for lack of a better term. It's amazing how much a difference it makes to have the pipes actually be modeled.




Here's another image which shows the work I've started on the center box shape. The more inboard areas are more or less done, but the forward area still have work left to do.



For those of you not familiar with the kit, here's this area on my old, OOB kit. The pipes don't really go anywhere. This has bugged me since I was a kid. I really like the improvement.




--Alex

[JarodRussell]

Nice job.

Looks like you've painted on the plane plastic. Never seen that before.

[Albertese]

JarodRussell wrote:

---

Nice job.

Looks like you've painted on the plane plastic. Never seen that before.

Do you mean it looks like I painted directly on the plastic without a primer coat or any kind of base layer of paint? If so, that's totally true of the old model. Most the kits I built in my teens I wouldn't paint if the plastic was in the right color to begin with. I have since changed my mind about that. This build will be painted better than the old one. I just threw that up there for comparative purposes.

--Alex

[Albertese]

Here's a bit of progress. I did some battle damage and added more to the front area of the center box structure.



--Alex

[Albertese]

I decided to take a brief break from the Falcon. I have a new table-top game called X-Wing Miniatures Game. One of the scenarios in the rule book is a shuttle escort mission and, although there are models of an X-Wing and two TIE Fighters, the shuttle is just a token. I decided I needed a model instead of a token. I put one together over the weekend. It's built out of a collection of battleship life boats and a couple small turrets, a few small scale walnut barrels, a plastic pipette, and several lengths of styrene and wire, and some green epoxy putty.

Here's the unpainted scratchbuilt model along side the token it is replacing:




Here it is painted:




Here it is compared to the X-Wing provided in the game box:




I'll probably get back to the Falcon now, but I do have an idea for another scratchbuild, so... we'll see....


--Alex

[Patrickivan]

That came out really well- It's amazing what a good paint job can do for a model.

[Albertese]

Thanks! Yeah, before the paint, it just looks like a bunch a crap I just glued together.

--Alex