May fourth

[Kelly]

The same as last year, May fourth snuck up before I knew it, and I had no plans for a Star Wars project.  With even less time than in 2024, see the post under first pass, I decided to not even model a ship, but to model not the ship...



...by making a mold I solved two problems, first being that less time would be required for a subject with softer details, and second, the presses from these molds would be so easily handleable, to the point of disposability, that I would not have to worry about their use by children.  The great paradox of modeling is that the more time I have put into any subject, the more concerned about anyone else handling / breaking it.  These test pieces loosely from episodes 4,5,6 in some ways held up better than I expected, and fell down in other ways, specifically issues with removal.  Version two will have these individuals being placed onto disc pedestals so they should be much easier to take out of the molds.

Here is a pilot and wingman from beige squadron ambushing a wing of TIEs, more to come later...

[Kelly]

It took longer than I expected but my reworked molds on bases came out well, and passed the elementary school test this morning…



…each of the fighters is now on a 22mm disc, and not only are the removal problems basically gone, but I can now support reliefs up down to .5 mm thickness as shown on the guns of the X-Wings.  There are still some scaling problems I need to tackle, but 1/750 will continue to be the neighborhood these will be in, with more models to come soon I hope.

[Kelly]

Some more progress on the project with Y-Wings now modeled, and since they need something to bomb...


...a thermal exhaust port* and turbo-laser towers were the next up on the schedule.  Getting the installations to work in this format took a little more work than I thought, with several revisions, but the final molds came out alright; literally, the first versions had serious releasing issues that necessitated a lot of angle testing to have these come out in one piece.

With a bomber and interceptor for both sides, and two surface targets, the next last step before getting this to the table is actually finding where all of the gray Play-Doh went.


*As much as I have railed against floating scales, I would note that the interior diameter of the exhaust port is actually within womp-rat size of 2-3 meters, which was the subject of discussion in Episode IV, not the exterior housing.  Everything here is still true scale at 1/750.