Bloghead

Filled in the panel lines and did some weathering on the main fuselage.

So I used my two favorite tools these days to make some blast patterns for the X-Wings.  Illustrator and my vinyl cutter.  The pictures below show the pattern, and then the mask being applied.  The wings and engines will be gone over with fine steel wool to tone down the spray but she is coming along nicely and is almost done.

Also see what happens when you have butter fingers and drop a wing on the way to the garage.

Ok so I am working on two X-Wings still and really have fallen behind on one of them.  I decided to get my ass in gear today and start soldering up LEDs.   I had to order more LEDs and some fiber optic cabling, but everything is in and I made some progress today.

Last year I bought a vinyl cutter to mainly cut styrene, which is does famously.  However, yesterday was the first time I actually used it for cutting vinyl.  This thing cuts vinyl like a hot knife through warm butter.

Well I got allot of work done today.   The non lit X-wing is really coming along.  I am waiting on LEDs for the lit one so it is lagging behind a bit, but here is some fresh paint for you.

The front edge of these wings was pretty tore up with bubbles so I put a strip of Styrene on there to make it look good.  Drilled holes and added pins to the wings and started soldering LEDs for the lights.

Painting has begun and we are cooking along rather nicely.

Here is a tutorial in pictures on how I did the metal flash supressor for the X-Wing.

First I went to home depot and bought some 3/4 metal tubing that they have on the hardware aisle. It is 1/16″ thick and is pretty easy to cut with a good hack saw.

You can see in the next picture the setup I used to cut the rings. I measured the kit piece and then measured how far over to cut. Using a mitre box I clamped in the tube and cut out a ring. I needed two sets so I did this three more times to get four rings.

Next, using a vice I clamped in the ring I just cut and made my first cut. All you need to do at this point is make one cut then flip it over and make your second cut. It doesnt take too much eye balling to get it right and to cut the ring in half.

Once you have your pieces cut in half you will see in comparing to the kit piece that the ring halves are not the correct shape. They are more narrow that the kit piece.

To fix this what I did was clamp the orginal tubing into my vice. Then I took the semi circle pieces and, using a hammer, placed them on the outside of the tubing and hammered around until it expanded the piece out. Now in comparing to the original kit piece you can see that they are much closer in shape.

Next I put the pieces in the vice again with the rough edges facing up and using a metal file, filed each side down flat. I did both sides at once so that they appear uniform.

Last all you need to do is drill the hole centered in the piece while it is still clamped in the vice and you are done.

I hope this helps you guys out, it is really easy to do and I think you can see that the results are pretty good.