March 18, 2007
This is the beginnings of something I have been wanting to do for some time. Probably three years ago now I bought and received a Nice-N Models T.I.E. Fighter. It is studio scale and is a beautiful model.
I received mine and went to work on it almost immediately. I set the rather large wings aside so I could concentrate on getting the main fuselage ready to prime and paint. I was working a few other projects at the time and really kind of forgot about the wings.
When I finally got ar
ound to working on the wings I discovered I hade made a rather large and stupid mistake. I had set the wings leaning against my workbench. Normally this would not be too big of a deal but my workbench was in my garage. The garage was part of my house which is in Texas. It was the middle of the summer and my wings had bowed in.
I was devastated to say the least. But even then, I started thinking about salvaging part of the ship and making it into something. Fast forward a few years and I now have extra parts galore for the CC X-Wing and decided that I was going to do the unthinkable and destroy two beautiful kits and make myself an ugly TIE fighter.
This like my other pages will be a walk along as I build it so read on...
First things first. I only wanted to use the cockpit/ball fuselage from the TIE so that meant I had to do some cutting.
Using my miter saw I cut the wing bracers off the main body of the TIE.
Next using Aves 2-Part Epoxie I rounded the ship off where I had cut the wings off. Once the rough shape was done I let it cure for 24 hours and then sanded the roughed in area down getting a more or less rounded ball shape again. It is not exact yet but will be honed once I get the rest of the ship ready to assemble.
Using Illustrator I designed a very simple wing mounting bracket and printed the template out. Once printed I cut the pieces from sheet styrene. I assembled the pieces and once they were glued together, filled the inside with Aves Epoxie putty again to make it strong. This will be the master for which the brackets will be mold and cast from. In one of the pictures I did a test fitting of the bracket just to make sure that it would work. In the picture below, it is not in it's final position.
Again using Illustrator I created a simple blueprint showing what I hope the ship will look like when finished. Click on the image to see a full size version of the blueprint.
As always Stay Tuned more is on the way!!!
