I had an idea and started working on a scratch build to satisfy a "what if", with the goal of slapping it on the contest table at Wonderfest for a good laugh. Buuut, I am so deep into everything else (and prioritizing the Landspeeder pattern), that I know I'll never get this done by the end of May, so there's no harm in keeping it off line now. So - here's the idea and progress so far...Any one in their 40s remembers playing with those first waves of Star Wars toys, and probably has a soft spot for the MiniRigs that Kenner produced for Empire. I have long admired how Kenner took ILM's delicate and/or elegant miniatures, and translated them into simplified toys. So as a creative exercise, I am taking a Kenner "design" that never existed apart form being a toy, and extrapolating from there, as if it had been "toy-ified" from an ILM filming miniature. My favorite was the dippy PDT-8, which I knew woudl not only be a challenge form-wise, but would also let me go nuts on the detailing!
I started with the toy itself, and laid a ruler to the body, deciding a nice upscale from 1/18th to 1/6th would do the trick. A couple of days later, I had a drawing in Illustrator, which I lasercut in acrylic. Using my powers of "hacking the crap out of spare plastic bits" I finessed the shape. So with the use of Aves, I smoothed 'er out.
I made some engine pods with Plastruct, acrylic, and Aves, smooshing the Aves to get the cowl shapes. I laser cut some discs to match the Plastruct's ID tube dimensions, epoxied it to an old screwdriver bit, added some tape, friction fit it to the inner wall, and bam - instant ghetto lathe against a disc sander! A couple of rounds of putty and primer and they are smooth as silk.
I made a video for the control panels... imagine a Snowspeeder-like control panel, with two larger round screens and one long screen below the two bigger ones. They will all be sourced from an iPod Nano, which will sit directly behind a laser cut fascia. It will look like three screens. Inside the central structure below will sit a speaker and the light board, which will illuminate the engines, front head lights, nav lights... all powered by a single board that Lightbenders made for me that provides 9v power to the leds and two USB bus powered ports for the speaker and iPod. Getting the right configuration to power a Lightening adapter was a feat!
Here's the raw video - I made it from oscilloscope footage, photoshop files, about four engine/turbine source files... lots of little stuff I sampled/picked that sounded "Star Wars" like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xArNp1Q2G_8
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