I did that years ago, long before forums (at least that I'm aware of), and really before the Internet was viable as a research tool for the kind of pics and info that would help. I was limited to the box art and that corny "Star Wars Technical Journal." I did correct (or at least change) the bottom of the fuselage by removing the area between the two bends, if that makes sense. I used sheet styrene in that area. I used a mixture of brass rods and plastic tubing to redo the lasers, and mixture was because the right diameters were not available in one medium. The semi-circle at the end was cut out of a brass rod, too (the same brass rod I used for main body of the lasers, I think). The only part of the lasers from the kit was the part at the very end of it, I think. I scratch-built the cockpit to match the full-size X-wing using that picture of Luke sitting in it just after "landing" on Dagobah. The rear portion of the engines (not just the nozzle, but the whole, smaller cylinder section), which I did not care for, were replaced with engines from some 72nd scale jet kit--one of those kits that comes with a whole engine to display removed). As I posed mine on the ground, I left out the R2 unit and scratchbuilt the area where he would be with all kinds of crazy details. There is no pilot figure either, and the canopy is raised. Some of the detail behind the the seat is totally bogus, as I just threw in a bunch of resin and photo-etch stuff I had laying around. I wasn't so much going for accuracy as I was just fixing the parts of that model that just look bad or stupid to me. The fuselage looks stupid. The laser cannons look soft on detail. The rear engine nacelles look stupid to me, and it was gonna be hard to hide the seam and not destroy detail. By the way, my first idea for the engines was to scratch build them from brass rod (both for the body and for the smaller details) and other materials, but that just wasn't working out. I was going to cast the best attempt in resin, but that also wasn't working out. I did not do any lighting. The gear were all replaced with totally fabricated parts. The gear wells were detailed, and as with other things, I totally gave up on trying to find good pics and do it accurately--I just made it look good to me. The rear windows are individual pieces of clear plastic. I was cheap and used the packaging from some other product--you know that somewhat rigid clear plastic that is used in a lot of packaging. The whole project took a year or so.
Here's a link that I hope works--to my album of this kit--so I don't have to post a bunch of links separately. Let me know if it doesn't work. And it looks like there's two pages.
x-wing MPC pictures by dedalus5550 - Photobucket
The funniest thing is that this X-wing sat on various shelves and so forth through the years, and then I decided to pull it out dust it off, and enter it in a regional event (OrangeCon) a couple of years ago and it took 2nd or 3rd place in Sci-Fi. At first, I was only going to put it on the display table, too.
