232 and 223 Droid Pods

CutThumb

Sr Member
I've been collecting a few of the more commonly used kits for a couple of years now ,knowing that at somepoint I would want to start building some of the studio scale models that have been thoroughly mapped and pretty much completed as per the originals by many of the people here.
So with Dave G's new Y wing and Mars's Probe Droid hull kit dug out of storage I'm going to try and get these done over the winter. Its getting colder, definitely wetter and more miserable and its time to try my hand at these so I can complete and paint them in the spring.

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But first up are a pair of the Probe droid pods that I've always wanted to do. Got most of the kits ( except for a few parts which I've struggled to get like a few others it seems) and I've still got some questions despite many of the excellent build threads here . Trying to go with all original parts, but I doubt I will manage it totally.

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So first up is the 8rad version:
I've tried to list everything on a sheet to help.Some of the codes to the Plastruct /EMA parts are different simply because the UK EMA catalogue uses other listings. When you look on their website go to "Scale Representations" and look for "Light fixtures",it took me ages to find them . If you phone the orders through they are really quick to dispatch but remember its a minimium order of £12 and the postage will cost ,so its best to do it when you need a few other parts, so I ordered the Y wing tees and parts for the Probe droid.

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Where there is a gap on the sheet I haven't got all the parts but what I do have is some questions from the various threads.......... :

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And I'm also looking for casts of those 1/12 Tamiya Lotus JPS mkIII engine parts and the 1/25 T 34 type 85 top part please. More than happy to pay for them, I've just missed out on one on e bay when It went for far more than I thought it would but that seems common at the moment.

This details the various parts on the bottom of 232 and in what order they are placed :

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And the other one (223):

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Also to add to the list :

Tamiya 1/35th Jagdpanther whose five treads go around the top. The older version is needed with the Jagd turret pointing to the right of the box and is plain. (Post pictures later)

Tamiya 1/35 Panzer III Ausf M/W . These are five rectangular pieces that go under the T shaped part (D17) from the 8rad

No exact reference on the base of the 223, people have done variations using parts from other familiar kits.




The Ferrari 312B and the Brabham BT440 are scarce kits in the UK and going for astonishing prices when they do come up for sale. They can't be all studio scale builders I'm bidding against????? Again if anyone can help out with these I would be grateful and happy to pay (seeing as I probably don't have any kits that most of the really dedicated guys here do would have to swop). The Ferrari part is a cut down from the original kit,

Anyway heres the builds so far;

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Most of the hulls have gone together fairly easily. I've used EMA plastic weld to initially bond them together then used hot glue on the inside of the joins to really strength the seams as they otherwise sometimes pop when you put too much pressure on it. It looks like it does the job if a bit messily on occasion.

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I've then cut hexagonal parts to strengthen the inner walls of the hull and to help hold the aluminium tube stable. I'm not lighting these as I rarely bother to turn on the lighting on in all the other models I've built. Thanks Marvin for letting me crib off your hull strengthening idea (and use your hexagonal template). It really takes your time to cut and test fit them properly, but they really help put the hulls together neatly.


And a last question for anyone in the UK. Do you know and recommend any supplier of casting products in the UK. I see polycraft stuff on Amazon but any personal experience with resins and silicon for small parts casting would be very helpful, because I'm going to finally have do it sooner or later.
 
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Hey man you're welcome. The templates helped me so I thought it might help others as well.

Nice start. I found the 223 hulls a lot easier to line up neatly than the 232 hulls for some reason.

I personally hate hotglue and would stick with either styrene reinforcents or two part epoxy.
 
Cut thumb- I have the 1/12 Lotus and 1/24 SU-100 rim already cast. You'll need a heat sink as well. PM me and I'll hook you up.

I forget which direction I positioned my parts but I believe I used reference from Moff Eaton's build and Marvin's if I'm not mistaken.
 
Thanks Wingnit VERY much appreciated!!!!!

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Just finished closing the hulls up and gluing on the hatches ,they look rather neat! Got another Morser Karl on the way (thanks to a buy it now ebay !) but the built FerrarI 312B that I thought might go a bit cheaper went for £160 in the end!!! All these older Tamiya racers seem to go for well over the hundred quid mark these days when they occasionally pop up in the UK, must be the Formula One crowd.

I'll check Jasons build out , all ready got Marvins and a couple of others as main reference on the 232 . Some seem to all differ slightly around the engines, particularly as well on the 223, which is why I asked. It probably doesn't matter too much.
 
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The 232 is well IDed and documented around the engine bell. The 223 however, there's no ref of the back available. The engine bell seems to be correct but everything else is anyone's guess.
 
The 232 is well IDed and documented around the engine bell. The 223 however, there's no ref of the back available. The engine bell seems to be correct but everything else is anyone's guess.


Thanks marvin, went back and reread the builds and found a couple of the more later ones ( Shadowknights and Propcollectors in 2014) that clarified most of my questions . Odd, but they didn't come up on the "Similar threads" last time (probably because there have been so many). I'll do a diagram of the engine base layout on the 232 (already made a mistake on that one!!!).

And here is the diagram for the 232 8rad :

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Added a few notes to help clarify a couple of things that differed slightly from build to build (and camera angle shot to angle shot)


Also found out that on the 223 the square rectangular part supporting the T shape part from the 8rad (D15) comes from the Tamiya 1/35 Panzer III Ausf M/W and is not simply a scratched bit of plastic sheet, though I might just do that in the end and will amend list at top.
 
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Great research! Based on this, I can say that I assembled mine wrong. I did not cut down the vents for the 232. I cast the hull with them on it.

Thanks marvin, went back and reread the builds and found a couple of the more later ones ( Shadowknights and Propcollectors in 2014) that clarified most of my questions . Odd, but they didn't come up on the "Similar threads" last time (probably because there have been so many). I'll do a diagram of the engine base layout on the 232 (already made a mistake on that one!!!).

And here is the diagram for the 232 8rad :

http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh122/KnownSpace/2016_1018waxwings0005.jpg

Added a few notes to help clarify a couple of things that differed slightly from build to build (and camera angle shot to angle shot)


Also found out that on the 223 the square rectangular part supporting the T shape part from the 8rad (D15) comes from the Tamiya 1/35 Panzer III Ausf M/W and is not simply a scratched bit of plastic sheet, though I might just do that in the end and will amend list at top.
 
Great research! Based on this, I can say that I assembled mine wrong. I did not cut down the vents for the 232. I cast the hull with them on it.

You are not the only one!!!!!!!

Much to my extreme annoyance when I looked at marvins build again, then Jasons ,then Shadowknights to then finally end up on Propcollectors build ,who has what looks like two shots of the original 232 build I realised I'd missed both the fact it had a slightly recessed base and the vents well. So I spent this afternoon correcting it.

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I made a bit of a mess flipping the vents out so I had to repair those thin back strips that invariably snapped. The width of the replacement plastic is the same as the width of the base of the 38flv part that leans against the engine.
On the plus side repairing them allowed me to make the heaxagon recessed and had the advantage of letting LFS-16 lampshades stick better. Such is life.
 
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I would really recommend that once you have got the hulls put together and before you start adding the pieces to it that you sort out a stand for these.The reason being I will guarantee you'll end up knocking bits off otherwise or worse snapping some of the more fragile parts ,particularly the thin handle bar parts from the Morser Karl that stick out of the end on the 232.

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And on that bombshell I'll let sleeping dogs lie and go to bed myself.
 
Found this photo in "The making of The Empire Strikes Back". Its a small one and my cameras old so its not the best but if you have the book go to page 259. Not seen this anywhere else.

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The recess MUST BE much deeper than I first thought.


Not happy.
I've had a good look at the photo and I think what they actually did was to cut the end of the 8rad hulls off straight after the vents finish. Given that I snapped most of those off redoing them this wouldn't surprise me. There certainly looks like there is a clean drop after that to the base.
The top of the flak38 A9 and A10 parts look almost level with the bottom of the vents, at least 4 to 5mm lower than I thought. And the bottom engine struts look slightly braced against the inside of the vents rather than next to them.
The only way to tell is to test fit the engine parts and see what everything looks like after that. I don't doubt the photo is the original model, its just a pity its so small but the angle of the photo is good enough to get some reasonable comparisons between everything , particularly where the top of the Flak38 E 10/11 parts attach to the JPS engine and also the engine base. Those parts do not look cut down so everything else from there on should make sense.
So I'm going to leave things for a while until I can do that. No point adding any more o the build as I will just end up snapping them off as I redo the engine base again.
 
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Does the electronic version of the book have the pic in higher rez? I seem to remember Jason had some higher rez versions of some photos from the Making of Star Wars eBook.
 
Okay, I've studied the models, of course, AFTER I built mine (sigh). Here's what is going on:
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As far as the butt on the 8 rad version, if you look really closely at that pic from the Making Of book... I now think it too might be hollow just like the front and back of the 223 Pod.
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I'm seeing Pay McClung this weekend. He built them - I can ask his opinion/see if he remembers....

I'm pretty sure the pod coming at the camera is the 8Rad, and then the lit one heading towards the planet is the 223...
 
Ugh, also, the 223 rims as we have them are really wrong. From what I can tell at first glance, there is a cone that looks like it might be mating to the 223 hulls on all five sides, and then there is a reflector in the mix, maybe (and then in the middle, mounted with what looks like a glue glob, the square plastic and halogen bulb as sketched above)

This gives you the gist - I and a few friends are working on IDing them.

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I think my rims are undersized. The void is immense and doesn't match the real model.

But then again the real model is really slap-dash with the hollows. You're better off idealizing as close scrutiny of these is a bad thing, if you are going for "prop" accurate.

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Yikes!!!!!

"I felt a great disturbance in the Forum...... as if millions (well dozens anyway) of studio scale voices suddenly cried out in terror (or said ***k!!!! rather loudly, I know I did. )

Struth ,thats a lot of info suddenly and a bit of a game changer at that!

Thank you Jason, that was a very honourable and magnanimous thing you did in sharing all that information and I appreciate your generocity of spirit (and the much better detailed photograph and explanation).
This has been driving me mad most of the afternoon and those pictures and diagrams have cleared up alot about the 8rad I couldn't quite understand. It looks like they put the hexagonal engine base in the hull at the junction where the main part of the hull ends and the angled vent part begins. I'll have to rebuild mine by taking it back to what I built up to from there anyway, which won't be easy .It won't be hollow though, I'll have to put in plastic strips to rebuild and support the vent section ,cos they are just going to snap off again and look pretty messy.
I'm a bit distraught about the 223 info. I've Just bought a bradham BT44b from Japan for the rims and it definitely wasn't that cheap but at least not into the hundreds. Still I've made a contact for parts over there now.
 
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In all likelihood halogen bulbs were not used. You'd have about 5 seconds before the bulb would get hot enough to start melting the plastic. Halogen bulbs really weren't necessary for motion control shooting where you could have long exposures. They were pretty much used on high speed shots where the frame rates were fast and only had to remain on for a few seconds. Most likely it was an incandescent bulb from Carley or JKL.
 
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The Ferrari 312B and the Brabham BT440 are scarce kits in the UK and going for astonishing prices when they do come up for sale. They can't be all studio scale builders I'm bidding against????? Again if anyone can help out with these I would be grateful and happy to pay (seeing as I probably don't have any kits that most of the really dedicated guys here do would have to swop). The Ferrari part is a cut down from the original kit,
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Hi CutThumb
im in Ireland I have 312b , let me know what your after , I have a part swap thread , I'm looking for items for 5 foot millennium falcon items so we should be able to help each other out.
 
Hi CutThumb
im in Ireland I have 312b , let me know what your after , I have a part swap thread , I'm looking for items for 5 foot millennium falcon items so we should be able to help each other out.

Thanks Vac ,I'll drop you a message!!!

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Redone the 232 bottom (again). I estimate that the recess is between 3.5 to 4mm below the bottom of where the vent part is cut off. I put the flak38 part in (levelled the bit off the bottom first) and built it up until the reflectived light on the top matched the photo Jason posted. I'll amend the details on the diagram later. I think Jasons spot on about the fact they left it hollow, I didn't have the option the thin bits were just to damaged.


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Paul, great to see you blazing the trail in refining the build of this model! You got me starting to acquire the necessary kits to build one now.
 

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