Hello,
I'm not one who seems to find the time or funds to work on all the multitude of project ideas I have floating around in my head. But this one has been building for the past few years now. And finally I'm at a place where I can begin to move forward on it.
...very slowly move forward on it. I will take what I can get!
Expect this to be one of the slowest builds on the board - for a number of reasons. First one being - I have two little ones at home, a 4 year old and a 3 month old. The second being 2 sister in laws (and their families and kids), my wife's mom and my own and my brother in laws sister and her family all live within a one mile radius. Which is great because their fabulous people - but that also means we're having someone over or we're walking over there nearly every night of the week.
And I'm going to ramble. But it's my build thread so you're stuck.
Ok. So now I can check a number of things off my list - some of which have been keeping from starting this over the past 4 years.
1. Find a beautiful supportive girl who is actually going to let me display this thing somewhere in our house once it's done and marry her. Check.
2. Take an unfinished basement from four cement walls and a cement floor and convert it into a permitted basement apartment complete with kitchen. Only took 4 years but Check. (this project was my own personnel reward for finishing)
3. Myself with limited modeling skills and who hasn't actually built a model since middle school. Check.
4. Four year old who could at some point sneak upstairs, see the cool "rocket" and destroy the whole thing in a matter of seconds. Check.
5. Four month old who requires constant holding and parenting and relieving of beautiful wife when I come home and who at one point glowed like Tron (see second photo). Check.
It's important to note that I don't care about accuracy. I am very detailed but as far as exactly replicating the studio model - nah. I'm more interesting with the scratch building fun and the process itself. As long as it looks right to me and has the right "feel".
Ok. So how to begin building this? I've been collecting every reference image I could find and closely reading and watching not only various star destroyer builds on here but tons of other modeling threads as well for the past 5 years or so.
I needed to figure out the basic shape of the ship before doing anything. So I began working on a paper mockup. Initially I was thinking of a length around 3 ft. But as most of my projects tend to do this grew in size.
(quick note - all of these photos I found in the public domain of the internet through google searches. I certainly want to be respectful though and if there are any issues around posting these please let me know and I will remove them)
Here were some of the reference photos I found that really helped. And using these was able to pull measurements for the shape.
It seemed the original model makers simply took a rectangle, cut it diagonally, flipped one half around and put them together. That made sense to me. So that was how I approached it. I had reams of various paper in storage left over from college. The largest of which was 15.5" in width. Using that as a starting point I began taping together various sheets, cutting them and seeing how they looked.
Having one measurement and using the photos above I took measurements in photoshop. Eventually I arrived at a rectangle 15.5" x 41.25". Of course this was after numerous tries.
Again, using the photos above and my best artistic eye I came up with this shape. For posterity's sake I've written the measurements on the paper. Which you can't make out so here they are. The triangle is 13 3/16" x 3.25". The height of the end is 15/16".
Guessing at a tench depth I came up with 1". So now having that it was simple to cut out the shapes for the internal structure.
Before racing ahead I wanted to be sure. So I upgraded my paper model to a foam core model. Oooo!
Here is the outcome of that effort.
It took some studying to figure out the placement for the very back internal piece. It's hard to discern where the back wall of the engine area is. The photo of the original that ended up deciding me was this one:
I believe that gap you see is where the back wall begins. So that is where I set mine.
Next steps: My plan is to use wood for the internal "bulkhead" structure and then head to home depot to see what would be best to use as rods to hold it all together. My plan is to have two mounts. One on the bottom of the model towards the back. The other on the side in the back like the original. So obviously whatever I use to hold it all together needs to be plenty strong. As for mounts I'm still undecided. I may be able to cobble something together from home depot - or look into a strong camera mount. I'm leaning towards the camera mount simply because of the swiveling it will allow me to do which will make working on the model MUCH easier.
Just have to find one strong enough.
As for the top structure of the model - I'm not worried about figuring that out yet. I'm going to tackle the primary hull shape and then move on to that. Though I go back and forth on that.
There is a tap plastics on my way home from work. For the plastic sheeting I'm looking at using sheet styrene that is 1/8" thick.
I'm excited to finally be at a place I can begin this project. It's hard to watch all the fantastic modeling being done on this site without one to work on yourself. I'm going to really try hard to post frequent updates on my progress. My biggest hurdle is time and occasionally funds.
I'm open to suggestions, thoughts and critique on any part of this!
Thanks for reading!
Chris
I'm not one who seems to find the time or funds to work on all the multitude of project ideas I have floating around in my head. But this one has been building for the past few years now. And finally I'm at a place where I can begin to move forward on it.
...very slowly move forward on it. I will take what I can get!
Expect this to be one of the slowest builds on the board - for a number of reasons. First one being - I have two little ones at home, a 4 year old and a 3 month old. The second being 2 sister in laws (and their families and kids), my wife's mom and my own and my brother in laws sister and her family all live within a one mile radius. Which is great because their fabulous people - but that also means we're having someone over or we're walking over there nearly every night of the week.
And I'm going to ramble. But it's my build thread so you're stuck.
Ok. So now I can check a number of things off my list - some of which have been keeping from starting this over the past 4 years.
1. Find a beautiful supportive girl who is actually going to let me display this thing somewhere in our house once it's done and marry her. Check.
2. Take an unfinished basement from four cement walls and a cement floor and convert it into a permitted basement apartment complete with kitchen. Only took 4 years but Check. (this project was my own personnel reward for finishing)
3. Myself with limited modeling skills and who hasn't actually built a model since middle school. Check.
4. Four year old who could at some point sneak upstairs, see the cool "rocket" and destroy the whole thing in a matter of seconds. Check.
5. Four month old who requires constant holding and parenting and relieving of beautiful wife when I come home and who at one point glowed like Tron (see second photo). Check.
It's important to note that I don't care about accuracy. I am very detailed but as far as exactly replicating the studio model - nah. I'm more interesting with the scratch building fun and the process itself. As long as it looks right to me and has the right "feel".
Ok. So how to begin building this? I've been collecting every reference image I could find and closely reading and watching not only various star destroyer builds on here but tons of other modeling threads as well for the past 5 years or so.
I needed to figure out the basic shape of the ship before doing anything. So I began working on a paper mockup. Initially I was thinking of a length around 3 ft. But as most of my projects tend to do this grew in size.
(quick note - all of these photos I found in the public domain of the internet through google searches. I certainly want to be respectful though and if there are any issues around posting these please let me know and I will remove them)
Here were some of the reference photos I found that really helped. And using these was able to pull measurements for the shape.
It seemed the original model makers simply took a rectangle, cut it diagonally, flipped one half around and put them together. That made sense to me. So that was how I approached it. I had reams of various paper in storage left over from college. The largest of which was 15.5" in width. Using that as a starting point I began taping together various sheets, cutting them and seeing how they looked.
Having one measurement and using the photos above I took measurements in photoshop. Eventually I arrived at a rectangle 15.5" x 41.25". Of course this was after numerous tries.
Again, using the photos above and my best artistic eye I came up with this shape. For posterity's sake I've written the measurements on the paper. Which you can't make out so here they are. The triangle is 13 3/16" x 3.25". The height of the end is 15/16".
Guessing at a tench depth I came up with 1". So now having that it was simple to cut out the shapes for the internal structure.
Before racing ahead I wanted to be sure. So I upgraded my paper model to a foam core model. Oooo!
Here is the outcome of that effort.
It took some studying to figure out the placement for the very back internal piece. It's hard to discern where the back wall of the engine area is. The photo of the original that ended up deciding me was this one:
I believe that gap you see is where the back wall begins. So that is where I set mine.
Next steps: My plan is to use wood for the internal "bulkhead" structure and then head to home depot to see what would be best to use as rods to hold it all together. My plan is to have two mounts. One on the bottom of the model towards the back. The other on the side in the back like the original. So obviously whatever I use to hold it all together needs to be plenty strong. As for mounts I'm still undecided. I may be able to cobble something together from home depot - or look into a strong camera mount. I'm leaning towards the camera mount simply because of the swiveling it will allow me to do which will make working on the model MUCH easier.
Just have to find one strong enough.
As for the top structure of the model - I'm not worried about figuring that out yet. I'm going to tackle the primary hull shape and then move on to that. Though I go back and forth on that.
There is a tap plastics on my way home from work. For the plastic sheeting I'm looking at using sheet styrene that is 1/8" thick.
I'm excited to finally be at a place I can begin this project. It's hard to watch all the fantastic modeling being done on this site without one to work on yourself. I'm going to really try hard to post frequent updates on my progress. My biggest hurdle is time and occasionally funds.
I'm open to suggestions, thoughts and critique on any part of this!
Thanks for reading!
Chris
loads of pics
