I'm sorry Gene but the colour is way off because you've gone and coloured matched 33yr old dirty and UV faded paint. :lol.....
Do you folks ever take into consideration that after thirty years the paint may have faded?
Gene can address this better than I, but I suspect that hatch cover of Richard's spent the better part of the last thirty-five years crated and in storage............
Sorry for the radio silence. Been trying to buy a house this summer and that's been wreaking havoc with my geekiness....
I thought the same thing you guys did, so no offense taken! When I first saw the TIE, it was in a display case with some of Richard's cameras and a Graflex (a real, non-lightsaber'd Graflex. That he
used as a Graflex.). At first all I saw was the ball and arms, but then he pointed out the wings on another shelf. The story he told me was that when the stage guys bundled up the models in 1978, they had the damaged wingman TIE in pieces and asked him if he wanted it. He said sure, and it was put in a box and shipped up north to his new office. Where it sat till he moved to BOSS in 1983. Then, it sat in a box at BOSS till 1998, when he opened his current office. Basically, he never had the time or desire to reattach the wings and touch it up. So, as far as I can tell from asking Richard, it's been out of sight (literally) for about 30 years.
It was dusty, but not overly so. I think we just brushed it off with a soft paintbrush. The paint looked consistent all over the model. Resin was visible under some paint chips, but there did not appear to be any prior attempts at retouching. The only decals I noticed were the ones that were on the hatch.
Initially he only had the hatch I displayed here. That hatch was the original top mount hatch that had a hole cut out at the top. At some point someone (it may have been Richard) tried to "repair" it by cutting a circle out of another hatch and gluing it to the hatch. Yeah, I know - destroying an original piece for the sake of aesthetics. When I came into the picture, we found a box with a few more loose parts, including the clamps that go on the arms, the bottom hatch cover (unused since that is the mount point now), and another, period,
intact top hatch. With that I decided to do a quick paint match and get the replacement hatch painted to match the rest of the body. Since it had to go to Profiles the next week, I did it in a weekend, using the original hatch as a paint guide. As a reward, I got to keep the original hatch. It was a damn close match (if I do say so myself) and fine for a one-off, but for this exercise, we went to a paint mixing expert.
.......Thankyou once again for your tireless research.
No problem guys, glad I could help. As you can see, I'm as big a fan of the stories behind the pieces as I am of the pieces themselves.
Also, kudos to JMChladek for his thread on the alternative paints. Ultimately, you can paint it any color you want. Just not pink. Pink would be.... wrong. :lol
Gene
