#imperial shuttle

So over the last several years, I've gotten into building Star Wars models of ships, vehicles, and some figures. Specifically kits made by Bandai, Revell, AMT, etc. and not Lego sets, since the point for me is for them to look real at the end (no shade to people who like Lego, it's just not for me).

Well my favorite ship has always been the Lambda-class T-4a "Imperial" Shuttle, but since I was so late to the model building game, they don't make those kits anymore and if you can find one, it'll probably cost you over $100 to get it.

I built a small metal earth version but it just wasn't the same, so I decided to try to build my own out of wood, using the metal model as a reference. The "head" of the shuttle was more difficult, but I found a paper model kit online that helped me eyeball the angles (it came from an incredibly sketchy forum so I didn't trust it enough to download the zip file, but some of the pages were there as jpeg previews and one of them had the piece i needed).

I used balsa wood (because my wrists are still recovering from tendonitis and I was afraid using anything denser would set me back) and sanded it into shape, using a dremel tool to do the back.

There was some trial and error for the other pieces and I had to redo several when I realized that shaping by sanding was a lot better than carving it with a knife. But the pattern I drew at the start was still a decent guide.

These are most of the finished pieces, minus the wings which were cut from mat board.

After I was done shaping the wood, I sealed it with several layers of mod podge, which also helped me set the bend in the lower wings at the correct angle (135 degrees). I clamped them in a jig I built specifically for this while they dried.

Then I had to assemble the guns, which was just gluing bits of wire to the turret bases. For this I used JB Weld SuperWeld glue which cures in seconds with UV light

After that I glued some of it together with a mix of the JB Weld and e6000, then everything got a coat of white acrylic paint (which took forever on the wings since the mat board we had was dark maroon).

Once I was sure everything was fully dry, I started inking in the panel lines with a micron pen and applied paint to the windshield, the rear thrusters, and a couple panels on the wings. I had to amass a worryingly large folder of reference photos for this thing.

I had my dad help me build a base from scrap wood (it was thankfully already sanded and finished, we just had to cut it to size, round the edges, and refinish that spot) and a piece from a wire hanger. Then I drilled a small hole in the underside and finally put the wings on (which was a whole thing in and of itself since I had to keep the lower wings at a right angle while the glue cured, it was a very stressful time lol).

It's not perfect but all in all, I'm very happy with the results. It's been in-progress for a good 2-3 years, but I only really got serious about it in the last month.