I fell into a rabbit hole – again – building a scale model. This happens almost every time but this time it seemed deeper than usual. Was it because of me having an exceptionally good time? Or bad? Am I getting old and just slow? I really don’t know.

With these plunges comes a problem. I have trouble focusing on anything else while building. For someone earning a living as a freelancer this is not a good thing. And yes, now that the model is finished I need to find some paid work. I spent way too much time with this.

Anyway, I would like to say this Mandalorian N-1 starfighter model is very cool! It is from Revell Germany and at 1/24 scale it is properly big. Finally, a Star Wars plastic injection kit model big enough to my preferences! I made changes to it so it is not like the one you saw in The Mandalorian tv-show. It is not like the one in The Phantom Menace either. It’s a custom, a remake of a small white AMT model I built a couple of years ago, it is the “Royal Guardsman Mark 2”, if you will.

The original white Royal Guardsman N-1 starfighter from 2022. Made from the small and quite simple AMT 1/48 scale model kit.

The cause of the deeper than usual rabbit hole was my ambition. I wanted to try something despite having failed at it earlier. The idea of using a metallic basecoat and painting colour on top is perhaps not ideal but I wanted to try it. It’s because of the effect I thought could be achieved by it. It’s about the top layer of paint peeling off due to friction or stress revealing metallic materials under it. This is a spaceship after all.

The build itself was great fun but the ambitious paint design hit a snag. Here is some of the hardest part of the build process photographed from top.

From left, first attempt to paint the model was a failure. I removed the white with water (as it was painted on a water soluble chipping medium), then I painted it white again. It didn't look good so I removed everything with acetone. New white but it was, again, wrong. Another wipe with acetone and finally, on the right, metallic base before the final white layer – a success this time.

This all took a long time because every layer of paint had to dry for a couple of days. First basecoat, then gloss black, metal on top of that and then white. I was not able to do much else while waiting. The immersion building these is very deep! For me, at least.

In the meanwhile I tinkered with assorted details around the model. Installing lights here and there.

The big 1/24 scale allows more detail. I made the best of it and tried to install lights, the bare necessities, like the droid head and dashboard gauges. That is 0,25 millimeter optic fiber in the droid head. Only twice as thick as human hair. For the dashboard I chose red because it just looks better than blue on digital camera sensor. The wavelength of blue leds act weird on camera. The seat belts are from a Mercedes Benz upgrade sheet I bought from a local hobby store.

In the end everything worked quite well and I am very happy with the final version. I think this willl perform well in photographs once I get there.

I have never built a model twice. Once a model is finished I don’t want to see it for a while. You know? There has to be some distance before I can think of photographing it. But with this one I don’t feel that need and I’m thinking of building another one. Some day.

The finished model, top view. Not much added weathering after the paintjob. A couple of decals but not much more. But to dig in deeper, that orange diagonal stripe decal in front of the canopy is actually from the same Microscale Rio grande decal sheet they used for the first X-wing model ever made in 1976, the one known as Blue 1. Same location too, in front of the canopy. The blue markings were painted red (Red 2) for filming and the blue X-wing was never seen on screen in the blue livery. Microscale still produces the same decal sheet and I happened to have one left over from earlier modelmaking projects. This was a nice hommage to the first X-wing I think.
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Tags: scale models, spaceship, Star Wars