After Ollie had finished up his A-wing model, he considered many Star Wars ships and vehicles for his next modeling adventure. Of course, he'd love to build them all, but he decided to build the Jawa Sandcrawler.

It's such a great part of Star Wars and a wonderful design (originally painted by Ralph McQuarrie) and he wanted it to be BIG! So when all is said and done, this model will be approximately 101cm x 45cm - not quite as big as the original ILM model but still quite large.

After about a week on the drawing table, Ollie started by building a mock-up model from cardboard, which is an absolute "must" when you build from scratch without detailed drawings to guide you. He must have made about 6 or 7 major changes to the mock-up before he got it right. So remember, while slightly time consuming, it's very smart to make a mock up before you build your final model.

After finishing the mock-up, Ollie invested in some plastic. He bought 3mm sheets of styrene for the base. Because it will carry the weight of the whole model, he took no chances. Oh yes, this will be heavy!

The base consists of many sheets crossing each other, glued together to give it strength. After gluing everything together it proved to be surprisingly strong.

With plenty of accurate photos to reference, one can easily construct the hull of the sandcrawler. It mostly consists of an entierly flat covering. Only the detailing will need vacum-forming.

The control room section was made in one evening. Ok, maybe one and a half evenings with the details and all, but still rather quickly. The interior is painted light yellow, just like the ILM model, to give the cozy, yellowish glow seen in many ILM reference photos.

With the base constructed, I now had an urge to get some volume on my workbench and I must say it came together quite quickly. Due to the sheer size and rather large parts, the sandcrawler grew bigger in a matter of days.

To avoid some tricky work, I decided not to glue the top of the middle section and the control room part in place yet as I will be adding internal lighting to this model. This will have to wait until all the little light bulbs and electronics are in place. There will be at least 10-15 separate sources of light throughout the sandcrawler.

With this much assembled, I wanted to start with some panel detailing on the hull. This proved to be much more time consuming than the actual construction. All of the panels have to be made separately as panel scribing does not go well with this scale. However, the result is remarkable. It gives the hull even more life than panel scribing ever could.

I'll also add whatever other little details I can at this stage. I dont like to wait with that because in my book, that part of scratch building is the most fun.

[Update: 09/11/04]

Its been almost a year since last update on my progress with the crawler. Due to being a part of society and a family, one cannot always sit down and scratchbuild star wars models (too bad, I might add!) but once in a while the inspiration and drive comes back big time as it has the past weeks/months.

I have continued with construction of the main hull of the sandcrawler. The aft part is roughly done. Once again it grew bigger rather quickly. I also want to mention that i have no record of how long a time I have spent just studying and looking upon the model but I must say, I'm getting a good feeling about this project. It feels right.

I also continued gluing panel parts on. In addition and contrary to what I said earlier, there is a lot of panel scribing (works well, even with this scale). Just look at the aft side hull. I must have been mad thinking I would glue those parts on individually. It would have taken forever! But I feel I have personally taken panel scribing to another level (for myself that is). I also detailed whatever I could on the aft side hull, which is still is the most fun part of it all.

The control room section was next. I finished up the panel gluing/scribing with some minor details here and there and set out to make the window frames. It sounds easy, right? Well, I made three different ones before it felt right. There was of course a lot of swearing in between but it came out OK in the end. I also finished detailing the top/roof of the control room section. A lot of small parts and goodies wound up in there and it was great fun.

With this much assembled it became quite stunning to look at but I knew it could become even more stunning so I ran to the local hobby shop and bought some tamia base coat. I took the model outside and base coated the whole right side. I almost screamed for joy after I had applied it. It was pay-off time!

So as it stands now, one side of the crawler is finished, not counting the painting of it of course, and it feels great. I hope my inspiration and drive will continue on...