Yes, my very good friend Lars Ole, or "Ollie" as we call him, has built a fairly large model of the A-wing fighter from Return of the Jedi. This was an ambitious project for him since it involved large-scale vacuum-forming and prototyping.

He based his construction plans on a few pictures showing the craft from the side, aft, top and bottom. Like me, he spent as little time working on the plans as possible. If I recall correctly, I believe he spent about a week at the drawing board before grabbing for the knife.

The good thing about this ship is that you can use the same vacuum-plug for both the upper and lower half of the hull. With that in mind he started constructing the vacuum-plugs. He basically just glued a lot of styrene ribs to a sheet o styrene cut to the shape resembling the horizontal outline of the ship. The space between the ribs was then filled with blocks of urethane foam and about a kilo of two-component polyester putty. This raw form was then sanded, filled and sanded again to a smooth finish.

The vacuum-plug was so large that we had to build a new vacuum-former to accept it. Since the sheet of styrene required was too large to be heated in the kitchen oven (as described in the vacuum-forming article), we used two propane burners and a heat gun to soften the plastic. It took the two of us to pull this off. One rotated the frame with the styrene over the burners while the other used the heat gun on the topside of the plastic. We actually had to make quite a few attempts before we had the two successfully formed halves for the primary hull, and there were a few burned fingertips along the way.

The vacuum-formed parts were then cut to shape and assembled. There was a lot of waste material involved in this phase of construction. The hull in front of and under the cockpit was cut away and replaced with a lower, straight sheet of styrene. All the material had to be cut away where the engines would be, and the cockpit opening had to be cut out. All in all, Ollie did a great job in aligning and assembling the different parts.

With the primary hull now assembled, he could start scribing the panel lines into the plastic. The first thing he had to do was to draw all the lines on the hull with a pencil. He then made a few styrene templates to follow the curves in the hull. On the back of the templates he used double sided tape to hold them in position while scribing. He used a small, custom sharpened screwdriver for this task. After scribing he had to sand the hull to remove all the excess plastic along the lines. He then had to clean the lines by rubbing the sharp end of a styrene sheet in the cut. This was very effective and left the panel lines with a smooth finish.

Most of the parts for the cockpit interior were kitbashed in the ways of the grand tradition.

The pilot was sculpted in Super Sculpey and cured at 175 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ollie vacuum-formed the engines and the rear end of the ship with a skill that impressed me. The engines tubes are slightly bent and conical. He made a plug for the outer half of the tube and formed four parts that he just glued together. The hull conceals the inner half of the tube, so his approach worked out great.

After the model was finished it was time to paint - a job Ollie sometimes finds frustrating, but with this model it went very well. First, he applied a base coat of white, then red, then he mixed different tones of white and red to apply on various panels throughout the ship. Some light blue panels there made as well.

When all the paint was applied, it was time to weather it down. To get this effect, Ollie used the air brush quite often with a very thin black/dark grey color, lightly toning it down. He then washed it with white spirit mixed with black, brown, etc. several times.

The pilot was painted with humbrol via brush. Much of the detailing was also done with a brush. It took him about two weeks to paint the whole model.