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This actually was the first model I built.
Starting my new found hobby, I did not have a huge stock of paints so I went with the colours that I thought were closest to the ones mentioned in the manual.
The detail on this particular built are superb! Fine Molds has done a nice job with this one. |  | |
| Kit details... |
| Manufacturer: | Fine Molds | | Scale: | 1/72 | | Parts: | 45 | | Built: | June 2007 | | Aftermarket kits: | None | | Add-ons: | Lighted cockpit | | | |
| Building the base stand... |
| I wanted to give the TIE Fighter kit the impression of flying over the Death Star surface, kind of like the scene where they were chasing the X-Wings. So I searched the internet and came upon Triliance's website. They sell great death star surface panels! I bought a few (since I will be building a TIE Interceptor as well) and used one panel as base for this model. |  | | I first cut loose the different tiles from one panel and rearranged them to my liking. |  | | Then I airbrushed them Flat Black to give it a dark base colour before spraying Gunmetal Grey on them. |  | | Underneath the Death Star surface panels, I wanted to add a piece of wood so that the base stand would be about two centimeters in height. |  |
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| Building the kit... |
| Since this was the very first model I built, I decided it would be best for me to simply follow the manual and start at the very beginning: in this case, that meant building the cockpit. |  | | Since I had planned to add a little LED to the cockpit, I almost immediately ran into a problem... I had never before worked with LEDs! So I put my kit on hold and did some research on the internet on how to use LED lighting. A few hours later, I was back building my cockpit. |  | | The rest of the model went quite smooth. All the parts came off the plastic trees easily, there were no holes or bubbles or anything in the parts so it was an easy job putting this all together. | |   | |
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| Painting the model... |
I used the following Tamiya Acrylic colours on this model.
Tamiya Flat Black (colour number 81701)
Tamiya German Grey (colour number 81763)
Tamiya Medium Grey (colour number 81720)
Tamiya Flat Yellow (colour number 81703) | |
| Overall experience... |
The TIE Fighter was a fun kit to build, very accurate and detailed. The only thing that bothered me was the use of very tiny decals. Some were so small that they actually got lost in my cup of water which I used to remove them from their paper.
I ended up painting a few decals by hand, which explains the Flat Yellow colour I used. | |
| More photos... |
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