by Jean Benoît
Scale: 1/250
The Arc-170 is a new fighter shown in the upcoming movie Revenge of the Sith. It is mostly shown and used by the clone troops in the battle over Coruscant.
In my opinion, the appearance of this ship is something you like to hate. At first glimpse, you look at it and you see some Stuka canopies with some oversize engine coils, and all of it does not make any sense, but after a wile the design grows on you.
And the more you look at it, the more you start to like it, especially when you have to study it for scratchbuilding.
The Arc-170 was really hard to build. The first difficulty: “the scale”, my construction is about 1/250 in scale. Then there was the search for good pictures or drawings of the ship. After April 2, more pictures on the web were available since authorization to release books and toys came about. But even with good pictures not all views of the ship was available, I mostly had to analyze the Hasbro Arc-170 toy.
The model is entirely built from Balsa and Pine wood, the canons and engines coils where made out of pine and turned on a mini lathe (Unimat1). For the rest of the ship, meaning wings, fuselage and parts, they where all made of balsa wood. With time I’ve discovered some techniques and products to block the grain of balsa wood, balsa has essentially this big problem on the visual side, it has “ugly grainy lines”.
Regarding painting, all the bigger red patterns and black windows were hand painted and all the little decals were home made with decals paper.
It was the first time I’ve been using decals paper, this product is wonderful.
I really, really wanted to build some transparent canopy, with little figures inside, but time was missing. Also the folding wings had to be cancel too.
I really enjoyed building this little ship; it took me about 45 hrs to build it.
Image: Beauty shot
Image: Front/left view
Image: Business end
Image: Higher
Image: Size matters not
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