Posted by Whitebase : 30th March 2008, 8:00 pm

Here’s another round of updates on the WIP. Mid way through the project, during the craze for ‘maintenance bay’ dioramas, I decided to have the meteor in ‘full hatch open’ mode.

I cut away an opening on the main body, following the original panel lines which come with the kit. Here’s a test fit of how I intend for the hatch to be opened, and how the engine will look like inside.

The under surfaces of the opened hatches will be in plain view so I had to clean them up a little and apply some details.

First off, the under surface was cleaned up and sanded roughly to smoothen the surface. Then a sheet of pla plate was glued onto the surface to provide a good clean surface to work on. Shown here is before I trimmed off the excess pla plate around the edges.

Once the new surface was properly dried, I whipped out the good ole’ motorized grinder and grinded a notch along the side edges.

The notch was then filled with some detailing by slowly gluing pla plate strips in some diagonal patterns.

Some people (cough *eric* cough) are just plain fantastic with their artistic sense, and can come up with uber cool designs on the fly. I unfortunately am NOT one of those… I then took quite a long time to design how the rib detailing would look like on the under surface. Here’s a test fit pic

Here’s a little something I like to do whenever I’ve scribed some custom panel lines. I stain the lines with some ink, and let it dry before wiping off the excess from the surface. The stained lines usually still show through even after applying surfacer. The surfaced parts revealed a lot of imperfections on the surface which will have to be cleaned up further…