thank you Bump and Ron, and yes, Tamer, you are always welcome, my friend. Shawn has been a bit under the weather lately and I think he needs some cheering up.
First off, I wanted to share a pic that was on the card of the Saga Death Star gunner showing our gun, more or less, in a scene that I am not sure that I remember seeing in A New Hope.
Notice that gunner up top? He is sighting in his target using some sort of optical device mounted to the top of the gun that isnt included in our factory gun, at least not looking that way.
I just thought it was interesting.
OK, I had forgot to mention that the turned aluminum fittings that I used on our piping assembly were Detail Master items. Now for another car model aftermarket detail from a company called Model Car Garage. This is a set of their Photo etched nickel Automotive Gauges for 1-24th and 1-25th scale car models that feature photo etched nickel gauge housings and bezels, the faces of which are black printed on clear plastic. What you are supposed to do here is paint a background color on the backside of the gauge face that will show through behind the graphics, cut the gauge face out and glue it to the backside of the gauge housing using white glue. The front plastic face of the gauge face kind of makes it look like the gauge is behind glass. Tedious small stuff, let me tell you. I lost one gauge face while cutting and when things are this small, if you drop it, more than likely, it's gone. The gauge housing and bezels are to be cut from the sprue with either a sharp hobby knife or a pair of micro scissors.
Here is the gauge housing that I chose pre painted "remind me to stop doing that" and a set of three gauge faces painted from behind. See how I painted the red needle first and then painted the white background? Perhaps not as we are getting pretty small for the camera here. I was experimenting with my real camera the other day and it didn't seem to be focusing any tighter than the phone does even with the macro setting. perhaps if I dialed the resolution up it would help.
Here are the gauge faces ready to be trimmed and glued into place. It would have been nice had the faces been spaced on the sheet to just cut a strip of 3 and go but no, the spacing wasn't right so I have to do these one at a time. The housing face has an etched line in the bottom that allows for a right angle bend for mounting of the assembly.
Here they are glued into place. That took forever and I lost one of the faces so I used one from a different sheet and put it in the middle.
Here is the gauge assembly mounted on top of the forward plumbing block. Now we are looking both retro and industrial at the same time.
My original thought was to use strips of the etched nickle sprue to make straps out of for where the brackets meet the top cooling line but they were so springy while bending that I lost the first one several times and decided to use the styrene strips instead.
Here is a shot of the strips glued down and around to make our straps.
And finally, here are the straps painted up. I ended up scraping the paint off of the Gauge face assembly and going for the bare brushed alluminum look which negated the need for the bezels as you would see them better on a painted background so, I didn't use em.
Man, that also took longer than I thought. I have a couple of other fires to start or put out today. I had better get to it.
what do you think, Shawn, is this too conservative or, do I need to tone it down a bit?
