Star Wars A-Wing Kit Masters 1/24th Scale

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Well now, here's the deal.
Purchased a set of master patterns, made by Alfred Wong and bought from a third party, for a 1/24th A-Wing fighter with a view to turning it out as a kit.
All splendid and tremedous untill i finally got my hands on them.
Please bear in mind i'm being honest here as anything else is a waste of my time and yours.

Now kiddies, i'm no paragon of perfection in my work but i try to get it right, in a lot of aspects, these masters were anything but right to my peepers.

...shall we?
They Are OK...
Which for anyone that knows what i'm like, translates to 'not good enough for my purposes'
So to begin with, for a fair amount of the folding stuff i got the following...





Decent use of kit parts for the detailing, namely from the now venerable Revell 1/32nd scale F-14 Tomcat.
Good kit by the way, built a few meself.





Now a little summat was gnawing at me brain since i looked at the pics before i bought them and once in my hands i got it confirmed.
I am well aware that the shape has it's basis & design in an F-14 but i didn't think that using the front ends of a pair
of the aforermentioned Revell kits would be used to make up the master without at least correcting at least one or two flaws.
How wrong i was, eh readers?

Look at the pics below and you can clearly see what was used by noting the injection moulded push out marks and the mating suface pin holes.







So then, the gap between the front prongs was too wide and the front edge was too deep and had some form of...intake i s'pose.
Well the front is supposed to be a bit thinner in depth and blunt so that needed addressing.
Also the detail such as it was, was very soft and not well defined.
The fit of the top and bottom parts together was only just the right side of atrocious.
After a 10 min smoke and caffine break, the only way around this was to either dump them and start again or scrape them clean and re-work from the base up.
After the cash outlay so far, binning them was not an option.

In with the scalpel and chisels then.

After that, some application of putty, sand down, repeat several times.

Even found a few of the original panel lines from the Tomcat kit parts hanging about under the paint.
I'ts an old issue kit going by that awful greeny colour that revell used to mould in.
The newer ones were moulded in grey.



While working on this, the belly intake thing almost fell out when i put me finger into the plasticine like substance that was holding it in.







The clear rubber like glue that was holding the parts the plasticine wasn't had long ago lost it's grip so that's another replacement job.
Well now to the front end gap deal.
Narrowed the gap with some evergreen strip and much putty, also additional strips to the front.



So concentrating on the bottom with much filling, sanding, repeating many time, some plasticard, some brass,
a few assorted kit bits from the greeblie box, one singular bit of detail i kept
from the original stuff and a goodly amount of fiddling about and re-scribing, we get to this stage...



A bit more re-scribing and clearing up, we get to here...









A couple of larger pics for ya of the primed article.



So that done, a final run round with the pinvise and a 0.75mm drill bit, a blast of primer and surface of the underside done!







Well perfect it ain't but i do not have that much time to spend on it so this will have to do.
And that's the lot for now, back with the top side when i muster up the courage. Go easy gang!!

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