I finally, finally finished the X-Wing model kit I got all the way back in 2017. I was on such a roll with the Gundam Kits I just finished, so I took advantage of the momentum and knocked this sucker out for good.
I originally started this build back in 2018, and put it on ice after finding it to be rather … tedious. Having four wings means that the work on this model gets very repetitive very quickly. Furthermore, each wing has some very minute differences in terms of detailing and decals, and I found it a bit difficult to keep track of which wing was which.
… or so I thought. This time around, in 2019, I had no such problems keeping track of all the parts, and the work hardly felt boring. This helped me understand the true reason why I stopped last year - I was intimidated by this kit. It was the first time I tried to do weathering and detailing to such an extensive degree, and I had not yet come up with a set of techniques I was comfortable with. This was basically my first chance experimenting with weathering, yet it was a kit I wanted to look perfect. That caused me to overthink things and second guess my work, and after a while it became overwhelming.
This was also my first time trying to use waterslide decals, which ended up being a disaster. Apparently waterslides have something of an unofficial shelf life, and I think this kit was well past it. None of them worked without separating and in some cases disintegrating. This was extremely disheartening, and at the time I was convinced that using the regular decals (the kit comes with a full set of waterslide and standard decals) would be “settling”. Frustrated with the whole ordeal, I put the kit aside and forgot about it.
In the following months, I built (and weathered) several Gundam kits, as well as several smaller and simpler Star Wars kits. Nowadays I feel much more comfortable with the tools and techniques needed to do this kit justice, and this made the build something more of a joy.
Unfortunately, my troubles with this build mean that I do not have work in progress photos to share, so we will have to fast forward to some shots of the finished product:
The X-Wing has always been my favorite Star Wars vehicle, and this kit only reinforces that sentiment. What a cool freaking ship.
As you can see, not only does the kit comes with a stand, but a rather fancy one at that. It you cannot tell, it is meant to look like the surface of the Death Star. At this point I can confirm that every single Star Wars kit I have ever built has come with a stand, but none have been this detailed.
Nor do any of the other stands come with an extra diorama piece that lets you replicate Luke Skywalker’s successful bombing of the Death Star with Proton Torpedoes:
Let’s be honest here - I do not for one second believe that Bandai was trying to give this kit the “Deluxe” treatment or anything. More likely the reason it has this stuff is because the kit itself weighed in with a low piece count for their target price, so they needed to add something to sufficiently sweeten the pot.
Moving on, this kit has a ton of gimmicks. The wings can fold in and out of attack position, and it has pieces you can use to set up the landing gear:
I love how it includes the necessary pieces to replicate the flaps that open up to let the landing gear out:
The cockpit also opens up to reveal the pilot within:
Painting this figure was not quite as touch as I thought. There are actually a bunch of tiny decals I used on the helmet, and the body was done with orange and white paint respectively.
Last but not least, the kit comes with not one, but two different astromech droids to choose from. One of them is, naturally, R2-D2, which you can best see in this photo here:
This was an extremely difficult piece to detail because of how small R2’s head is. Thankfully, not only does the kit come with two different droids, but it comes with two separate headpieces for each one. When my first attempt to use decals failed, I was able to toss it and try again on the second head using paints. That is the version you see above.
The second astromech droid serves as an interesting “What If?” scenario - it is an R5 droid, AKA “Red”, who Luke almost went home with instead of R2-D2 at the beginning of the film.
I use R2 in the finished model because I am a purist, but I actually like the look of R5 better. It comes together a bit better with a lot less work involved. This photo also lets you see the shape of the droids, and how only the very top is actually detailed.
As I said earlier, this build was mostly a joy, but it had some complications. At least two different pieces suffered breakage, and needed to be super glued together. Additionally, I had trouble with some of the painting. You can see in some of these photos that some of the read paint began to bleed:
Color selection was also tricky. The thing about the X-Wing (or at least Luke’s X-Wing, which this kit is supposed to represent) is that it is not just grey and red in color. You get some yellow and dark grey in there as well. The kit comes with decals for all of these colors, but I found most of them to be lacking, and this which led to me trying to hand paint it all in. I constantly felt unsatisfied with my work, and redid certain sections again and again. You can actually see the result in the photos within this post. See the very first photo of the finished model? The yellow paint on the nose is surrounded by a darkish grey. Now look at it here:
Here, the grey was replaced by and even darker grey that looks almost black. I honestly cannot remember why I did this, but I do think it detracts a bit from the look of the kit. The almost-black stands out too much, and when a specific vision of what an X-Wing looks like is burned into your mind, seeing this out of place color messes with my mind.
That is about all I have to say about this X-Wing kit, but before we wrap up, here is a shot of the back, for no other reason than because I had no other place to put it:
The Build Process
I did not talk much about the build process, but you can probably surmise a lot about it from these photos. The X-Wing, like with all the Star Wars kits I have built so far, contains far fewer pieces than most Gundam kits, making the simple process of assembly much easier. On the flip side, these SW kits require far more painting and detailing work to make them look right. Whereas most Gundam kits look fine enough with some decals and a bit of marker, these Star Wars kits need far more love, attention, and weathering effects to come to life. This leads to an ironic paradox - these Star Wars kits are far more appealing to the mass market, but are arguably far more challenging to do “properly”.
This difference in priorities also leads to a slightly different build experience. When building this and other SW kits, I found myself having to come up with strategies on how to detail each piece. If I knew multiple parts were to be colored the same way, it meant I had to do them all at the same time, with the same batch of paint.
Conclusion
The kit did not come out perfectly, but it still looks like a dream. Bandai has done a fine job capturing an astounding degree of movie-accurate detail in these Star Wars kits, but you have to bring a strong passion for these ships in order to do them justice. If you do, they can make you feel like a kid again, looking up at the stars and wishing you could just blast off into hyperspace.
For some additional photos of this kit, take a look at the gallery here