A Blast from the Past!!!!!

As I was checking my stored boxes of models and stuff  for parts for my projects, I discovered some old models from the time of my youth, late 80's. It was a time with a lot of passion, but without information, without Net and with only a tiny amount of details about the movie models. All I had in hand was some difficult to find Evergreen plastic, some MPC kits - No Fine Molds around - and a desire to build my own accurate as I could models. A number of books, "Famous Spaceships of fact and Fantasy", "The Rebel Alliance" and "The Imperial" Sourcebooks from West End Games, "The art of the Empire Strikes Back" and "The art of the Return of the Jedi" , were my main sources of information alas with a very few photos of the actual models. So I started building, shaping, converting, vacum-forming the shapes I needed to achieve the form of the ships I liked. In the 1st bunch of photos is the Millenium Falcon from the very old MPC "Rebel base on Hoth" kit, with a lot of tiny details and scratchbuilt the antenna radar and the upper gun turret. This was meant to go in a flight Dio over the newly constructed Death Star II so no detailing was done at the underside. I think I have somewhere an Xwing and an Y wing from the same kit and reworked them also to look right, to go along with this one.

The next one is a scratchbuild Y Wing. The front part is made out of plasticard over plasticard frames and the main body out of balsa wood for the main core and plasticard for the skin. The engines are Evergreen tube with vacuum formed the cones. Many tiny bits and pieces went onto this but after a failed attempt to paint it - which created a grainy surface of paint - pushed me to abandon it at that time and used it as a test piece for pastels. With a bath in oven cleaner and some repairing will become as good as new. I 'm not sure for the scale, maybe 1/100 . 

At the same scale is this scratchbuild Tie Fighter, dating back to 1988-1989. The cockpit was formed with 2 hemispheres of heated plasticard over a ball of milliput. Never made it to the finish. I guess that the front grill of the cockpit was too difficult for me to model it, at that time. Inside there is a pilot too!!!!