If you followed my other page at all while I was counting down to the release of Rise of Skywalker, you probably know that I love X-Wings. A lot. As in, the amount of X-Wing paraphernalia in my house outnumbers the average person's shoe closet. I had been tracking Bandai's X-wing releases, and particularly their 1/48 scale classic Red 5 X-Wing with lights and sound effects, for a while, but it was prohibitively expensive until I caught it on a 50% off sale.

Overall, this kit was a great pleasure to build and the big scale allows for a lot of great detail, especially in the cockpit and engine parts. The added bonus of lights and sound effects makes for a great display model! I used a combination of paint and decals, as I often do with Bandai kits, with a base color of Vallejo Model Air White Gray.

For the weathering I used a dark gray Vallejo wash and Oilbrushers for some of the engine rust. I ran into a scary problem when one of my matte clear coats fogged up most of the model. I had to spend some time wiping off the model with thinner, especially on R2-D2 and then giving it a gloss coat to help defrost the matte. I was able to work it out in the end, but I got very anxious for a while.

This kit is pretty hard to find these days, but if you can grab one, it is well worth the investment. Between its size and the bonus light and sound effects, this X-Wing will make a great shelf piece!

As I continue to play catch up with completed builds, the next one up is the Bandai 1/72 X-Wing kit. As I was scrolling through my past pictures I noticed that I took these photos almost exactly one year ago, so it seemed only appropriate to relive it now.

I bought this X-Wing kit as part of a two-pack box in conjunction with Rogue One, which included a 1/72 scale X-Wing and a 1/144 scale X-Wing. You will see the 1/144 X-Wing pop up later, but for now I want to spend some time on the 1/72 kit. The provided livery and decals were for Red Leader from the assault on Scarif, but I have always been a Wedge Antilles fan so I really wanted to build his X-Wing. Thankfully, there are a lot of great custom decal makers in the world of the internet, and I found a good set of Red 2 decals from Cosmos Models (he makes a lot of really great decal sets for many different Star Wars ships. I will plug him all day long; his Instagram handle is @nicholas_sagan).​

Outside of hunting for reference photos, this kit was fun and easy to build. I used a slightly gray tinted white for the base color, custom decals for Wedge's colors, and an oil wash with Starship Filth for the panel lines and dirty look. I am very happy with the final result on this kit, so much so that the old one got bumped to the land of storage.

Stay tuned for more on that other tiny little X-Wing that came in the box with this one!

Besides building Star Wars models, I am a huge fan of the X-Wing miniatures table top game. I am not into the tournament circuit, but I like collecting the ships and playing casually every couple of months. A while back I stumbled across some research about magnetizing your X-wing ships to create the ability to bank and turn your ship on the stand. The idea intrigued me, but I never made the commitment to doing it.

For whatever reason, I decided about a month ago that it was time. The process was quite easy, and I will just direct you to the K&J Electronics tutorial where I both learned how to do it and bought all the magnets. I followed their instructions, but I used super glue instead of hot glue.

Small Ships
See this great tutorial from K&J Electronics. Here are a couple of additional thoughts.

Note about the glue: Super glue worked well for attaching the magnets to the ships, but was much more difficult when attaching the steel ball to the plastic stand. I went through many frustrating attempts trying to hold the ball onto the stand with it sliding off and ruining the surface of the steel ball. I would recommend hot glue for the steel balls rather than super glue.

Note about the bigger small ships: I did find that some of the small ships like the Sheathipede shuttle needed a slightly bigger steel ball to match the ship's weight. I used the 1/4" steel ball (NSB4) for these slightly bigger ships, and it worked perfectly. I would recommend making some small/medium ship plastic tube stands to use with your heavier small ships.

Big Ships
The tutorial linked above did not address much about the bigger ships beyond a suggestion about the size of ring magnets and steel balls. The size suggestion is perfect, although I would recommend making a few with the 3/8" countersunk ring magnet and the 1/2" diameter steel ball, which is one size bigger than K&J's initial recommendation. A few of the newer ships (I'm thinking mainly of the Shadowcaster) are heavier and need a little stronger support.

The biggest challenge with some of the larger ships is the placement of the original stand connector. Above, you can see the YT-2400 required a magnet placed diagonally to maintain the weight balance of the ship when attached to the base.

The other ship with which I faced the biggest challenge was the Slave 1. The original stand connector is placed up inside the ship so it can fly vertically, like in the films. The magnets were not going to fit there so I made the call to glue the magnet to the back. You can see the result above. The bonus of this placement is that you can rotate the ship into its landing position, if you feel so inclined.

I have yet to play a round with my magnetized ships, and I still have most of the scum ships to finish, but I really like the final result of the magnets, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who feels up to it. The process is not hard at all and looks to be visually rewarding.

Feel free to leave any questions in the comments or share some tips of your own!