Splashcoat
New Member
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2010
- Messages
- 421
BACKGROUND - I had built up this old AMT Speeder Bike and Scout Trooper many years ago but was never quite happy with how the Trooper figure came out; because it was finished in gloss white, every badly sanded seam (and there were a lot of them) was almost impossible to hide. I ended up throwing the whole thing into my parts box after the model became damaged after several moves and completely forgot about it until…
THE RESURECTION - One day while rooting around in my parts box, I pulled out this beat-up old model and had en epiphany. I always thought that the Scout Trooper was pretty nifty looking but only served as comic relief in Return of The Jedi. The whole idea of running around the forest in bright white camouflage while acting as Ewok bait and doing pratfalls didn’t do justice to the cool armor design of this Trooper. That’s when I thought that I could simultaneously re-build and repaint the bike and rider; eliminate the glossy white forest camouflage and, with the addition of a sniper rifle as in the Star Wars Battlefront computer games, give the figure more personality and a more dedicated role.
THE SPEEDER BIKE - The bike was in pretty good shape, all things considered. The handle bar grips, control wires and rear control vanes had all been broken off and lost over the years. The control vanes were easy to replace as they are only flat plates with a bit of rivet detail. The handle bar grips were re-built with overlapped pieces of plastic I-beam to simulate a sliding assembly with styrene rod attached to provide the grips; these were then dressed-up a bit with a few small discs of plastic to simulate bolt heads. The control cables were replaced with lengths of copper de-soldering braid. I never did find the tarp which is strapped to the rear deck very convincing, so I replaced it with a few pieces of rolled-up gauze painted in a camouflage pattern and held down with masking tape straps. After I found and re-attached all the bits that had broken off the bike, I airbrushed the whole thing in a three colour camouflage scheme of red and green blobs and lines sprayed freehand over a base of sand yellow. While the paint was still un-cured I scraped down to the original paint in several areas to simulate wear, I also weathered the bike heavily with a general black wash and pastel powder.
THE SCOUT TROOPER - Since the Trooper was originally finished in a heavy coat of gloss white, I stripped off the old paint with oven cleaner before touching up some of the seams and re-priming the figure with grey automotive primer.
I’ve seen this figure built up by several other modelers who have re-positioned the head to provide a less static pose and I chose to do the same. I simply cut off the head with a razor saw and glued it back on with the head facing 10 or 11 o’clock rather than straight ahead. I airbrushed the figure in a freehand three-tone green camouflage scheme. To get the high-gloss sheen of the rider’s goggles I flowed several thin layers of gloss black paint into the frames and covered it all with a layer of future floor wax. After mounting the figure on the bike I airbrushed both the lower parts of the figure and the lower parts of the bike with highly-thinned earth tone paint. I feel that weathering the two components of this kit together ties them in with one another as they display a similar weathering pattern.
THE SNIPER RIFLE - The heavy blaster rifle seen in the Star Wars movies and the Scout Trooper’s sniper rifle seen in the Battlefront computer games are based on the WWII German MG-42 machine gun. With this in mind, I used an MG-42 provided with Tamiya’s 1/16 scale kit of a German heavy machine gunner and elongated it slightly to better represent a sniper rifle. By adding a few bolt heads here and there and fashioning a scope from the handle of a “potato masher†style hand-grenade which was also included with the heavy machine gun figure, a convincing sniper rifle can be cobbled together. After painting the rifle semi-gloss black and weathering it with silver pencil crayon, the rifle was slung over the Scout Trooper’s back with a masking tape sling.
