Randy Cooper

Tim Ketzer has an amazing series of pictures detailing his build of of Randy’s Star Destroy.. er.. Avenger – complete with engine lighting and fiber optics. Fantastic!

Check out the gallery here…

here’s a link to Paul jackson’s sand crawler http://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=71711&page=6

David Simonds sand crawler buildup

To begin with, let me say what a joy this kit was to assemble and decorate. I have had few garage kits go this smoothly. This is my most favorite RC kit to date.

The parts were well made, nice castings with few bubbles. As with all garage kits, there was a fair amount of goobers to remove from the pour locations, but these were easily removed by a belt sander and a dremel. The majority of the parts I was able to use a mini rasp and remove the extra junk by hand. I will note that the one thing I wish I had noticed early in the build was the thickness of each panel. It is important that the thickness be the same “bilaterally” in order for the left and right sides of the model to be symmetrical. Had I not been in such a hurry, I would have sanded down those areas that contact the other parts of the kit so that everything would line up better. I was able to compensate later well enough but I think it’s important to do this from the beginning.

The assembly was pretty quick considering all the angles and flat surfaces that had to line up. Follow Randy’s instruction CD and you can avoid most pitfalls. His order of steps in critical because some things cannot be done if you get out of order on these steps. I used simple CA glue for the entire model. I did add lots of detail bits in areas where I wanted additional detail or where I decided to snip off a part that had a bubble etc. Bubbles in garage kits always seem to find the most detailed parts, and high spots, so you have to be able to fill and sand and sometimes reshape this bits. I’m too lazy for that so I’d find an acceptably shaped part of some other kit and glue it right down. Never looking back. Just as I imagine ILMers did back in the day.

I assembled the entire model except for adding the “rooms” and “cockpit” and I also left the tread assemblies un-assembled for painting purposes.

The painting was pretty basic. I painted the vast majority of the model Nato Brown which makes it look like a giant SC shaped Hershey’s Bar……LOL. It’s even satin when you’re finished. Had to go buy some chocolates to calm my nerves afterwards. Seriously, this is your base coat. It’s a redish brown color. Next I added some paneling using an airbrush and flat black to simply slightly darken the chocolate color. Then I airbrushed the black and oily streaks, and drips etc……. and added in the light sand color to dirty the whole thing up. I took care to spray the sand from up above so it sticks mainly in areas that you’d expect to catch sand in a desert environment. I did another overspray of black in some areas and then hand applied the silver and rust colors for weathering. The interior rooms I painted a flat gray color. I did some detailing of the parts within the rooms etc., but for the most part, left it gray. The tread covers need the same chocolate basecoat, with some black weathering up top and some sand down bottom. The treads themselves are flat black. The wheels under the treads I did black basecoat with some chocolate overspray, then more black to tone down the satin.

The lighting was achieved by pre-drilling any holes needed for each lighted area, and I bought some Phillips battery operated christmas light LED strands now available in the Christmas section of your local Target stores. I got the “warm” white LEDs which will give a nice warm amber glow as they are nice and dim.

Overall, I love this kit and would recommend it to anyone with moderate modeling skills.