T-70 X-Wing Fighter – Ralph McQuarrie Throwback Scheme

Last Christmas I received both the X-Wing and the First Order Tie Fighter kits. I'm kind of on a Star Wars building kick at the moment and decided to pull this one out of the stash and get started on it. It is Interesting to note that while this kit can be displayed in flight, there is no pilot figure. With this said, I went to the spares box and found a helicopter pilot that would fit the bill nicely for a Resistance Pilot.

These kits are prepainted, albeit not very well. I decided to leave the cockpit as-is and do a little dry brushing to enhance some details. I glued the pilot in the cockpit and pressed the cockpit into place.

I began work on the S-Foils and the fit on the some of the parts were less than stellar. I know it's a snap tite kit, but I guess I set my expectations too high for a model kit tooled in the 21st century. There were some pretty big gaps to fill in the panels.

Once the filling and sanded were done and the factory paint job left a lot to be desired, I stripped the paint and primed the entire kit with Tamiya Gray Surfacing Primer.

I decided that I didn't what this to look like an X-Wing from the movie. I tossed around the idea to do it in a red paint scheme, but I figured there would be a lot of people doing that or maybe green. So, those options were out. I was looking around the internet for inspiration and then this jumped out at me.

(c) LucasFilm Posted Under Fair Use

Although, not exactly the same X-Wing, the TFA X-Wing clearly draws a lot of inspiration from this original concept. So, I decided to adapt McQuarrie's Paint scheme to the T-70. The color was overall Model Master Light Gray.

I used RLM Gray for the fuselage stripe. It's a little too dark when comparing to McQuarrie's art, but I decided to keep it

Next was some careful masking and spraying International Orange on the fuselage and the S-Foils

With the painting is complete. Next up was gloss and weathering.

I used an acrylic gray paint thinned for weathering. I prefer this technique to oils due to the fact that if I don't like the result, I can wash it off with water.

In conclusion, this was a relatively fast build including the repaint. The fit was good with the only filling and sanding being done on the nose area. Overall, I would say this is a very good kit for what it is. It's certainly not a Bandai or Fine Molds kit. It's actually not as good as Revell's T-65 X-Wing from the original trilogy (I post that one soon). It's in an odd 1/50th scale. In the end, I would recommend this kit to a Star Wars fan. I like it because it's bigger than the 1/72 Bandai kit and I wanted it to be a companion to my equally odd 1/43 scale original boxing MPC X-Wing.

Original 1977 MPC X-Wing Fighter with scratchbuilt Death Star Base (well before the availability of 3D printed tiles)

Enjoy!

1 additional image. Click to enlarge.