It was the last issue of the current delivery and I was excited. The upper hull was looking more and more complete, details for the surface of the Millennium Falcon were getting completed quickly and – in other words – it felt like the ship was coming together. It was coming up to the two-year anniversary of when my daughter Ember and I had embarked on this project. While there have been some slight bumps in the road, that is one long time to be doing a project, particularly with a child. It has become part of our routine. Seeing my all-time favorite ship come to life and grow along with my daughter has been worth the price of admission alone to this.
While I may be excited about what comes next, I still needed to remember that there were still thirty issues to go. Hulls might be almost complete, the interior sorted but we still had some way until this bucket of bolts was going to be done. As always, I scouted the issue to work out what would be completing this installment and if there was anything I needed to find or do before sitting down with Ember. At the start of this whole endeavour, there was a lot of painting that needed doing beforehand. Nowadays, it is more about finding the pieces from previous magazines so we would have everything we needed.
This delivery has been nothing but variety, which has been quite enjoyable. This last part is no different. Just looking at the parts bag, you can see that there is a rather big piece of hull. This is the part that is central to the main part of the Falcon and sits between the mandibles. It looks impressive by itself, and I couldn’t wait to begin work on it. When I looked at what Ember and I would be doing, it was cutting, filing and gluing. Usually this would be a part that Ember would be concerned about, particularly the gluing. She has seen me getting glue on my fingers enough times to be rather wary of it! However, having brought tweezers for builds like this and she’s been like a new girl; happy to place the parts on and be far more involved. This would be perfect. As I checked through the instructions though, I suddenly realised that this big piece of hull came with a big number of instructions! Forty-six steps over five pages, with twenty-three pieces needing to be added. This was going to be a lengthy bit of build!
Usually when there are that many pieces, they are accumulated over a few magazines, and you must find them. Thankfully for this one, every single one of them was in this issue’s part bag. Well, that was one stress taken away! With nothing more to do than to actually start this lengthy process, I sat down with Ember, and we got to work!
Surprisingly the build was not as long as I had first imagined. Many of the pieces mirror one another, so half the time Ember and I knew what we were already doing. I will say that the steps are really broken down as well. That is by no means a complaint but rather a compliment. With so many pieces, it would be easy to make a mistake but instructions this clear makes that very unlikely. The one thing that disappointed Ember was the size of the pieces. I thought they would be smaller, like a lot of the gubbins we had added in previous installments. However, all of them were easily workable with hands and too big for the tweezers. I appreciated this as I could do this sort of work, but Ember had to place the tweezers quickly down. She looked at me sighing that I could do the gluing part. While I could understand her frustration and I wanted her to get over her fear of superglue, I must admit, I really enjoyed adding all the little details myself!
That’s not to say that Ember didn’t have her work cut out. Pieces had to be identified, cut and filed ready for me to glue. We settled very quickly back into our normal routine which was really wonderful to do again. After the break between issues that we’d had to go through, we had lost that synchronization with one another. It was back. With a lot less time than I had though, we had completed the issue. Certainly not time to fit in another magazine but not too much time that it was becoming a chore.
It might only be one part of the hull, but it is a very recognizable part. I marvelled at the details that were added onto it. Because it is a piece that is so much bigger than others, you can really appreciate the work the original ILM crew went to to bring the Falcon to life. With deliveries back up and running, this delivery has been a joy to do. It was not quite what I was expecting all the way, but it has got both Ember and me back into the swing of things and ready to continue the last third of the project. I’m eagerly waiting for the next delivery, although I’m not sure what to expect. Are we going to finish the upper hull or make a start on the mandibles? Either sounds pretty great to me!
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