Stretched Sabre spaceship part 3

 I have been working on detailing the wings starting with the inside surface.

 The next step was to devise some sort of tech outer surface that looks like it could be the source of the propulsion system. I started by looking for some sort of interesting textured sheet and thought of hexagons. The only thing I could find was a hexagon textured PVC sheet online at gaming terrain model suppliers but I could not find more than 1 sheet from any one supplier and did not want to wait for overseas postage.

I looked in a craft store for anything that might do the job like some sort of stick on vinyl, couldn't find anything I liked but came across a large Fiskars Hexagonal punch that could punch out an accurate hexagon shape. Trying it out at home I found it could only cut paper, not even thin cardboard let alone 0.5 styrene. I have other Fiskars small punches that happily punch out 0.5mm styrene, the larger ones are unfortunately not up to the task. Oh well... I cut a paper pattern using the punch that was then stuck to some 2mm styrene to make a cutting template. On the back side I double sided taped a piece of old fine sandpaper to provide a non-slip grip that would prevent any irritating slippage whilst cutting out hexagon shaped pieces of Evergreen 0.5mm thick grooved sheet.

The wing panels were first lightly scribed with guide lines to help with alignment and then the Evergreen panels stuck into position. Using the masking tape technique to then make a pattern for the plain 0.5mm styrene edges where the half tank sits in the middle of the wing. The outside of the grooved panels was then filled to the edges of the wing with plain 0.5 styrene hexagons which were then cut back to the wing outline once the solvent had set.

Each panel was rotated by 120 degrees to the adjacent panel for some added interest. I have run out of the grooved Evergreen sheet so I could only complete one wing. Once I get some new stock I can complete the other wing. I think I may need to add few small kit parts to the outer surfaces to totally finish them off.

Below you can see the completed left wing in position.

I did some work on the engines, gluing them in position and adding some model kit parts along with some single solid core wire piping on the back face.

I also fired up the engine lights to see the effect of them working.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...