A Tale of Two Chewies

Revell-Fan

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When my Star Wars colleague received his BD gift he asked me if there were any paper models of Chewbacca. One of his best friends is going to be a father in December and he wanted to come up with a suitable present for this special occasion. "Of course there are", I replied, and showed him two which I found would be perfect to do the job. He agreed and commissioned me to build them. So here we go again, two models for him, a build for me and a thread for you to enjoy. :)

The first one I chose was the Cubefold Chewie:


This is a very cute model, very well designed and the final result is too adorable.

Assembly is very straight-forward:

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Most of the single components are glued into boxes. The bowcaster has one flaw: The back side of the bow is blank and stands out a bit. So I painted it black.

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The result was infinitely better.

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When I was assembling the main body I chose to articulate the head of the figure. To do so I cut two holes in the middle of the position of the neck and combined the head and the main body parts with a brass fastener.

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This small detail makes a difference.

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I was thinking of adding the same joint to the arms but I feared this was not too practical because the shoulders would constantly hit the lower portion of the head, so I left the arms as is.

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Then I switched to a second model: A jumping jack version of Chewie which I found at


This one is very impressive because even though it is not a photo-real version of Chewie it captures the essence of the character tremendously well. I darkened the outline a bit to give it more contrast.

One of the most distracting things however was the fact that it comes with empty eye sockets. So practically he was blind, and the more I looked at him I thought he was not only blind but dead as well. So I imported the page in Gimp and gave him some nice blue eyes:

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This worked wonders, and whilst I was at it I enlarged the pattern by 182% so that it was big enough to be hung on a door later. The final figure is now about 42 cm tall which makes for a quite impressing model, and together with the little mods it turned out so well that you could think it was an official piece you could buy at a store. I'm really impressed with it.

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All parts were laminated to two layers of strong card to add rigidity.

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Much to my surprise the cutting process was much less stressful than I thought and quickly I ended up with this:

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Now I'll need to get some nice string to make the Jackbacca jump. I can't wait to see him doing some space aerobics:

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Gymbacca. He may need a bandana on occasion...:cool:

Stay tuned! :)
 
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Revell-Fan

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Thank you! :)

Lil' Chewie was edge-coloured and can turn his head.

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Big Chewie got some strings. After punching some holes through the marked positions the limbs were knotted together and brass-clamped to the body:

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Then a long string was knotted to the limb strings:

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Some beads were knotted and glued to the end of the string:

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All knots were strengthened by a drop of glue. To prevent the card from getting stained I put a glove between strings and Chewie.

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Finally a hook was attached to the back of the head:

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And DONE! :)

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And here we have all Chewies looking forward to seeing their new home.

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Thank you for watching! :)
 
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