A madman's support structure subproject

As the model itself was finished per se, I was bothered by the fact that it didn't have a place to stand. The planes have their landing gear, tanks their tracks, but having a TIE on its wings just didn't sound right. Therefore...

To the bitsbox!

I rummaged around my thousand-box and dry-fitted the TIE on various pieces. Then a Panzer's track sprue caught my eye. Its central ring-shape that actually fit under the pod like a chainsaw in my enemy's soft belly. I cut one off and kept fiddling with it.

Rather unsurprisingly a track shoe from the same sprue fit nicely into the injector residue part sticking out from the thin donut. Then I tried to sandwich that between two track shoes to make a "leg" of sorts. It felt like it could work. To play the part of the base I had found a part from the battery-operated Panther but attaching the track shoes straight on didn't quite look sturdy enough. So I cut off another donut-shaped ring from another sprue and decided to proceed with them.

Before I glued anything on anything, I cut off all but two of the guiding fins from the track shoes. Those or via them I could add some random greebles. This wasn't going to be anything like the Fine Model kits but something that'd be better than nothing at all. [155]

Greebles

All that was left was to fill the thing up with random pieces. I had picked up some parts that looked like they'd work well for the theme and a roll of flower-binding wire for cables.

The jack's bottom plate would be a handy screen

I drilled holes into two parts (half an idler wheel and a random Panzer part) for the cables. Through those I inserted half a dozen pieces of wire each and superglued them in place. As a random spur of the moment decision I decreed that instead of individual power wires they'd be two major cable bunches. Things could've been fine the other way, but right now I was aiming for some sort of a docking station or something to that effect.

The hem

At this point I had to fill the bothersome openings on the plate, so I cut two pieces of polystyrene that fit decently. Below them I had glued on two strips for support (see third pic below) so that they'd rest on those and had more contact to the whole setup than just along the thin, irregularly shaped, edges.
I also cut four rectangular pieces to make a hem for the base. This way it'd look sturdier and have a proper shape to it. Of course it wasn't a perfect fit but that'd be fixed a tiny bit later.

All the insane gaps and dents I filled with Tamiya's putty that started drying in the final stages. Not that it was a problem, as I was going to sand the roughnesses away in any case.

Finishing touches

I added some more greebles to fill up the freshly filled holes and the newly liberated surface area. On the other "leg" of the support structure I attached some of the tool holding "hooks" and periscope shields from the Panzer kits. And on the other one I added in a moment of madness a part of the Panther's suspension, playing the part of a hydraulic piston-thing. Will this end up looking anything decent? We'll see when it's all painted up. [190]

The most comical part of all this is that this has taken an insane amount of time. Especially if you compared it to the time spent on the Interceptor. And I hadn't even planned on doing anything like this!

Painting

At this point I took a shortcut by skipping a 24h of waiting by first priming  (VSP 73601 Grey Primer) and pretty quickly after that I airbrushed the whole setup grey (VMA 71120 USAF Medium Grey). That shade just happened to be the exact same that I had used on the Interceptor, so the weathering was expected to bring a noticeable difference. [200]

Because time has been in short supply lately, mildly put, I got to finish this piece nearly two weeks after I had painted it. I applied the wash (the same VMW I used on the Interceptor itself) pretty heavily. After letting it dry I matt-varnished the stand and decided that it was done. [203]

I had been thinking of detailing for a long time and I had thought of doing some lamp-like effects and turning some things into screens and so on. Finally I reached a conclusion: they'd only served to steer the attention away from the model itself and that wasn't the point of the stand. Sometimes you just have to know when to quit ;)