The Millennium Falcon

The first thing to do, is to buy a plastic toy Millennium Falcon to strip down to use as the basic hull for this project. The kenner toys from the 1970’s would have been ideal, but my funds are limited and those have become very expensive collectors items.

More recent Millennium Falcon toys are more affordable, and I managed to find a damaged second hand one on ebay for under a tenner.  As at some stage I will probably be cutting it up that was ideal for my purposes. Luckily when it arrived the scale seems right – I wanted to be able to stand 3-4 figures in the cockpit to be able to recreate those classic star wars scenes.

It hasn’t got legs or an opening ramp like the older kenner toys had, so I’m going to have to fix that, and it has a large Nerf gun that, …ahem,… Isn’t Canon 🙂 So that needs removing. The hatches that are meant to hide the gun are missing, so I will have to rebuild that part of the ship’s roof.

Also, I want my Falcon to look complete,  but to be able to remove the top roof to reveal the realistic insides of the ship, so it’s going to need a removable lid for the whole ship – currently only the back half lifts off. Until I get it stripped down into parts and I can see how it’s constructed I am not sure exactly how I am going to do that…. If things go very badly my fall back position is to too make a crumpled crashed spaceship scenery price out of the toy if it just falls apart and loses all structural integrity once I start cutting bits off it – these toys are normally made as cheaply as possible and cutting a ramp out of the floor and cutting off the roof may just remove too much of the support if plastic is too flimsy.