Death Star II Scratch Build Part 1

I had threatened to do this over a year ago but I finally got to it. The second Death Star from Return of the Jedi! The image on the left is of course a shot from the movie (Lucasfilm all rights reserved. yada yada yada).

 have been looking for cheap 12" plastic domes with no luck. I even bought a few world globes at the thrift store but one was cardboard and the other thick ass black plastic. So, no go.

Then one day I was going through my pile of junk that I never throw away because it might be useful someday and I came across this Perplexis puzzle toy that used to belong to my son. It's only 7" across and smaller than I wanted to do, but I thought "Why not?". So here it goes!

First things first, how easy was it going to be to cut this thing up? So I started with the "Death Ray" dish. I made it a little too big and a little too far towards the top of the dome, but I decided to live with it and press on.

The material was easy to cut through but I was worried that the dome would not retain its shape when I cut the big swatches out for the under construction areas. With that in mind I built in some support around the bottom of each hemisphere. As you will see later, this caused me some problems with lighting. If I were to do this again I will need to come up with a better way of solving this problem.

I used the piece that I cut out, flipped over, as the inverse shape of the death ray. 

Then I got to cutting out the huge missing areas. The shape held up just fine. I had planned on going with a "low Resolution" version of this with large blocky areas cut out and using Diamond mesh for the finer details. This did not work out well. I ended up using the mesh as a kind of interior texture only. 

After all of that I had a hell of a time getting the two hemispheres to fit together. It turned out that the top one is a little bit bigger than the bottom. Do I scrap this mess or press on with it? I decided that this is a sort of "Mock-up" run to figure stuff out. Later on I might use what I have learned to do a larger, more detailed build.

I then started to detail the dish. I sort of just winged it here. I wish I had actually looked at some reference material and done it a bit differently. 

Next time. 

Somewhere along the line I was doing some research and I found this fantastic scratch build by a guy in Japan. He was doing a large scale version with super details. One of the things that I saw he was doing was going back and filling in the large gaps with styrene that was cut with finer edge details. He was then putting putty on the seams and blending it all in. That looked like a lot of damned work, but I decided that I had to do the same (even if mine was half the size of his). I like a challenge.

I was more than pleased that I had decided to give this a try! At this stage I abandoned the diamond mesh and started cutting up some vinyl screen door mesh to use as the "girders". This worked out well.

Next it was time to mask for painting. For this stage I did look at some reference shots as well as what other people have done. Being so small I had to make some compromises, but it was starting to look pretty good.

At this point and had to take a 10 day business trip to South Korea. I hoped that the tape would hold up until I got back!

Once I returned I finished up the bottom half. I had chosen three grays to use (Light, Mid and Dark). So after applying the light gray, I masked off some more shapes and applied the mid gray. After that I masked off even more shapes and applied the dark gray.

During the process I did what I always do and kind of lost track of how dark the dark was. It wasn't until I removed all of the masking tape that I realized it was way too dark.
What to do?

Oh so carefully apply a mist coat of the base color over everything! Nerve wracking process. This would be very easy to put too much and ruin the effect that I had built up.

But in the end it all worked out!
Not too bad, me thinks.

Now, how the hell am I going to build the floors and all of that detail for the under construction areas? My trusty circle cutter and some 0.2mm styrene sheets!

I'm using thin cardboard to test out the shapes and fit of each floor before committing to cutting them out of styrene.

I've only got about 8 levels done so far but I think its looking pretty good.

Before I can get all the floors in, i need to install the fiber optics. I think I drilled about 400 holes in this thing so far and I know I'm going to need more!

The camera tends to blow out the lights and make them look way too bright, but this is as far as I have gotten on the lights (about 1/4 done). 

More to come after this weekend. I am probably going to run out of cool white LEDs and 0.5mm fiber optics. So I may have to take a break while waiting for more of those to arrive.