Gino Dykstra’s YT-2400 Light Freighter

This is a model I completed for a customer who is a big Star Wars fan. I’ve never actually seen the original onscreen, and consequently have no great idea as to what it looks like. Fortunately, the internet came to my rescue with a number of good screen captures so that I could paint this up reasonably accurately. The model itself is quite large at 1/72nd scale and the parts are, for the most part, quite good. There was surprisingly little warping for such large castings. My only real difficulty was attaching the cockpit “tube” to the fuselage, as the fit was terrible. I finally had to sculpt the attachment with two-part plumber’s epoxy in order to establish something resembling a decent mount. The interiors for the cockpit and gun tubs were scratch built. Although the model comes with parts for landing gear, my customer prefers these in flight mode without any rods or other permanent supports. I made a base with three support rods tipped in silicon pads to prevent damage to the paint job.

Because of the somewhat iffy nature of the resin used, I primed the model with car body primer before airbrushing, which gave a nice strong base for the rest of the work. There was a fair amount of masking and airbrushing, followed by some hand weathering to bring out the detail. Overall, an impressive kit of an unusual subject.

Gino Dykstra