Bandai Star Wars 1/48 Snow Speeder by Bandai

Introduction

While the Snow speeder isn't my favorite vehicle from the Star Wars series, I did always like the faceted angular design of the hull. I built this kit several months ago and it sat partially assembled in it's box until about two weeks ago. Overall this was a very quick build that incorporated some shading and weathering techniques into the design to make it feel lived in and "real" I chose to use the Luke color scheme for the kit; but, I didn't bother to reference the colors/weathering/etc to make it screen accurate. 

While photographing this kit I also re-shot the Bandai Tie Fighter model from last year and I felt the photos of the Tie were kinda crap. You can see those photos here. 

Kit Talk

I really liked the simplicity of the construction of this model. The order of construction lends itself well to building and painting all of the sub-assemblies separately before adding them to the main model.

The detail molded into the kit is impressive: all of the control boards inside of the cockpit have raised details, and the armor panels of the exterior of the craft have an asymmetrical layout. The panel lines of the exterior of the craft were a little too shallow for my liking; I used a .2 chisel to deepen most of them.  

There are a fair number of areas that are not molded in color that need to be masked and painted. Decals are included for many of these panels as well as the normal assortment of warning indicators.   

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Photos

360 Shots

Action Poses

Yes, the beam effect parts are included in the kit.

Detail Photos

I'm not wild about how the stand connects to the model. It requires the removal of a larger piece of the hull. 

As you can tell from the photos above the large windows of the cockpit show the figures off really well. I spent quite a bit of time painting Luke and Dak to make the most of that visibility.

The flaps on the top and bottom of the snow speeder are swapped out for turning poses. The recess under each flap is different on the left and right sides too.

I used a simple and shallow one-directional shading technique for the snow base to add a bit of detail.