Custom Foxcatch for X-Wing

This is something that’s been a long time in the making. I’ve painted a few of my ships in the past but beyond paint schemes I haven’t really customized any of my X-Wing minis. Well, I finally decided to do my own custom ship and I thought, given the name of this podcast, what better ship to start with than Jodo Kast’s very own Foxcatch. The Foxcatch is a modified Lambda-class shuttle with beefed up lasers and sensors as well as six Incom 4L4 fusial thrust engines (the same kind of engines as an X-Wing).

The first part of this build involved chopping off the wing tips and part of the dorsal fin. I looked around the internet for advice on chopping up my model and found that some people were suggesting using a nail file. I tried that but it was too damned slow. Instead I went down to my local hobby store that sells all kinds of modeling things and found these nice little saw blades that fit into my X-Acto knife. Once I had those I was able to saw through everything pretty quickly and then I used some fine grit sandpaper to smooth out any rough spots left by my sawing.

For the sensor array bits on the dorsal fin I chopped up a couple of random action figure guns I had laying around and then glued them into the proper place. Kast also upgraded the cannon emplacements on each wing to have 3 guns instead of only two. I got my extra gun barrels by cutting up some accessories to a Gundam action figure that I had laying around. Once all of these bits were glued on I gave the whole thing a quick coating of black primer.

That’s when I realized that I forgot the engines.

Originally I had plans to make a mold from one of my existing X-Wings and try casting my own engines or cutting up a spare X-Wing and removing the engines. However, even though lorewise the ship is supposed to be using the same engines as an X-Wing, they just looked too tiny and small on a Lambda-class shuttle. The drawings of the Foxcatch in the comics show engines that are quite a bit larger than an actual 4L4 engine would have been. So instead I had to make my own slightly larger engines. I spent a long time searching around and trying different items that I could turn into engines: pen caps, straws, etc. But everything was either too big or too small. In the end I bought a couple of wooden dowels and crafted the engines out of those. They got the same black primer treatment and then were glued on as well.

After that I laid down a layer of grey over the whole ship except the main engines and the cockpit canopy. Then I applied a black wash over the whole thing to darken up the seams between panels and some of the other sunken in parts. Now I had to go back to the grey again and lighten back up some of the areas I didn’t want to be so dark such as the cockpit and the raised up parts of the panels on the wings. To finish of the main body I drybrushed a lighter grey onto some of the edges of panels and other parts that the light would catch.

All that remained now are the finishing touches. I was out of blue paint so I ended up making the engines red instead. I honestly think that the red looks better with this darker color scheme anyway. I also drybrushed a little bit of white in the center to give it a glowing effect. The last thing that was needed was a matte clear coat over the whole ship and then a glossy clear coat over the cockpit canopy to give it a nice gloss.

So that’s it, the Foxcatch. It took me much longer than I had anticipated due to the difficultly I had deciding what material to use for the engines. But in the end, I think the time was worth the results. Let me know what you think in the comments down below.