McQuarrie/Johnston Millennium Falcon
This is one of those projects that I have subconsciously been preparing for since I was a little kid, spending all those hours with the Star Wars Sketchbook and various printed materials that showed Ralph McQuarrie’s work. His Star Wars portfolio made a huge impact on me. The Millennium Falcon was designed and finished so quickly, and is such an iconic ship, that it was surreal and almost heretical to make this “variation on a theme”. It is my attempt to make the ship that existed as a design concept, using McQuarrie and Johnston pieces to pull cues from.
The work of Stinson Lenz was the spark that kicked this project off, as he had designed a McQuarrie Falcon in SketchUp. At that time I did not know any 3D programs, so I purchased the model from him for a very reasonable fee, and enlisted the help of some friends to get things where I needed them to be. John Sabean drew a skeleton and we printed the parts on an FDM printer, Jeff Waclawski and the late Kip Hart converted a few key parts like the cockpit shell and radar dish to STL and grew them on an Objet, Jim Shima solved an electronics requirement to get that even blue engine light the way I wanted, and I (now with Rhino and my own 3D printer at home) grew the remaining parts, laser cut some panels, cut the styrene, clad the saucer, sculpted the figures, and detailed the model as shown. I finished and debuted it at the 2017 Wonderfest in Kentucky. It is my favorite model so far, and I hope you relish it as much as I !
