X-Wing: Miniatures - B-Wing conversion

Recently, I started playing X-Wing bij Fantasy Flight, and it's a really great game. Not only do you get neatly painted miniatures, but the game is fun, refreshing and really breathes the complete Star Wars atmosphere. Luck has it that both me and my significant other love sc-fi, and we instantly chose opposing parties to get involved with. Even my son joined in the fun! Since I'm a rebel, I've got me several of the most important (and most beautiful) models. This included the B-Wing. But wait, hey, didn't that fly horizontal?

Coming on a nice stand, the B-Wing was introduced as part of Wave 3

I have this 15 euro model.. How can I frack it up.. :)

Most of my friends know me as a tinkerer, so I went out to find how to reposition this model. Fairly quickly I came to this blogpost that gave me a great explanation on how to convert the model. So I decided to try myself :)

THAT's what I'm talking about :)

Getting ready!

Reading the post quickly got me convinced I could do this with ease, and it proved to be true!

Time needed: 20 minutes

Difficulty: Low

Materials needed

• Hobby knife
• Cutting board
• A B-Wing miniature
• A Dremel (or other drilling aid) of 3.5mm
• A steady hand
• Super glue
• A small saw

Goodbye poor B-Wing, I hardly knew you..

Let's get busy

 Firstly I took my hobby knife and softly cut off the cockpit. When you look at your model you can likely find sufficient spaces where you can apply pressure to your model in order to cut it off. Do be careful when applying any pressure so you don't break off any other parts or weapons!

Filing off the cockpit can be kept till last step

As you can see, this was most likely designed to fit both ways and now makes it easy for us to convert! Next I simply broke off the connection peg by simply wobbling it back and forth until it broke off. Using a small saw, I cut the round pip off, leaving a peg for us to get it back on the model!

Now comes the hardest part. When looking at your B-Wing, you'll notice 4 small ribs. I drilled down in the second rib. Make sure you don't drill down completely! Otherwise you'll ruin your model! The purpose of drilling down, is to fill it with the peg, so we can place it back on the stand. If you drill too fast, you might lose control and break of other parts.

Be careful when drilling not to pierce through!

Next up is dryfitting and checking we still have all parts. Once everything fits snug, you can glue it all together, slightly applying pressure to make sure it sticks. Once the model is glued to the base, you can glue on the cockpit. Smoothe out then glue together. By postponing this step, at least we're making sure we're not glueing it on backwards :)

Dryfit the peg to make sure it fits, then glue on the model and the cockpit!

Last step is cleanup. Carve out the remainder of the stand between the engines. By sofly cutting it with your hobby knife you can clear leftover pieces. Once I was done, I took some gray paint (Citadel Mechanicus Standard Grey) and cleaned it up :)

Nice and clean engines :)

The Results

I was quite pleased with my result. Standing nicely horizontal, and looking more awesome than before I'm now at least considering purchasing and wielding those vessels into battle next time around! If you're wondering if you could do it, don't worry, this is a very easy and safe conversion, as long as you take your time and test everything out. As always, I'm eager to read your comments and thoughts about this or other proposals!

Much better!