After following this great guide to making my B-Wings look like more than weird Space Crucifixes, I found myself with a mess of leftover magnets and a nagging, fervent desire to glue magnets to other things, because magnets.
I remember loving my micro machines Virago model back in the mid-90's - it was like an X-Wing, but pointier!
The wings/S-foils/breakable parts rotated inward for parking it in the garage (or hyperspace, or whatever), and the guns rotated back, so you could laser the ships in pursuit. Let's call them...Anti-Pursuit Lasers. So I decided to make my equally-pointy but sadly less-articulated FFG model into the Starviper of my childhood.
I started by pressing each wing toward the body of the ship until they snapped off. Then I set about filing out four small recess where the wings had met the cockpit for the magnets to sit in. It probably would've been easier to simply pin the wings back in place, but I had a difficult time aligning the wings properly and getting the pins to hold the wings upright. Also, magnets (see above).
I also detached the guns and filed out spaces for magnets where they sat, deep enough that both magnets would be hidden in the body of the ship. This way the guns can rotate to accomodate the folded wings.
Then I GLUED MAGNETS TO IT! Six, in fact, so that I was left with a funny little grey escape pod that weighed three pounds and got stuck to all my tools.
Then I cleaned up the wings and guns and attached their corresponding magnets, checking polarity as I went. Now my StarViper is ready to do what StarVipers do best - namely, deploying its guns and S-foils, killing Rebels, and attaching notes to the refrigerator!
What do you smarter, more model-savvy folks think? In the end, I think pinning is probably the way to go with the StarViper (there's a video floating around the forum showing off a great pinning job) - mine is now a little too bulky-looking, the guns don't quite face forward when they're deployed, and I suppose there's no real reason for each wing to rotate independently, except maybe to signal a left turn. Either way, it was a fun mod!