When I went back to Japan at the end of last year, a friend gave me this super cool Bandai 1/350 palm-sized Millennium Falcon model kit as a souvenir. It’s tiny, but packed with amazing little details—really well made. I was saving it to enjoy later, but then my younger daughter saw it and was like, “I wanna build it!!” So I said okay.
I handed her a high-end pair of nippers (super sharp!) and just gave her a quick heads-up on how to safely cut the parts off the sprues. Then I let her do it on her own. And she totally nailed it—followed the instructions on the back of the box, put everything together, even got all the stickers on. Finished it like a pro.
But I felt kinda bad just letting it be, since my friend had picked it out just for me. So I took it apart, repainted it, and reassembled it. I wasn’t planning on modding it, but the antenna support looked really rough, so I cleaned it up. Added a little panel line on the laser cannon, and before I knew it, I was going full damage-mode on the whole body. The weathering was so much fun I couldn’t stop—it ended up looking way too beat up.
I totally messed up the airbrushing too—had to layer it over and over, so all the fine edge details got buried, and the surface turned out kind of a mess. But hey, it’s been like 30 years since I last built a model, so I guess this is fine for a comeback!
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