Earlier this year I was gifted set 75251, Darth Vader’s Castle. The main build is amazing, but something that lowered my excitement was the miniature TIE Advanced starfighter, Vader’s personal ship. The side build was way too large to work with my display of the set, but it was too small to make into a minifig scale build. I decided that I wouldn’t let that stand in my way as I disassembled the thing with much better plans in my mind for it.
I started out by examining several photos of the ship itself, both from clips from A New Hope, along with other builds of the ship. I decided that I would ditch many parts from the original build in order to replace them with far more accurate parts, such as the windshield. After my research, I felt it was time to get building.
The front of the ship was relatively easy, as most of it was laid out for me in the main build. I decided to add a pair of stud shooters, both to imitate blaster cannons and as an homage to the original TIE fighter windshield piece. I dug out both a new, hinged windshield part and a round tile with the correct printing for the top of the ship.
When I got to the wings, however, I encountered several problems. The angled wings required me to hide hinges under the outer plating, which mainly consisted of Minifig stands from the Collectible Minifig bags. I managed to capture the angle and borders just right in the end.
The rear was interesting, as I could not find any curved bricks. I had to stick to a more retro approach of just using bricks placed diagonally from each other for the majority of it.
I finally assembled it, and paired it with my custom Vader Minifig to finish it off. (I might do a post on my custom figs in the future.) In the end, I feel that it looks how it should at that scale, and it looks great on my display shelf with the rest of my Galactic Imperial memorabilia.
