[MOD] Bricklinking 10134 UCS Y-WING

[BrickieB]

I've had the small Y-wing (9495) for some time now, but I still love the UCS version. As I'm slowly working on a collection of UCS spaceships I feel the Y-Wing should be present too. Now, with the new movie I suppose a re-release won't happen anytime soon so it's worth bricklinking it.

As you may know, it can be found second hand at prices of around €500-700 - or a lot more. I'm not prepared to pay this amount for this ship. I like it, but piece count dictates a price of around €150 so bricklinking it should be easy enough, and a lot cheaper.

I started by looking at the parts I already had in inventory and I came at about 40%. Of course, the remaining 60% would be the hard to get items, so I was prepared to make a few changes.

The idea is to make the model as intended (or close to it) at first, and then mod it to my satisfaction. I would not do this if I had bought the original, but as it will not be identical to the released model anyway I will improve it.

First complication: hard-to-get items. There are a few of these.

- The white tube parts (78c02) that make the sticks towards the rear of the engines. These are still available but very expensive (over €1 each at this time, and you need 112 of them!) I replaced them with 6538b, which were available new at about € 0,12-0,20 each at the time I ordered them (last year). Unfortunately, these too have become hard to get now - and very expensive.

- The wheels at the rear of the engines (32077). These were only used in white on this model. You can find them in silver but that would mean you had to paint them (eww!). So I found an alternative in part 2903 which is easy to find in white. It's the same diameter but only half the width. This actually appealed to me, as I find the original wheels to be too wide.

- All the tubes as greebling on the top of the ship are hard to find in the correct lengths and colours. So I used Reddish Brown 6L bars where possible, and ordered longer reddish brown / LBG bars which were cut to length for the other bars needed.

- The 2x8 slopes in DBG are not that hard to get, but none of the stores I ordered from had them in stock. However, I had some 2x4 DBG slopes which I used, and they worked perfectly.

- 1x2 Bricks with handle (30236) are very uncommon in Dark Orange - I've seen prices of €16 each! I was thinking of taking these in reddish brown colour or tan ones. I ordered both colours but stuck with reddish brown as it's closer to the original.

- Same goes for the Dark Orange grille-tiles. I have replaced these with gold ones.

- A bit of a weird piece: Light Bluish Gray Slope, Inverted 45 6 x 4 Double with Recessed Center (30183). Luckily, I managed to replicate this with parts I had in my inventory, so there was no need to buy them. (1x 60219 + 2x 64799 did the trick)

- Tan 1x1 plates with clip were not so easy to find either, so I chose gold ones to match my grille tiles.

- I could actually use the windscreen from my smaller Y-wing. The only problem is that it doesn't have the white roof, but I can live with that.

- White Technic, Axle Connector with Axle Hole (32039) is also hard to find, that's been replaced by LBG ones, which again I already had. In my model, I could also replace them by white piece 32013 - I haven't done so yet.

Second complication: small changes to improve on the model.

Mainly the long sticks towards the rear of the engines. As I was already going to use different parts to 'thicken' those sticks, I wasn't depending on cross axles to support the original tube bits. So I could move the connections to the engines slightly to make for a better, more continuous part.

Another consideration is replacing the parts you won't see anyway. I'm thinking of (for example) black 1x16 bricks where they could really be any colour, or yellow 2x2 bricks with a pin poking out, you don't see a thing of this either. So these can be replaced by different colours - or even different parts.

It is very hard for me to put a price on this model: I had a lot of the parts already, and I also ordered parts for other projects with these orders to save on shipping. One of these projects is Anio's Venator which needs a lot of plates - which are very expensive. If I was to guess I'd say I have about €150 into the Y-wing.

Below are some pictures, I welcome your thoughts, questions and comments!

[Hold0511]

Sweet build BrickieB, I made some changes to my bricklinked UCS Y-Wing, similar issues to yourself but with some different choices http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=114682&hl=10134&st=25.

Yours is another great addition to the Y-Wing family.