[MOD] UCS X-Wing 75355 Landing Gear Stand

[mcphatty]

I've been working on some modifications to the 2023 UCS X-Wing in Studio. My main aims are to give the top surface of the nose more of a slope and reduce the height of the back of the fuselage slightly, but I've also put together a landing gear display stand. The landing gear feet and doors are connected to a thin flat base. The X-Wing rests on top connected only by two open jumper studs on the front gear, then aligned and supported by a column of bricks that poke up into the ship's display stand hole. The X-Wing set doesn't need to be modified to sit on the stand so hopefully it'll be useful to anyone like me who wants to display their X-Wing under a coffee table. Here's some renders, free instructions are on Rebrickable and parts for the stand will set you back around £18. Big thanks to u/1bradshaw1 on Reddit who took pity on me waiting to build my X-Wing until my birthday and has tested the stand with his set, he's confirmed that it works!

You might have spotted a midi-sized R2-D2 standing guard over the ship? Like many others I wanted to reuse the old 30611 polybag head part behind the X-Wing's cockpit, it's slightly too big to be the right scale but personally I prefer it to the too-small minifigure. Taking things  step further I wanted to modify the R2 set body to be more accurate, in keeping with the UCS theme. I was really struggling to create a truly round body that matched the head so I cheated and started Googling and came across Jan Woźnica, who goes by john_carter and is the behind the Tale of The Space Age Lego Ideas set! He brilliantly positioned 1x1 Round Plate with Bar pieces at 45 degrees between two 4x4 Round Plates, taking advantage in the gaps between studs and anti-stud notches underneath round plates, allowing an open stud piece to securely connect to the end bar poking out of the 4x4 circle. I messed around in Studio for a few hours was quite pleased with how my effort turned out so I reached out to Jan and he very kindly agree to let me alter his design and share this little guy with my X-Wing mod, thank you Jan! You can find his excellent original here and here's a render of R2-D2 on the move.

I created a seperate set of instructions for R2 (also on the X-Wing mod Rebrickable page). Parts for the body will only cost around £5 but unfortunately the head has become very rare, there are none on Bricklink but in the UK there are at least some 30611 polybags on eBay. As an alternative the small spart of the Landing Gear Stand that he sits on can be rearranged slightly to display the Luke and R2-D2 minifigures from the set.

I'm waiting until I've built the set to share instructions for my other modifications, in the mean time here's some WIP renders with the original set on top and my sloped nose idea in the middle, then the exposed structure below. I'm thinking of angling the whole top beam of Technic bricks which may mean weakening the whole front end of the fuselage, so I want to build the mod for real check that it's not going to fall apart and also to play around with filling the gaps. Then I'm going to swap the all nose parts for light blueish grey and try to bring the top of the back of the ship down a couple of plates so it's below the top of the canopy. Lastly, I want to see if I can swap those 2x8 plates under the windscreen for some kind of an arrangement of tiles. I'm not 100% sure it's possible as those plates are surprisingly critical to the strength of the side panels, but I think it's wortha  try. I'll do an update if I can manage all that, in the mean time I hope you like the Landing Gear Stand and R2 and thanks for looking.

 

Edited May 25 by mcphatty

[TeddytheSpoon]

For such a subtle change, the nose angle mod improves the look of the set greatly. Hopefully it holds up IRL!