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BSG Raider PartsBSG Raider Instructions

When looking for a Battlestar Galactica themed craft, I originally thought about making my own version in a style similar to the way I made the crafty donut in a previous episode. But after a little searching around, it turns out that someone named NinjaToes had already designed and made available a pattern. I thought this would save me a bunch of time. “It’s already practically done!” I thought to myself. I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

My first attempt at putting this all together ended in complete tragedy. I used white glue, which got all over my fingers, and then I touched the paper, which made a mess of that. And it took a crazy amount of time for the glue to dry. I managed to put together the cockpit before I gave up on that nonsense and cracked out the big guns: AKA gel based crazy glue. Much better choice. Of course I still managed to get crazy glue on my fingers too, but not nearly as bad as the white glue.

Before I started the second attempt though, I decided that rather than cut out what I needed as I needed it, I would instead cut out all of the pieces so that all I had to do was “just” put them together. By the time I had finished cutting all 72 pieces out, including a seemingly endless number of triangle bits, a mere 5 hours had passed and my index finger was pretty badly dented and definitely bruised. It took over a week to stop hurting every time I touched something with the tip of my finger. I’m not trying to complain, just fair warning in case you decide to use an x-acto knife for an extended period of time.

Once all the pieces were separated I re-started the assembly, starting with the cockpit again. I diligently folded the triangles, and began putting everything together one piece at a time. Most of the pieces had an obvious place to go, however I found that the top of the cockpit was fairly particular. And I don’t know if it was either mislabeled or I just messed up, but I ended up putting one of them in the wrong spot. It is not as easy to separate two pieces of paper once they’ve been bonded as you might think. Unless of course you think that it’s a giant pain in the backside.

Once the cockpit (AKA the thing that looks like a cockroach) was assembled, it was time for the wings. These were a great deal more complicated than the cockpit. The way they went together was definitely less obvious than the cockpit (which after putting 1 together cleared up a lot of my confusion) and there’s several CRAZY SMALL pieces. The guns under the wing, and the 3 raised pieces on top of the wing were so small that the only way to even handle them was with tweezers.

During the creation of the first wing, I actually messed up the order of things pretty badly. There’s a set of pieces that gets inserted to the very top that is supposed to go in before the top and bottom of the wing are glued together. Unfortunately for me I realized right after I glued the top and bottom together that I had forgotten to do this. So I jammed it in the spot as best I could, and tried to glue it down using extra glue so that it would stay down. It was at this point that I realized when you put a lot of crazy glue on paper, it leaves a nasty stain in the ink. When I built the second wing, I made sure to put this piece in first. It went a great deal smoother the second time.

I would also recommend making the slots in the cockpit a bit larger than necessary. I got the first wing to go in, but there ended up being a bit of a gap that would have gone away had I just cut the slots a bit longer where needed, and made their openings a bit wider.

Of course having finished the first wing, I had a lot easier time with the second wing. It went much quicker and without any real issues.

New on the shelf this week: He’s tough to spot, but I found the flasher gremlin from gremlins one. He’s up at the top in the middle. And of course the NES business card holder from last episode.

Thanks for watching!