Not a lot of build progress due to work, but now that things are settling down again I got the chance to work on the pylons. I've been puzzling over these for the last few months because the geometry is not easy to work out from reference alone. A shout-out to chazzychaz for sending me some measurements off his AMT TIE Fighter, which I used to check my measurements (rescaled) and things seem to check out.
Here's the main pylon roughed out.
And here are the strut parts temporarily added into place:
These all need some tidying up, but this is what I had time for today. I'll probably redo the strut parts that go top and bottom. For reasons I'll outline below, it's imperative that you get the measurements and geometry of these right. Once I'm happy with what I've got, I'll create a table of measurements and add it to the OP.
The first thing you might ask is: "why are you making the pylon as a single piece?" rather than making separate top and bottom halves and marrying them up along the hinge lines? Indeed, in an earlier effort I did just that. It turns out, I think the ILM model shop guys did them as one piece. These were then cast and cut in various ways to make top and bottom pylon halves, as well as the end pylons.
For one, if you look at references, the mould seam doesn't actually line on the apex of the pylon, it's often just a little bit off:
Instead, I think one master pylon was made, including 'top' and 'bottom' halves. This was cast, cut, and detailed in different ways depending on the component. The main one was made to fit the hull sphere, of course. Then, as is widely known, the terminal pylon was made by cutting the end off the main pylon.
What seems less widely known is that the leftover from that cut can be used to make the end plate for the wing. This is something I only just noticed in the last week:
While I'm building my TIE using mostly "traditional" methods, I do use Blender to test out measurements and prototype components. Here's a quick screen grab to show the three pieces together:
Indeed, if you look carefully at images of the end plate, you can even see the longitudinal grooves that you see on the main pylon (and to a lesser extend on the terminal pylon):
If you're going to do it the same way, then you need to get all the measurements very close to right, otherwise your end plate will look funny. The upshot is that this will help ensure that your terminal pylon and end plate have very similar footprints. This is important because they need to fit snugly between the greeblies on the wingstar hub and you want them to therefore have the same geometry. This is likely why the ILMers did it—they were clever like that!