 Hey everybody, welcome back to my Star Wars channel. My name's David. Today I got a fun one for you. Gonna walk you through my 1984 Kenner B-Wing restoration. Great shot, kid! That was one in a million! Remember, the falls will be with you. Always. Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Thanks for being here. I love Star Wars and I hope you do too. If you're looking for a new Star Wars channel to subscribe to, hey, I love Star Wars and so I talk about everything Star Wars related that affects me and my life, right? I do vintage book reviews, vintage toy reviews. I talk about Star Wars celebration coming up later this year. I walk you through my collection. We talk about just anything going on in the Star Wars universe. One of the things I do is I collect the vintage ships, the original Kenner ships, and started off just, you know, getting in the X-Wing and the TIE Fighter and kind of moved on from there. I have most of them. There's a couple left I don't have. I don't have the A-Wing. I don't have Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. And not really a ship, but the Cantina is something I've been wanting to get to. So there's some play sets out there. You know, every now and then I get a little bug, a little itch, and I go out and look for one of these vintage ships or play sets. And recently, I was thinking, I really want the B-Wing, right? I want the B-Wing because I don't remember, well, for one, I don't remember anyone in my life that had a B-Wing back in 1984. Like when I was a kid, I don't remember anyone that had a B-Wing. You know, everyone had the X-Wing and the TIE Fighter. And I loved the B-Wing. I love the B-Wing design. In fact, originally in the movie Return of the Jedi, the B-Wing was supposed to have a larger presence and play a bigger role in the film. It just didn't work out that way. But you do see them in the film. And so I started looking on eBay, found a guy who was selling one. He had a complete B-Wing, had all the parts, and it came with a figure. So that was awesome. It did say it was dirty and dusty and had dirt and play use from 1984 all the way. Grammy children's fingers, you know, all over it. And probably some of the decals were missing. Some of the decals weren't even put on in the right places. So I thought, well, I'll get it, and then I'll just restore it. I'll just rebuild it, right? And since it had most of the pieces, I knew there wouldn't be a lot of things that I would have to do. A couple of things before I jump into the restoration. Things that are really cool about the B-Wing. Number one, it only takes two AA batteries, which is nice, because a lot of these ships took giant, huge, heavy batteries, and this one only takes two AA. So that's nice. So if you only, if you have two AA batteries and an action figure, you're ready to play. My ship, the sound didn't work on it. And I know it's, you know, you got to take it apart and do all the little windy things to the engine to make it work. I didn't want to take this one apart. I didn't. There's a lot of moving parts on this, and I just didn't feel comfortable taking this one apart. So I'm going to have to just, you know, yeah, suck it up and say my sound doesn't work. Another feature is it has sliding landing gear. There's a little lever underneath and two components drop out of the main hull and allow you to have a little kickstand, a little landing gear. That's pretty cool. There's also an ingenious wing raising feature. So one of the engines in the back is actually a dial. And you can turn that engine left or right and it expands and detracts the B wing aspect of the wings. Yeah, I said that right. So that's kind of cool feature. You can open and close. I mean, you see the kids do it in the commercial for Kenner. They fly between two trees. And as they go between the trees, they close the wings and then reopen them as they come out the other side. Great directing. Awesome. And it has a gyroscoping cockpit. So as your figure is in his cockpit and you swing the ship around, the cockpit will always stay right side up thanks to gravity and, you know, centrifugal force and all that. I don't leave my figure inside when I do that because the gyroscope thing doesn't work perfectly. And a lot of time is my figure might turn to the left and he pops out the canopy and he gets ejected into space and he gets suffocated. So that's not a good thing. So hey, I want to walk you through the build, walk you through some of my pictures that I took as I was building. I didn't take a ton of pictures, but I took some highlights just to let you know what I had to do to it to get it from it's arrived in the box eBay stage to I'm going to put it on my shelf and it's going to be my own. All right. So let's look at those pictures. All right. So I want to walk you through the build here. Took a picture of the B wing after it came out of the box in the mail. Can't really tell how dirty it is, but it was covered in dust all the way back to the 80s. Right. So it was a lot of restoration how to do. You can see the canopy came and see through it. There's like how the decals looked when I first got it. And so what I did was I removed all the decals that were on there, the originals with tweezers. I was very careful trying to get them all off. And that's how many there were. And then, you know, of course, once they're off, I want to make sure that they go back in the right place. So then I scrub the entire thing down with just warm water, dish soap and a toothbrush. Nothing too abrasive, you know, very gentle. And then I'll just let everything dry, clean off everything, clean off the figure. This is a overhead shot of how much dust and dirt I got off. So, I mean, it looks great. This is a fantastic find for me because it really came with everything, including the figure. I was really pleased with how clean this ended up getting. There's only a little bit of yellowing over there on the left side. Ordered new reproduction stickers. I'm not going to use any if I have the original. So I'm going to re-glue the originals down. So that's the old ones back in place. Everything you're looking at right now is an original vintage sticker. I just put it back in the right spot after having cleaned it. The only repro sticker here is going to be at the end, right there, that orange circle. That's it. And there's a couple ones. One's a repro, one's a fake, and one's a real one there. And yeah, had to wait this one down with a bolt because it was bent. So I wanted to make sure that the glue dried evenly. And there's another reproduction sticker underneath where the landing gear is. Really weren't that many others that were repro's as opposed to the originals. And the figure cleaned up nice. Everything cleaned up nice. And this is where I ended up putting it in my office because I have so many ships and things as I'm running out of space. You know, I've got, I got a couple more ships I'd like to buy and I have no idea where they're going to go. So my B-wing is right there on the shelf with my character inside. And he's all set amongst the other ships in my office. And I love this piece. I love it a lot. All right, that's everything. I'm excited to have a B-wing now in my collection. So like I said, now I'm going to, now I think I'm going to look for an A-wing. I think that's the next one on my list. Either that or Darth Vader's TIE Fighter, one of the two. I think Darth Vader's TIE Fighter is harder to find inexpensively. It's always, whenever I look, that one's always expensive. That one's always up there. Because I don't remember a lot of people having Darth Vader's TIE Fighter either when I was a kid, right? That seems like it would have been one of the rare ones to find. But yeah, hey, do you like your vintage ships? Do you have any, you ever done a restoration like this where you weren't satisfied with how it came in the mail and you kind of wanted to clean it and fix it up? Tell me about your experiences below. Do you like the B-wing? I think it's a beautiful ship. I think it's definitely on par at least with the X-wing. I don't think it gets enough play for how cool it is. And then we saw it again in Rebels. There's a whole, there's an episode with the Rebels characters and how they discovered the B-wing. It's a really cool episode. So I don't know if you've seen that one or not. I've rambled enough. Thanks for watching guys. May the Force be with you. I'll see you next time. Bye.