Flat black covered the piece and Testors Flat Tan weathered it, again with a tiny brush. Flicking a toothbrush would have been too random for me to duplicate the original. Finally some brown pastels, flaked onto the surface with a pin, and rubbed around with a small dry brush blended the weathering on the window frame.
Since I’m a guy who doesn’t exactly need glasses, I had to go buy some and take the lenses out of a set of reading glasses ($8 at W/M) with a thick +3.00 correction factor. I cut out a square 23mm by 23mm of Duct tape and placed it in the middle of the lens on the [concave] inside. Then I covered the other side with another slab of Duct tape (to protect from minor scratches). I took two pieces of VERY dense black foam (from who knows where) and wrapped those in a scrap piece of Velcro (soft side). I placed this mess into a vice and used a coping saw to cut the 23mm square around the tape. The whole window frame is about 23mm, but I needed some extra room in the clear window to sand it down to perfection with the dremel.
**dremel cutting wheels and plastic reading glasses don’t get along…forget about it!...saw the piece by hand, it only takes a few seconds**
I rounded the corners of the clear piece also for a better fit. Now the piece wedges into the window frame nicely – no glue. I elected to have the concave side facing out since the ref. pics show a little upward bulge between the window frame and the clear RF part if you look through the side view (but I guess that doesn’t matter since I can switch it around if I want). I applied RTV silicone to adhere the window frame assembly to the RF clear part. If you use a healthy quantity, yet enough to not be oozing out the sides, it holds steady under jarring testing (I’m still curious about a replacement glue…maybe E6000…that doesn’t mar the RF clear part). The key is to set it, and let it dry for a day or two. Heck, I’ve got silicone holding the master link clip on my motorcycle chain too -- It'll hold. Also, the silicone cleans up easy wet or dry.
One point of note that I found was that in the ESB scenes where Fett is loading Solo into Slave I, his window frame is gone…I guess the real one just kept falling off, hah!
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