Icons TIE Fighter

The TIE fighter 1st generation masters castings came from an ex-ILM employee (although that style of miniatures was also studied at the LFL Archives). 

"The main body was from a 1977 ILM model which had wings as well but they were too bad to mold" said Max.

"I rebuild the wings : I used this central core of the wings but the triangle shaped grills that form the hex was in very bad condition. We found that metal grill and remoded it so I could then remold the entire wing. The ILM TIE wings were NEVER cast as single components.....we did it to save all that assembly time !!!"

Dave Heilman is the one who cleaned up the main body.

Al Zequeira oversaw the molding of the TIE fighter, including the TIE fighter wing micro-screens which were considered impossible to mold and re-cast in production.

Icons Fab & Design helped clean them up and work with Al on the assembly methodology, supervised by Mike Moore.

« The paint we used on the TIE fighter was a water based house paint from Sherwin-Williams. That is a paint company here in the U.S." said Mike.

« I definitely think less than 500 TIE fighters were made add Max……it was a lot of hard work for a lot of people to make that happen. »

Peter Greenwood was the Icons staff member who secured the TIE fighter castings.

Most of the original SW ANH miniature molds were buried in ILMs parking lot as ground filler. Per George Lucas instructions !!

Lucasfilm has one set of Icons TIE fighter masters that were given to them at the closure of the company, one Icons co-founder had one set (Mike Rogers) and one set was destroyed :-(

Here is a picture of Robert Bowen working on a TIE fighter during the year 1997 at Icons under the "supervision" of Peter Mayhew who played Chewbacca in the Star Wars movies....Thanks to Rob for that superb picture 😀