Doing some damage.

The falcon has so much character. One of things I like is that the ship shows a ton of wear and tear. The hull has blemishes, scrapes, chips, and of course blast marks. I started with the damaged panel near the dish on the upper hull. Here, I've laid out the pattern roughly with a marker.
Then, I heated up a metal ball end tool that I use when I sculpt in clay. I heated the ball end over an open flame, then pushed it into the plastic. It would slowly deform a little as the metal ball rapidly lost heat. I repeated this process until I had a little crater. Puncturing the hull inside the craters was easy with my soldering iron. Using an x-acto knife and the ball end tool, I cleaned up the molten flash left over from the soldering iron and created some detail in the blast marks. I sanded away the excess roughness with 400 and 600 grit sandpaper.Here is the finished damage with a light coat of primer applied to check my work.Making the covers to the screw access points on the hull was pretty simple once I had all the right components. First, I went out and grabbed some 3/16" round styrene tube (seen below). With the hull already screwed together, I used my digital calipers to measure the depth from the hull surface, down to the top of the screw heads. I subtracted the thickness of the magnet (in this case 1/16") and cut a piece of styrene tube to length.
The magnet is glued to the end of the tube. A little super glue joins the tube to the cap detail. Voila! A nice magnetic cover for easy access to the screw points has been created.
Last night I decided to end the night finishing some less than exciting work. Escape pod number two still needed the upgraded panel lines and detailing. I haven't found any clear reference of the greebly on the top so I made something temporary that resembled what I could make out from my reference. I'm going to do some more searching and make a new piece.