Taking the test fitted foot apart to find places to pour in the #12 lead bird shot:
One of the core foot pieces, before and after chopping and grinding out the "snap together" pins (all the before and after shots read right to left):
The other core foot piece, again before and after removal of "snap together elements."
The base plate of the heel of the foot, before and after:
The upper plate of the heel, before and after:
The toe, upper plate, before and after:
The toe bottom plate, before and after:
I also trimmed down these tabs that fit into slots on the upper plate of the toe assembly to make room for just alittle more lead shot. Before:
...and after:
Here's how the part above looks in a before and after test fit, before:
...and after:
Here's the paint dropper that I use to pour the lead shot. I clipped the tip so the opening is larger than a regular paint pipette. It's standing in a tape roll so it won't empty tiny balls of lead onto my work table.
Here's me pouring the lead shot into the prepared foot part:
Here are the two base foot parts filled with lead and with their various holes sealed up with epoxy putty:
Another view:
The core of the foot, also filled and puttied:
I love a nice bead of glue on a seam line. This will clean up nicely:
If you don't have one of these, you probably should get one. This is a fantastic knife for seam scraping and detailing work of all kinds - on kits or scratchbuilds.
I don't want to turn this blog into an Amazon wish list, but by all that is holy this looks like an amazing kit!
For those unwilling to click the link I'm reprinting HLJ's pics below:
For one who has long wished for a Ban Dai Master Grade-style Five Star Stories kit, this is the closest that dream will probably ever get to coming true.
The old saying that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach is true enough, but an awesome toy-for-grown-ups will get my heart pounding too.
Well, maybe not, but they sure seem to be pretty hot to give us plenty of extra poly caps with their kits.
It's clear that they have a number of standard sets of poly caps that they put with all their kits. You will almost never use every one off the rack that is included with whatever kit you bought.
DO NOT THROW THESE OUT!
If you feel the urge to throw them out, send them to me instead. Just put them in an envelope with a couple stamps on it.
The 10 year old Vatshu IP kit I'm working on right now has the worst joint design I've ever seen. The knees are pretty nice, but that's about it.
Mecha joints should imitate human joints, because human joints (and those of other fellow vertebrate animals) are awesome. This means BALL JOINTS for hips and shoulders, and also - for simplicity's sake - for wrists and ankles.
This Vatshu kit just uses different sizes of side-pinned tubes, and they don't even fit well in most of the locations sculpted for them (except in the lovely knees, we all know side-pinned tubes make nice tight knee joints).
Thank heavens I save left over polycaps.
I found two lovely pairs of tabbed cup polycaps that I'll be using for the hips and ankles on this kit with a little puttying work, much of which I would have had to do anyway just to get the bad caps to stop flopping around.
Still mulling over the best way to sculpt the balls to fit into the cups, but I've done this before so I just have to figure out if the way I did it before was the best way or if there might be something easier. I'm not always so great at coming up with solutions that are both functional AND simple.
I worked for hours today detailing one of the feet on that Vatshu kit.
The two rear stabilizer things came out good - very pleased with them.
Not so pleased with the main body of the foot. I didn't have a coherent plan to start with, but luckily I engraved all the stuff into a double coating of Mr. Surfacer 100.
I was bummed out by the prospect of sanding it back down and re-doing it, but then I had an epiphany, thanks in part to this image that lodged in my mind after I saw it this morning. I realized that I can take an impression in clay of the foot sole and then sculpt out a negative to cast and attach to the bottom of both feet. This way I can make something really cool and complicated without having to worry about trying to duplicate it on the second foot.
I ran out to IKEA last Friday night (an hour before closing time is the best time to hit that madhouse) and bought 3 new display cases. Got two built. Put recessed lighting into this one with the help of a 2.5 inch hole saw. I love hole saws. There's something so satisfying about using a good hole saw. I put my old MG Qubeley for Ple-two, my new KOG Joker 3100, and a fresh raw yellow MG Hyaku Shiki in it to check it out. Me like.
Several years back there was a Cantonese noodle shop on one of the main streets here in town. Wong Faye played on the sound system and in the front of the restaurant crammed into a tiny space - the way they do it in the micro-malls in Manhattan's Chinatown - was a little import toy "shop" with only enough room in it for the owner to sit and watch HK action movies on a tiny monitor. I used to love checking out the windows for the latest MG Gundams, mini figure sets and bootleg DVDs.
This was the spot where I bought my first garage kit, though I didn't know it was a garage kit at the time. Back then I thought all models were like the Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica ones I had sat in the basement building as a kid. Those kits, I'm guessing now in hindsight, were made in factories that churned out huge quantities for a low-priced children's market.
Garage kits are not like this.
I just recently learned that one of the bigger garage kit workshops in Japan has a grand total of 15 employees.
Ban Dai - the maker of all those Gundam kits - employs hundreds.
Anyway, that first kit was a Volks GGI/MM (Great Garage Injection/Mechanical Moving) EVA-01 kit that was, as I later found out, infamously difficult to build. Leave it to me to make my return to my childhood hobby with something this tough.
It took me about six months of pretty hard effort to build it (and this was back before I became a father and had much more free time for building). Admittedly I did some crazy, time consuming stuff like freezing the foot and leg parts into blocks of ice so that I could fill the hollows with smelted lead solder without deforming the plastic (I've since discovered lead bird shot, most recently of the #12 variety.Get yourself a lifetime supply for about $35.
Well, that brings me to this kit that I've just started building: a WAVE kit from 1997 that I bought at a good discount from that little shop-in-a-restaurant when it was going out of business. I got some nice little L-Gaim kits there too for less than what dirt costs.
A real blast from the past - this kit really shows its age, especially compared to the mostly very nice and straightforward gold-plated Knight of Gold Joker 3100 kit I built last month.
On with the show...
If I don't feel bound to follow the instruction manual (like I do when I build MG Gundams, which remind me of higher-priced Lego kits in their shared complexity and the disasters that can result if you"skip ahead" ) then I like to start from the ground up. So here's the first look at the feet:
A big part of garage kit work is figuring out what to do with the parts. The instruction book is perfectly serviceable, but it leaves out all the details required to turn out an end product that doesn't look like trash:
Another thing I noticed:
These 4-sided manicure kit nail-file blocks from the cosmetics aisle are stupid fresh:
And with the right tools it doesn't take much to make a big difference:
And on the subject of tools, the Dremel will now make its first appearance:
And now that the parts have been satsfactorily prepared I can fill the hollows of the foot with lead shot:
And seal it in place with cyanoacrylate glue:
After the glue set up, which wasn't long, I glued the 3 main foot pieces together with solvent glue.
About a year and a half ago I got really into the idea of trying to become a hardcore scratch-builder. I found a (relatively) simple Mamoru Nagano design from Schell Bullet:
I bought all kinds of polymer clay and moldmaking/casting materials and set to work designing a piece that I hope will ultimately work as a kit that I can cast for others to enjoy as well..
Here are some images of work I accomplished on the torso, arms, and hands.
Here's the torso in the mold box. The mold itself is the blue stuff which is then sandwiched with snug, but not tight, rubber bands between two pieces of scrap wood so that it holds its original shape and does not leak resin around the edges of the cast piece (such leaks, when they harden, turn into "flash" that must be trimmed from the part):
Demolding the torso. You can see the long pouring tube with a sort-of funnel shape at the top and the short vent tube at the opposite end of the part. It is better to fill molds from the botom up this way because it helps the air bubbles rise out of the resin so that they don't end up as pin-holes in your part:
This is the torso smoothed out with considerable filing work. This was my first-ever attempt at casting a part and I just decided to do it rough so I wouldn't be disappointed if it turned out badly. Even after smoothing the core piece, I still have to do a great deal of puttying work to sculpt out the final version. Then I'll have to cast that again:
The sculpted left forearm. Using white sculpey clay I worked the basic shape and baked it hard, then I tooled some details into the surface of the part. Now it needs to be molded and cast in resin:
The sculpted left arm-shield. Same technique as the forearm above:
I posed the hands from a Ban Dai MG Qubeley kit and sealed them with jeweler's wax (the brown stuff) If I hadn't sealed them they would have gotten locked into the RTV mold rubber, which has an amazing facility for flowing into the tiniest crevices. Then I could recast them. The blue suff the hands are emdedded in is oil-based non-drying clay. The fleshy-colored stuff is some PVC sprue cut from a Spriggan vinyl figure kit, used here to create the pouring tubes. You might also notice the frame of legos around the edges. Legos are great for building really solid mold boxes. They fit tightly together so that the mold rubber doesn't leak out and you can easily size them to fit whatever part you're casting.
Here's what the hands look like fresh out of the mold. You can see that I cut little vent tubes at the tip of each finger so that I could fill the mold from the bottom up again. Positioning your part correctly in its mold is very important so that it will fill smoothly and totally with resin:
After they've been trimmed up a bit:
This scratch building stuff sure eats up time, so this was as far as I've gotten, but it's really fun so I'm sure I'll get back to it eventually.
(cross-posted from "pajkossy" (another blog of mine)
I bought this bag of #12 (believe me when I say, that's the tiniest pellet size you can get) lead bird shot. This stuff is definitely not to be used in the course of hunting for food - unless you like breaking your teeth on the way to getting lead poisoning. It's like very small Christmas cookie sprinkles, only made of shiny black metal.
Why did I search for hours on the internet for this stuff?
Only love or anime could make me do something so odd. To be more precise: building injection-molded plastic mecha (robot) models.
I still haven't gotten around to watching Zeta Gundam - the show from which the model I'm currently working on came, but this Hyaku Shiki (that's "type 100" in Japanese) has some DAMN heavy feet now.
Prior to filling them with the lead shot, which settes in very nicely thanks to it's small size, each foot weighed about 1/4 ounce.
I'll update later with their new weight, as well as the weight of the rest of the kit. For now I'll venture a guess that the feet will weigh almost as much the entire remaining structure.
Pix here when I finish it.
UPDATE: Each foot now weighs about 1.25 oz, so together they weigh 2.5 oz. This is about how much the whole body from the hips up weighs. This should make the center of gravity low enough for more dynamic poses that an unweighted model could maintain.
I finished the body assembly on my Master Grade Hyaku Shiki yesterday, here's a little peek at it:
I know that it is yellow, not gold. I wanted to build this without painting it to create a how-to for those kit builders who don't or maybe can't deal with the painting side of the hobby.
I imagine I will paint this by and by, but for now I like the way it looks "in the raw."
One difference between hardcore Gundam builders and hardcore FSS builders is that the former get into shading with the beloved "Max Technique" and weathering and bashing and dioramas, while the latter dwell obsessively on stuff like resculpted shoulder insignia bas-relief paintings and other "cosmetically beautifying" efforts. Gundams are all about the narrative while Mortar Headds are about sculptural beauty.
Mecha - the excellent robots, mechanical beings, and powered suits from anime and manga.
Meister - The title given to those who create these awesome and powerful machines in Mamoru Nagano's The Five Star Stories manga.
Me - I want to share my love for building model kits of these fantastic designs. I especially enjoy building kits from original designs by Nagano-san, but his stuff is really just the tip of the iceberg in the vast landscape of this hobby.
