Vatshu The Black Knight

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.

I think this one is going to turn out nicely.

Come back soon for another set of videos.