Brocken Labor WIP to completion

I hadn't been doing much modeling for a while, and that had to change.

I dug out an old Patlabor kit that I picked up cheap at a Convention years ago. I didn't want to instantly burn myself out slaving away at an L-Gaim or FSS kit, so I went for something simple.

I didn't do any modifications other than weighting the feet with birdshot - no flying poses will ever be done with this guy.

Mostly I didn't even bother to chop registration pins as I was putting this together. I glued the facing edges of parts that would form seamlines as I snapped the kit together and that worked pretty well for later smoothing those lines.

I really had fun with airbrushing this kit. I made my first significant attempt at shading, and layered multiple shades to get what I think is a very nice depth to the finish.

Here are 4 videos of the process:









Here are a couple of finished images



If you'd like to see more, you can look here.

Modifying the Claws on a 1/144 Mobile Kapool

Smoothing Seams and Priming the D-Sserd

Pretty much self-explanatory thanks to the voice overs:







Some still images of it at this stage here.

Volks 1/100 Helmine

I got this kit from Yahoo Japan Auctions by way of the proxy bidding and "deputy" service website Shopping Mall Japan in the neighboring state of Indiana. Including all the service and shipping fees it cost just over $250.

This is the front page of the typically bare-bones instruction sheet.


And here's a picture of all its 47 parts laid out in the classic resin kit part layout "pose."



I'm not entirely sure whether or not this kit was worth all the money I paid, but I do like the design which is a kind of Five Star Stories "cousin" to the Gundam known as Qubeley.



Since the kit is about 20 years old, it is a pretty bad cast. Lots of pinholes or bubbles that were trapped and hardened into the plastic resin. Some mold misalignment causing damage to details or the design of the original sculpt. Some bigger bubbles that just completely wiped out details.

Those who know me, however, will know that I (perhaps perversely) enjoy repairing and resculpting parts on bad kits to make them better. This is what I will be doing in this case, and now I will take it a step further and re-cast the kit when the parts are up to standards that should improve considerably upon the original. I don't feel like I'm stepping on anyone's marketplace toes with this. The kit is really old, as I said, and very few people even know that it exists at all.

I'm well into the repair process already and I want to share some of it with you.

First up is a youtube video of before and after work on the big shoulder armors:



Next are before and after pics of repair I did to the point of the helmet's horn which was lost in the casting process:






Here is a video of the process for the resculpt.

[Edit] BTW I just found out that I've been mispronouncing the name "Helmine." It is German (duh to self) and short for Wilhelmine so it should be pronounced as "hell-mee-nuh". It means "the resolute protector" which I think is nice.

ACen Kit Building with Kids

Put this off for too long ...

The model building for kids thing I did at Anime Central went really great. The kids all loved it and we had a great time together. Thanks HLJ!

Here's a few pics.





The staff at the con said my presentation had the biggest turnout of anything they'd done for the kids but even so the turnout wasn't huge, so I had about a dozen kits left and I'll be doing it again next year with the leftover kits (now safely in storage).

Finally figured out the foot detail casting!

After my first attempt went awry thanks mainly to resin that was well-past its expiration date, I decided to make a new mold with RTV.

Here's the mold box getting started. I've just roughly lumped in the Kleen Clay to hold the part in position so that it is level in the box, and has enough space on all sides to make a good solid mold. I've tried to estimate a good volume of clay so that as I smooth it out the level will rise nicely to just below the edges of the part.


Using this set of tools:

from here (click on the "set of 12" thumbnail, it's the better set but has no direct link), I smoothed out the clay and worked it up snug against the edges of the part and the walls of the box. The RTV (Room Temperature Vulcanizing) rubber will work its way into the smallest spaces so a good seal is necessary. After that I built up the walls of the box with another row of bricks and laid in a thin snake of clay around the walls to raise the level a little more there.


Then I added one more layer of Legos so the RTV has enough space.


Here's the demolded RTV. I didn't use any mold release, which was fine in this case. I was nervous tho' because I did that by accident, not on purpose.


For the casting, I decided to use Bondo auto body repair filler. I was inspired to do this by a Brazilian figure sculptor on Hobbyfanatics named Ryuji who uses this stuff all the time. It's way cheaper than urethane or epoxy resins and the supply is much handier at the auto supply store (casting resin is a bit hard to find, even on the internet). I did spray mold release before spreading the Bondo into the mold.


The first one I did wasn't even worth showing because the working time on this Bondo stuff is only about a minute, which came as a big surprise and ruined the first attempt. This is the second attempt:

There are too many defects in this part to make it worth using on the final product, so I tried a few more times.

Here's what I came up with. The second and fourth ones are fine.


Now I just have to trim it up and smooth out the flat backside so I can fix it onto the flat foot and the prime and paint.

Wish me luck!

Vatshu Ankle Joint Modifications

I'll break it down for you. First I carved out some of the plastic that was there to hold the original stupid poly cap:

Until the new socket PC fit nicely, but loosely at the level where I wanted it:

Then I laid down a little "pad" of Magic Sculp epoxy putty for the new PC to press into:

And after the PC was mounted at the right depth and angle, I filled in the surrounding area with more Magic Sculp using clay sculpting tools to press and work it smoothly into place:

These are the "ankle bones" that connect the top of the foot to the bottom of the leg:

So now the ankles will be essentially double jointed.

Look at these videos for a more well-rounded view of all the action (ignore the sound, please):




Once again the main idea here is that test fitting is of the utmost importance in Garage Kit building. Even more so if you want to do modifications.

SD Gunner Zaku Lunamaria Hawke custom

I built this little guy last night to get ready for an intro to model building presentation I'm running with for a roomful of kids at Anime Central in Chicago next weekend.

I shot video of every part of every step of the assembly process so the kids can see first hand how it's done and then do it for themselves.

I feel like I really had a breakthrough in terms of using the camera as my eyes. I stood behind the camera with my magnifying visor on so that that little camera LCD monitor didn't seem quite so small.

It still eliminated the main cues (you know, 3D binocular vision) I use for depth perception, though, and that's always been the hardest part for me about shooting close up modeling vids. I always feel like my hands are just swimming around in space and I constantly want to peek over or around the camera to be able to see what I'm doing "with my own eyes" as it were.

I worked really hard to get the lighting decent and I think that helped alot, as did the magnifying visor. Here are two of the videos from late in the process:

Final Stage of building the BFG:

and mounting the BFG onto the Zaku:

More on Vatshu

I got the shoulder armor cleanup done.

First the inside of that piece from the last post:


And around the edges:


I got the final priming and sanding done on the smaller inner layer of shoulder armor too. I feel like I'm finally getting a handle on this whole elimination of seams thing.

Here's an animated gif of those inner armors:

I don't know if the gif will work, so here are the individual images:

Vatshu cleanup

Working on the shoulder armors.

I realized that the insides of these big panels were hugely exposed and needed smoothing out. Lucky for me I hadn't glued them together yet (hooray for test fitting). Here's what I'm talking about:

If you look inside there you can see little circles, pointed out on the right side in this pic (you might need to angle your monitor down to see it):

The arrow on the left is pointing out a rough edge I'll need to polish too.

On this pic you can see what this part looks like before and after smoothing out:


and here's a little movie, with actual narration no less, that shows you how to quickly and relatively painlessly clean up parts that show their "wrong" sides like this and other shoulder armors so often do:


Even if I was doing "no-paint" this would look good now. But I'm painting this time around, so stay tuned :)

Hyakushiki is done

ACen presentation

Check out the link here for more info about my panel at Anime Central next month.

Hyaku Shiki!

No decals/stickers yet. I put those on last night and need to make a few final adjustments. Final pictures soon.






One legged (I was detailing the other leg).

Detailing on the KOG

Here's a few pictures of some detailing I did on my KOG Joker 3100 Gold Plated Edition last night. I tried to do this with an acrylic wash over a layer of gloss coat. Lucky I tried that on just a small section of the top of the head, because cleaning up the wash with an alcohol swab nearly had disastrous results in that it started ripping chunks of the clear orange acrylic off from on top of the chrome plate.

I was lucky enough to be able to grab an extra fine point black Gundam marker at a hobby shop yesterday and that did the trick.

Have other people had trouble keeping these markers flowing properly? I had to keep a note card next to me to blot the pen tip regularly.

Really good article

Here is a great article I found while I was researching for background to add to my upcoming model building presentations at the Anime Central convention this coming May in Chicago.

Let me know what you think of it in the comments section.

why weight?

Vatshu leg early test fit

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.