MG 1/100 Wing Zero Custom

After almost 7 weeks I’ve finally finished building this! Many things went wrong during its making, but I’ll try to tone them down and keep it positive.

Final stretch

It’s a little late but Happy Lunar New Year to all the Chinese people celebrating it! Here’s a quick little update and like the title suggests, I’m finally nearing the end.

I got all the parts panel lined and slapped a few decals here and there. Most of the fancy graphics that came with the kit were stickers which I had no choice but to avoid. Besides, people have been saying that this MS (and its fellow Wing/EW brethren) is designed with psychological warfare in mind. Imagine seeing an angel/devil shooting/slashing the crap out of everything in the battlefield. So I just stuck to the generic markings found on every corner of a Ver.ka kit.

With the wires already threaded through some of the parts, the next step was to put them together in the right order for the final connections to be made inside the torso. Here’s a picture I took with all 5 pairs of wires sticking out the cockpit hatch. The objective was to connect all of them with a switch and cram everything inside.

After a few hours’ worth of messing around I was finally able to connect all 4 LEDs in parallel to the switch and battery, and there was barely enough space inside I simply used a stick and shoved whatever I could.

The final step would be to deal with the clear parts/sensors.

Another paint update

I’m still falling behind with my weekly updates and I didn’t take enough pictures for a proper one either. From my previous update I mentioned about getting the white to turn out right. I gave up after mixing a total of 4 batches of white paint and decided to just paint 100% white over them. I think one of the problems lay in my use of dark-coloured paint. I used a gray primer and then with my horrible pre-shading skill turned the parts practically all black. I should have also mixed a larger batch that could last the whole model since there was a large surface area to be painted white. I kept on feeling that the parts had different shades of white to them.

In any case, it took almost a week to get over this problem. Only around that time I remembered from building my Z plus that the base colour had a subtly important role in determining how the final colour would look. I guess I was too used to those gloss-finished kits the past year and a half. I dug up some Mr Base White and went to blast all the other coloured parts with it. This ought to make the final colour slightly brighter with the gray undertones eliminated. For the rest of the white coloured parts, I really hope they turn out okay in the end.

With the white problem over the other colours were a breeze in comparison.

Sorry for the poor picture quality – I’ve been using my phone to take these pictures for quite a while. The blue colour is a little over-saturated in the picture though. Within the span of just one day I did 3 other colours – yellow, blue and red. Almost all of the kit is painted, leaving the minor details which will be a difficult test for my now horrible hand-painting skills. I’m scared when I look at my shaky hands.

I’m also working on the seam lines on the rifles right now. Since their design is quite simple, I decided to paint them in a lighter shade to make whatever detail easier to see. Sorry, no modding work on them. It would have been nicer if I could light them up with LEDs but with my limited skill I didn’t want to permanently fix the guns to the hands just to be able to light them up.

Hopefully I can get some progress done this week.

The paint

Well, school has officially resumed and I am a few days late with my weekly updates. Was really busy the past week (yay life) and didn’t accomplish enough to warrant an update chock full of pictures. Today I spent most of my entire day building and troubleshooting my brother’s new PC.

The one good thing right now is that I have an internship that starts in February so that gives me a few weeks of rather slack school life (I hope) before everything goes into full force where I will be working on weekdays and going to school at night twice a week.

What I did the past week was to prime the kit. I had to re-sand and re-prime a lot of areas because I conveniently forgot to sand with higher grit sandpaper the first time round. There were a few seams to fix again, and I commenced painting with the first colour – the inner frame.

There aren’t many inner frame parts on this old model so that was taken care of quite quickly. After a few evenings gone, I attempted to do some pre-shading which turned out horribly. I prepared my white paint mixture but it was also not bright enough. The gray primer and the black paint made my parts too dark so I’m doing another layer of newly mixed white over them. I could get lazy and simply slap on some white without mixing it but the WZC has those soft plastic ‘feathers’ on its wings which don’t take too well to paint, so I had to follow the molded colour.

Getting the white parts done would take a few rounds as I have to deal with seams on the wings too. I think those will take some time to get done, following which it’s the other colours. I also ran out of my white colour mix and had to prepare another batch. Needless to say I couldn’t get the exact colour right and that was more time spent. Some of the parts can only be painted after the other coloured parts are painted, so that is a hassle.

The big secret

Happy New Year! Was a little distracted these few days and forgot to keep up with my updates. Despite running out of time before school resumes, I have been playing games on my phone and neglecting everything else. Still, it’s time to let the big secret out.

With this one picture the answer should be quite obvious.

It’s easier to work with these prepacked tiny kits as you don’t have to travel around sourcing them and the SMD LEDs are much smaller than those I’ve worked with before. They’re pre-wired so I don’t have to struggle with trying to solder wires onto their tiny terminals. The biggest challenge though is still the wiring and finding the right place to store the power source. I could take the easy way out by running an umbilical cord, but I decided to make this guy self-contained. To make things difficult, the Wing Zero is slightly smaller than most other MGs.

After looking around the backpack and torso which are usually potential spots to store the battery, I found that it was possible to hide the battery inside the crotch area.

Dug out as much plastic as possible inside and cut a notch in the polycap. There was just enough space to fit the battery.

Drilled a hole behind the polycap to run the wires out.

Working on the torso, I had to make space for the switch and for all the wires to meet. I sacrificed cockpit detail and removed the back of the pilot seat. The Zero System indicator was also getting an LED. The pilot figure will be left out to make space for the wiring and switch.

Too bad the finished product won’t look half as bright as this right now. I’ll be covering the LED with the usual silver tape + lens combo so that the orb would still look halfway decent without any light. Also, this LED isn’t alone…

The arms are also getting the LED treatment.

Drilled holes to run the wires through the entire arm. I’m a little worried about the structural integrity of the elbow joints as quite a bit of material was removed to allow the wires to thread through them, and ABS joints are brittle and will crumble in a few years.

Testing them out. The articulation range of the elbow is reduced to around 135 degrees due to my poor positioning of the wires. Could have stretched the range a bit more but I’m not keen on removing even more material from the joints.

Topping things off with the head.

Derp, the LED is so small it can’t be seen clearly in this picture. It’s sitting between the putty mess and the polycap. Cut the forehead camera off so that the face can be re-attached after painting.

Again the final product won’t be bright as I would most probably cover the eyes with silver tape too. Also I wonder if the little battery can even put out enough juice to power all 4 LEDs at the same time. I’ll see how it goes. However, things are far from over as I can only join all the connections when I’m at the very last stage of re-assembly.

Back to the pla-plate nonsense, I extended the waist by around 1mm as I found the arms to be a little long. The waist joint extension isn’t anything special – just some sheet styrene, a piece of brass wire and some super glue. Put a few pieces of plastic around the gap in the waist to make the joint less obvious. It still looks a little empty inside there but I can’t think of a good way to fill it up without losing the upper joint’s ab crunch ability.

I should be done with my messing around so it’s one round of checking through the parts again before priming them. Then it’s another round of checking. I have a feeling I may need to fix all my freehand scribing and chiseling.

Fixing my own mistakes

Happy Holidays! Didn’t have enough time to put up a special post as I was busy these few days. Despite having less than 2 weeks before school resumes I found myself working and spending even less time at home.

In my previous post I mentioned I had plans for my Wing Zero Custom. I guess there’s  no point keeping them a secret since there would be no progress updates otherwise. First, it’s the details.

I was really glad to be able to find this and a bunch of Kotobukiya parts which I really needed for this project. Gonna act like a pro and slap on a truckload of Kotobukiya parts on this guy.

For panel lines I’ll try to level up my lack of skills.

Got a chisel to help me make more details instead of flooding lines alone. I went to search the internet for tutorials on how to do this to no avail. All I could find were tutorials on how to draw panel lines, nothing new. At first I thought using a scriber alone would be enough, but I ended up with a horrible looking chunk of crap, and then realised I needed the right tool for the job. This is only a single width, but brands like Sujiborido offer an assortment of widths that cater to the highest-level panel liners.

Here’s an example of what it can do. Left: before, right: after.

Along with K parts and panel lines, it’s also necessary to spam those pla-plates.

The poor guy’s feet became my guinea pigs.

One problem with the hands is that they cannot hold the buster rifles at all. Good thing they re-used the Ver.ka runners, as you would end up with 2 pairs of hands! That means I could mess up one pair with another pair to spare.

I stuck a piece of brass wire so it would work like the tabs in the newer releases.

Hoping I would nail things right, I made holes in the corresponding positions in the handles of the guns. Things turned out better than I expected, so now I have 2 pairs of hands. The downside is that only 1 pair of the hand armour pieces are provided.

Also before I got the chisel, I made a big mistake which took a week to fix.

It’s a long story which would probably confuse anybody but I went to cut the front thigh armour pieces apart and realised I was doing it wrong, so I tried to undo my mistake. As I removed quite a bit of material during the cut it wasn’t sufficient to simply cement the parts back together. I tried using my epoxy putty to join things but it wasn’t very sticky (probably due to it being a few years old already), and the contact area was also probably too small as well. Re-attached the parts using 1mm sheet styrene and reinforced them with some brass wire. Didn’t take any pics though as I just winged it. Hopefully after all the puttying and sanding it would look as normal as possible.

Aaaaand the second plan is still anyone’s guess.

This is taking much longer than I expected.

figma Homura Akemi

It was almost necessary for me to get figma Homura to pair up with her Madoka. In my review of figma Madoka I mentioned that I was disappointed with its quality. This time round I didn’t have high expectations. In terms of quality control, Homura somehow did much better.

NEXT MISSION

After an 8-combo streak I ran out of toys to review for my one post a week regime (not necessarily a bad thing , and I still can’t bear to open any of my Nendoroids) so I had to let this ‘secret’ out.

As above. Again it’s been a long time since my previous Gundam kit, but I’ve wanted to build one of these for quite some time already. When the MG Delta Plus was announced I got sidetracked a little, and then came Gundam Unicorn ep. 4 which sidetracked me a lot with all the mecha porn (Sieg Zeon). I kept to my own promise and was a little surprised to be able to find this guy easily right after my exams.

He can’t even hold his rifles. Oh dear.

It took a week to get this guy built up, and now I’ve torn it back apart and gone down to the chores. I’ve got a little plan for this guy which I envisioned for a long time, and it’s gonna be quite difficult to pull off at least with my rusty, horribly noob skills. I thought of getting one of those add-on kits for some wing overkill but decided against it later on. For now I’ll be sticking to the out-of-box kit with maybe some minor changes to the colour scheme – not metallic colours this time.

I’m not sure whether I can actually finish this by the end of the year, since I’m already facing several roadblocks with my plans and I haven’t even gotten around to sanding all the parts down. Gonna do a third resupply trip to see if the shops carry the one specific tool I need. I hope I can get enough done to be able to post updates weekly.

SH Figuarts Barnaby Brooks Jr.

Good Luck Mode

Here’s a review of Bunny. I was lucky to be able to pre-order him when I bought Wild Tiger and I only went to collect him after my exams ended. I had somewhat high expectations (not sure why) but was completely let down by the figure. I’ll tell you why later.

SH Figuarts Birth CLAWs Set

I ordered this item from a middleman service at the last minute before the pre-order window closed and due to some hiccups it was only shipped almost a month after its release. Strangely the postal service was incredibly fast and I got it 3 days after I got my shipping notice. Those of you who have seen the review for it somewhere else would probably know that the actual product looks like a cheap bootleg compared to the promotional pictures.