I hope I don’t lose karma for mutilating a gift from my friends.
So I went to gouge a cavity inside the head of the Cherudim to cram an LED inside. It turned out that the “Super Bright Green LED” was more yellow-green than expected. I’ll probably compensate for this by painting the LED and clear parts blue.
I wish it was jacked to a UPS instead of running off an expensive watch battery.
Preparations for fitting the power supply. I initially planned to place the switch under the upper torso (see the square hole), but there was insufficient space to cram the battery in the same spot. Had to choice but to move the switch to the backpack. It fits inside the space just nicely. Material underneath the yellow collar piece was gouged to make space for the battery holder. A 2mm hole was drilled behind the neck for the wire. When everything is fully painted, I will then use my very pathetic, horrendous soldering skills to put the electronics together.
Above is how the waist block looks like before modification mutilation.
For the waist joint, I used an etching saw to cut the waist into two. You can just barely see the pilot hole I made on the waist on the right. I drilled a 3mm hole, inserted a piece of leftover sprue and held it in place using epoxy putty.
Sorry for skipping the intermediate steps. So, I cut a rectangular piece of sheet styrene to fit the big hole, and drilled out a 3mm hole for the joint. A remaining ball joint polycap was attached underneath, and everything was held using more epoxy putty. You can see above I slathered Tamiya putty all over it to try to make the surface more uniform.
And this is the end result – a twistable waist found in so many other Gundam models. For the colour scheme, I’m contemplating a lighter green. Or should I do a greyscale Cherudim?
I haven’t been dedicating a lot of time to completing this, spending my time instead on marathon anime-watching sessions (just finished watching the last 15 episodes Code Geass Season 1 in one go last night). School is starting in August so this may probably be my last Gundam model for a long time. I never expected to receive this gift and actually planned to build an MG Zeta Plus C1 with GFF-style white/light blue colours after finishing my Exia. Looks like it won’t be happening. 
[...] Modifications to head for accommodating LED and implementation of waist joint (link) [...]
Can you post where you put the switch for the LED as well as were did place the battery Thanks
You can see the third picture above where the switch is crammed into the backpack. The battery was stuffed under the head at the place where you can fit an LED unit from the 00 Gundam. I removed some yellow plastic to make space. Where the backpack connects to the back, I drilled a hole in the connecting peg to thread the wires through.
That was Brute and Verry the nice indeed..ur cherudim look so great and id love to do the same with mine (not yet assemble)..im thinkin of red and white colour cherudim..just 1 question..how come ur Head scope cover(red fore head thingy)..mine was red.. O_o
The unpainted model has all the clear parts clear, so the eyes, forehead crystal and GN Condensers are all uncoloured. Check out my pictures of the completed model and you should be able to notice that the forehead crystal has been painted clear red and the round sensor below it clear blue. The GN Condensers were also painted with clear green.