With SCGMC 2022 behind me, I have a whole new year of model projects to look forward to. SCGMC2023 is coming up and this time really for sure the Zaku Kai is gonna be done. I have other projects in mind for the show as well… Plus Anime Boston is coming up and I need to be ready for my usual panel there… But right now I want to take a bit of time and work on some simpler projects. I only just barely managed to get a single model ready for SCGMC 2022, the good bit there is I did it, I had something to show, and it got me motivated to really work on my workspace and my airbrush setup. But I want to make painting more of a regular occurrence. I want to make finishing models more of a regular occurrence. So I decided to do some more Zakus, the 2021 version of the HG Zaku, and the First Grade Zaku from 1999.

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This past weekend I attended SCGMC – I think this was my 6th time attending. Presently it is the only model show I attend other than the local ones and so a lot of my efforts in the hobby on any given year culminate in what I have ready to show (or not) at SCGMC, if I’m attending.

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Things have not been going well for this project. Back at the end of August, I worried that I was running out of time until SCGMC but with two months left, I felt I could buckle down and make it happen. Unfortunately, I’ve just not managed to re-engage with the project with the same kind of energy I had before, so I’ve had to accept the fact that this project won’t be ready for this year’s show.
On the bright side, I did some work on the Zaku’s arms, improving the joints and adding the elbow joint.

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Earlier this year I did a “100 day challenge” to work on my Zaku Kai project: The idea of the challenge was to work on the project every day for 100 days. It was a great experience in a lot of ways, but by the end of it I was ready to take a break. Now with SCGMC looming, I’m returning to the project with the aim of having it done in time for the show.

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I haven’t made much progress or posted any updates in the final 10 days of the challenge – until this one at least. I did some more work on mounting polycaps in the upper leg and, in recognition of the end of the 100 day challenge, I put together as much of the model as I could and took some photos – not an easy thing at this stage since a lot of important joints and structures aren’t built yet (like the waist-to-hips connection, the ankle joint, etc.) and I haven’t made enough headway with the right leg to include it at this time.

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For the past few days I’ve been continuing work on the Zaku knee joints. The design of this assembly and the mechanical arrangement for the knee armor goes back to the early days of the project, and it’s still something I take pride in. But at the same time I am kind of anxious to wrap it up and focus on other parts of the legs. Maybe within the last 10 days of the 100 day challenge I can even build the hip and waist joints needed to connect the legs to the rest of the build and have a look at the Zaku in a largely-complete state.

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I’ve been continuing work on the Zaku’s knee joint parts. The components are simple in principle but it is a bit tricky to build joint parts with the appropriate mechanical precision. Today I made a lot of progress on the lower portion of the joint: the portion of the hinge that attaches to the lower leg, and the strut which will carry the knee armor.

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It’s been about a week since the last update: part of that was because on the weekend I went to an electronics flea market: prep for that kept me busy for a bit, as did testing out the stuff I got afterward. But beyond that, I started working on the knee joint, and it took me some time to make headway on it. While this part is well-defined at this point (being one of the parts for which I have already made a 3D printable model) in some ways the structure is a bit complex: being a joint, it needs some degree of mechanical precision. It’s also got kind of a sparse interior structure and irregular contours. After struggling with it for a bit I finally powered through enough to create the first part of the joint.

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It’s been a bit of a slump with this 100 day challenge in recent weeks and this week is no exception. But part of the challenge is to just keep going, even if things aren’t working out quite how they’re supposed to.
Previously I used epoxy putty to create hollow copies of the upper leg part from a rubber mold. The process was a bit experimental and due to quality problems with the castings I wasn’t sure if I was going to actually use them. I’ve made up my mind that I will use them, so for the past couple sessions I’ve been working on smoothing them out. I did some gap filling on them and now I’m sanding them to get them smooth again.

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Although there’s no shortage of things that needs to be done on this project, sometimes it’s still hard to figure out what to do when I sit down to work on it. Today I decided to work on the thruster openings on the hips and the snout.

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