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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Today I separated the mold halves for the upper leg and used epoxy putty to make hollow copies of the part. I also added a bit of missing detail to the sole of the foot.

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Today I poured the second half of the upper leg mold and made some headway on the top of the foot:

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My track record with the 100 day challenge has been rather poor lately. Tonight I got back into it and turned my attention to the leg parts.

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