At this point, it’s as done as it’s gonna be. :) It’s time to party like it’s 1995!

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I’ve had this project in the works for a while now, though I never posted any WIP on it until just now:

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So for my “Zaku Project” that I’m working on I’m building various Zaku kits- with the exception of the Super Deformed Zaku I’m building, they’re 1:144 scale. I’m going for a sort of sampling of the different (OYW) Zakus out there… The variety of different designs and kits, but all of them very much “Zakus” at heart.

Anyway, it was inevitable that there would be a Zaku Kai in this lineup. In 1:144 scale that left me two options: the first is the old kit from 1989, which is somewhat close to the mark but with enough errors to make it look generally bloated and with much of the impact of the original design lost. The second is the HGUC kit released a couple years ago. The HGUC seems to have the opposite problem. Instead of being too chunky, it’s too thin. Instead of everything being flattened out by bloat, it’s just plain flattened out. Typical of Bandai’s cowardly approach to kit design these days. On the other hand, though – what the legs lack in bulk they make up for in style. I decided to see what I could do with the HGUC: whether I could make a few simple tweaks and make the HGUC capture a little more of the spirit of the original design.

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Lately I’ve been spending some time working on a First Grade Char’s Zaku. It’s going to be a full polycap conversion, basically I want it to look and work pretty much the same as a High Grade…

The reason I chose this particular kit is because I wanted to build a Char’s Zaku, and I like the way the Perfect Grade/First Grade design for Char’s Zaku incorporates most of what I like about the Master Grade Zaku v1.0, while representing the “elite” status of Char’s Zaku in a unique and cool-looking way. (Various Char’s Zaku kits include extra thrusters or whatnot to account for the unit’s superior speed – the PG/FG version has rounded thruster housings on the lower legs and backpack… I think it’s a cool design.)
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I haven’t been real happy with my first attempt at the Zaku’s lower legs, so recently I’ve been trying to do better. The first version I did, the plan was to build the common parts of the leg (the area above and in front of the pods – as these areas are the same on both sides of both legs… so I could sculpt this stuff once and copy it for the two legs.) – however, the plan quickly (and rather haphazardly) changed to include not just the common parts but also a full sculpt of the two inner halves of the lower legs, stuck together. From there the plan was to recast the thing and then alter one half of each of two castings to form the asymmetrical lower legs.
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Lately I’ve been working on various projects for the Tekkoshocon model contest. I have a couple projects that are nearly ready for paint and a couple others that are in various earlier stages of work… But these two will probably be the be the most substantial new projects I’ll have ready for the con: a Bandai Scopedog and a Hasegawa VF-0 Battroid.

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It’s been a while since my last update to this project: the Zaku project goes on and on, but there’s always other things I want to do, too. After all, I still haven’t finished my Armored Core group build entry. (close, though) Still, there’s a fair bit of new stuff to share.

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In the last post I talked about how I recently had a board fabricated that I’d designed… The purpose of this board is to make it very easy for me to install a microcontroller inside a model, even in very tight spaces… The general parameters of the design (specifically, the size) were dictated by my “Armored Core Hakuheisen” project: the one site on that kit that is central, easy to access, and easy to hollow out is also very small – at most I could probably fit a board about 10mm wide and 13mm long in there. Using a regular pin-through-hole type IC in there, the chip alone would take up most of that space, and I’d have no space left for resistors or connectors. So I set out to design a board that would make it easy to install a very small surface mount PIC and host the resistors on the board itself. I’ve gone through several iterations of this design – the version that was manufactured was version 3. For those curious, I’ve decided to write about some of the earlier (and more recent) versions.

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When I got started on my recent Armored Core project I decided I not only wanted it lit, I wanted to light the head and all the thrusters… Not only did I want ‘em lit, I wanted to be able to control the brightness, too. And not only control the brightness, but control them via an interface to the PC… And not only that, but I wanted this control system to support the connection and automatic control of many models’ lights, all at once… Needless to say it’s been a slightly complicated endeavour. At least, for me. I’m sure someone else could do it quite easily.

The trick is, the one place on this kit where it’s really easy to install a circuit board in this kit and be able to access it later is the belly – and there’s not much space there. If you cut out some of the excess material you can get a space about 10mm wide and maybe 13mm long in the belly. It would be possible to get more space up in the torso, but it would mean gutting the area in question, and then possibly rebuilding the area to give it structure again… And while the torso seems quite large, the problem there is it’s very very flat. Short of cutting up the torso (for instance, something similar to all the cockpit mods you can see on AC Armory) it would be very difficult, in my opinion, to install a circuit board in the AC’s chest, especially if you need to be able to get at it…

So my solution to this problem was to design a circuit board for projects like these – a board just about as small as I could manage, but incorporating as many features useful to controlling and lighting a model as I could manage. Today, after a couple weeks of waiting, I finally got the boards back from BatchPCB, the fabrication service I used… There is good news and there is bad news…

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One of my coworkers, after learning of my interest in model-making, was kind enough to give me various items from his old collection. These included a couple vintage ARII and IMAI Macross kits, as well as “Fred” here…

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