The Shield

I showed the initial work on the shield in the last update. Overall it’s been a very fun part to work on. It’s really simple, of course. A Zaku shield is just a bent rectangle with a few detail bits on it, so I was able to crank out the initial rough shape for it in a few hours. I thickened the shield up, added detail, arranged a mounting solution, and worked on refining it. I didn’t quite finish the shield: there’s still some more raised and recessed detail that needs to be added. I think it’s looking great, though.

Foot

In a sense, the work I did on the foot worked against my goal of having something displayable for SCGMC. Most of the work I did was stuff that wouldn’t readily be seen, like foot sole detail. I could have skipped it for the sake of a SCGMC finish. However, that didn’t appeal to me, and I felt I could get the sole work done pretty quickly and then move on to more critical stuff like the tops of the feet. Sometimes you just need to do what feels right.

Legs

The legs are always a big thing for me in this project. In the previous update I pondered whether I might want to change how the lower legs come together to make casting or assembly easier, help me get better symmetry, and so on. This time around I decided to act on that. After putting all that work into refining the front and top of the lower leg parts, I didn’t want to go through all that again and worry about making the two copies match. I wanted to take advantage of casting to make these areas, common to all four parts which make up the lower leg sculpt, truly match up. So I did something that would probably be pretty scary if I’d stopped too long to think about it: I cut through the backing plate of the part and separated the area so I could further refine it and its boundary where it meets the rest of the leg.

Casting

You could say that the last battle fought in my effort to get this project ready for SCGMC focused on trying to finalize what parts I could, and make molds to recast them. In the end, I got five parts to a state where I felt they were ready to be recast, but of course many others like the shield were close but not ready, or were too far from ready to even consider it. Once it was clear I no longer had time for this, I had to accept that the attempt to hit the deadline was over.
Again, it’s kind of sad that I didn’t meet the deadline, but let’s take a moment to appreciate this. I’ve had this project ongoing for something like 6 years, with long stretches where I’d make no progress or avoid the project entirely and work on other things. The project has been with me so long that sometimes I forget that it’s a thing that can reach conclusion. It’s simply a part of my involvement in the hobby… But here’s the thing. I finished some parts, made molds of them and everything. It’s a great feeling.


So that’s about where things stand at this point. I feel like with another week I might have been able to hit the deadline, though the resulting model probably would have been a bit crude in some places… As it stands, I feel like the current state of the lower legs is a bit scary. I think hacking up the parts was a good choice, as it will save me from having to remake the knee area, and make the two copies of that area match up… But in the current state, nothing really fits together right due to alterations I’ve made since splitting the parts. It feels like a big step backward in a way, though I believe it’s just a temporary setback, and a useful step.

Legs

The legs have been one of the more challenging parts of this build for me. They’re made up almost entirely of compound curved surfaces and soft edges. Each leg is asymmetrical, with the left one a mirror-image of the right, which means I can’t simply make a leg and copy it… I have to make the outer and inner halves of the lower leg separately, make sure they go together with each other, make sure they match their counterparts on the other leg, etc. The current lower leg parts are the result of my third major attempt at building the leg parts. I think the method I used to construct them struck a nice balance between precision guides where I needed them, and simplified construction where precise guides were less important. However, they still require a lot of work to get them ready, and once I get the basic shape done I still have to hollow them out, add the thruster ports, etc.
One of the first things I did when returning to the project was pick up those leg parts and start sanding them where they needed it. I knew the parts needed work, but after all the time since the last big burst of work on the project, I think I forgot just how much work was needed. Early on I put some effort into making sure the various halves would all match up properly – gluing them to the other half of the same leg, or the same half from the other leg, to check the general shape and the profile. There were places where they didn’t match up very well, but I’ve made quite a bit of progress there. In working on the curvature, I found it useful to actually ignore the guides in places: in some cases the guides weren’t placed precisely enough or were pushed around by the epoxy putty, so following them too slavishly makes a weird surface. I’m relying on the contour gauge more than the styrene guides at this point.
The upper area of the lower leg, around the knee and the front edges of the lower leg is the same on all the parts – it’s also one of the more complicated bits of the lower leg, so at this point I really want to limit how many copies of that area I have to match up – so I’ve focused on the ones on the inner halves of the legs, and plan to recast these (when they’re ready) for use on the outer halves. At the same time I’m thinking about how I want the cast parts to come together in assembly… Left/right halves might not be the best solution once I’m working with the final cast parts.

Skirt Armor

Around the time of my last project update I started work on the skirt armors for the Zaku. It was exciting to see the work progress, because it’s one of those really gorgeous and distinctive parts of the Zaku Kai. The staggered edges, the sheer breadth and bulk of it, I think it’s a big part of what makes the Zaku Kai great. I think I captured all that pretty well in my design plans, and so seeing those parts start to come together was really exciting. I actually built up all the basic forms of the skirt parts two years ago, and had planned to post the work as a third WIP update on the project in that year, but I got a bit sidetracked I guess. I look forward to sharing pictures of the completed skirt armor set when the time comes.
So these are parts I built two years ago but never put in a WIP post (apart from the front skirts in a very crude state). Returning to work on them after all this time, I focused on adding missing detail and refining anything that seemed too crude. I’d added the sloped portion of the front skirt armors some time ago, so I began work on the cut-out sections of those, as well as the thrusters that are inset on the front and rear skirts.

Shield

The shield is one of those parts which, until now, I haven’t worked on at all beyond designing it on paper and in Blender. When I attended my local IPMS model club meeting last week, I brought all kinds of tools, and planned to work on the Zaku while at the meeting. Unfortunately I forgot to bring the Zaku itself, so I decided to spend the time building a new part, the shield. I made some good progress with it (hardly surprising, the shield is like a bent rectangle, really simple) but I wasn’t entirely happy with it so I decided to start again.
So far that’s just meant cutting a thick plate of styrene to the width of the shield, then cutting it to length, scoring it to form a bend, and drilling holes in it. Still, the effect is pretty good so far. I need to thicken it up (to about 5mm, rather than the current 2mm) and deal with all kinds of little details, but it’s a good start.

MMP-80

My work on the Zaku’s machine gun is a bit weird because for the longest time I didn’t do any work on it, no designs or anything. When I was designing an avatar for myself with the Zaku’s silhouette holding the machine gun, I made a really crude mock-up of the weapon for the purpose… It’s pretty strange, because I love the Zaku Kai’s machine gun. When I finally took a crack at drawing up design plans for the weapon, it was for another project, my 1:60 Rick Dom II conversion… So the plans were drawn in the wrong scale.
I haven’t done a lot of work on the MMP-80 at this point, but I wanted to feel comfortable with the choices I was making about the weapon’s size and proportions. I wanted the finished weapon to look good and also (if possible) make it not look entirely out of place in the company of the 0083-style MMP-80s that come with the MG Zaku F2 and the original MG Zaku. I did a bunch of tests with the weapon scaled to different lengths (8m, 9m, or 10m mostly) and compared different kit versions of the weapon, including the 1:100 scale B-Club one I bought ages ago.

Conclusion

I’ve got about a week to do this for SCGMC. As I said, I don’t know if I can pull it off. If not, then at least I’ll be better off for having made the effort. There’s still tons of work to do, all kinds of areas of the body that don’t even have a rough build, let alone a refined part. Even if things get built, that still leaves the painting process to consider… I don’t want to let things like that discourage me, however. Right now I’m making lots of progress on the project, and it feels good.

For the decal to come off in chunks like this means it’s not adequately secured to the model in the first place. This could mean that there was air under the decal, or that the gloss coat it’s sitting on top of didn’t cure properly. I’m not really sure what happened.
I considered my options: I could attempt to remove the rest of the Zaku Lady and then replace her with another copy of the marking, or I could cut out just the arm that I needed and apply that. With the limited amount of time available, I chose the latter option. I briefly entertained a third option as well: make the shield appear damaged in the area of the Zaku Lady’s arm… But that’s really not my style.
Unfortunately, when positioning the replacement arm, it folded on itself and attempts to straighten it out failed, and I had no more spare Zaku Ladies in 1:144. So in the end I wound up applying the left arm from another marking, the “Fairy Heart” design. The new arm doesn’t entirely match the Zaku Lady design (there’s no whip or forearm brace) but at least she’s no longer missing an arm. So on the shield, at least, the whole decal-sanding thing royally backfired: the damaged areas of the Zaku Lady decal are more uneven now than before I sanded them, and the design is no longer quite what it should be.
On the rest of the model, the decal sanding worked out pretty well. The only other noticeable damage was to the red stripes on the hand, which were discolored in a few spots. However, it also didn’t entirely erase the decal boundaries either.
Apart from the decals, I also wanted to do a panel line wash and a filter, and I still needed to finish up the electronics (power source, mainly) to light the eye.
My panel line washes tend to be a bit on the sloppy side, especially on a kit like this that has kind of soft detail to begin with. Techniques for cleaning up a wash rely on either scrubbing away the excess paint, or wiping it away with paint thinner. Either method really requires that the underlying clear coat be cured to a tough finish so it isn’t removed along with the wash, but with the timing I was worried that the clear coat would be too easily damaged… To avoid more possible catastrophies I decided, instead of using an oil wash and cleaning the excess with thinner, to use an acrylic wash and wipe it away. The end result was a bit inconsistent, and with some leftover wash in places I didn’t want it and some panel lines without as much color as I would have liked. I also worried that the panel effect might be too stark…
For similar reasons, I decided I needed to skip the filter at present. Earlier in this project I tried a filter and wound up lifting the paint coats off the model. Given the minimal amount of time the clear coats would have to dry, I wasn’t at all confident that the clear coats would be able to protect the lower layers of paint from exposure to the thinner used in the filter, and I was running out of time anyway.
Working out the power source for the model was a challenge, as it’s really not something I’d given much thought to in earlier stages of the build. When I built the HGUC Zaku last year, I had arranged to hide a 20mm coin cell in the hips, and that was all installed and wired up before I started painting. But I was worried that putting a battery in the hips would weaken the hip joints, so I decided not to go that route this time. I started painting this project without a clear plan for how to power its LED. All I had to work with was a couple wires coming out of the head, and a hole in the torso (hidden under the backpack) to allow me to access the model’s internals for wiring. I considered running a wire up the leg and installing a battery pack in the base, but I didn’t get around to making a base, so my only option would have been to use the Kotobukiya Chain Base which I set up with a AA battery pack for my Armored Core build.
I tossed around a few ideas, and ultimately decided to make a simple battery holder for a smaller button cell (the LR44). The battery holder is pretty rudimentary – just a couple bent strips of brass to hold tension on the cell and make contact, and a bit of styrene in between to insulate the two strips from one another. Since I didn’t have a fresh LR44 to test with, I shaped the holder around a dead one, and tested the wiring by making contact with another button cell.
Once the last flat coat was on, I had to deal with a few other finishing steps: removing the masks on the visor and assembling things mostly. I ran into a few problems here, as well: when I removed the eye visor masks, for instance, it peeled up some paint from the edges of the head near the visor as well. Probably the thing to do there is to use a knife to separate the paint on the mask from the paint on the head prior to removing the mask. The damage was pretty minimal, though, so I mostly left it alone. In reassembly a few areas gave me trouble: it was difficult to reattach the knee joints to the upper legs and plug the head cables into the head, because the layers of paint and clear had made the parts thicker. The snout developed a small crack on the left side when the left head cable was plugged back in, and there were paint scraping issues when reassembling the upper legs. The snout vent (which I had replaced with a separate part, to avoid having to deal with the kit’s awkward seam down the middle of the snout) posed similar problems when I put it back into the snout. Some of these issues have made me rethink the whole question of whether it’s better to separate parts for easier painting, or assemble them and then mask the color boundaries. Masking might really be better in the end if the alternative is a tight parts fit that results in cracked assemblies or scraped-off paint.
So I took care of all that stuff, strung the beads back onto their “power cable” springs, and put the thing together. I tried posing the left arm, and the shoulder armor ran into the torso and immediately scraped off a chunk of paint from the edge of the chest block… I spot-painted it and vowed to pose the thing as little as possible until all the paint had had a good long while to cure. I handled it with gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints in the still-soft clear coats, and I made it to Granitecon around 20 minutes before the entry deadline, filled out the forms, installed the battery I’d picked up on the way there, and the Zaku was open for business.
I didn’t feel like I was going to place this time – there was all this stuff that had gone wrong, and all this stuff I had wanted to do with the kit (such as weathering and scenery) that had to be left out. It felt rather minimalist and the fluorescent lighting in the exhibition hall was not flattering for the model’s green paint scheme. But I was glad to have got the model finished and showable. I don’t feel it’s my best work, but good enough that I was happy to show it. I would have been really unhappy if I hadn’t had something to show… Missing a deadline and having nothing to put on display just gets depressing.
I was curious about what would be likely to win, so I took a look at the other sci-fi entries. I wasn’t really in the mood to take a lot of photos, so I didn’t.
The first was a Star Wars speeder bike that had been modified to be a “Hoth Model” – it had a little “heating unit” added to it and some improved detail. Overall it was one of my favorites.
Next was a Vorlon fighter built from a resin kit. It seemed like a good build, but the “mottled” paint scheme came out pretty speckly. From speaking with the modeler it sounded like it was probably a problem of a damaged needle or nozzle in the airbrush.
Third was a landing pod from Lost in Space. This build had extensive lighting, but I felt the finish was a bit lacking in places. Specifically, the color boundaries tended to be a bit sloppy, and some parts were (I believe) still showing parting lines from the molding process.
Then there was an eggplane. I forgot what real plane it was designed to resemble. It seemed like a decent build but I honestly didn’t look at it too closely.
There was a Cylon Raider, Viper Mk.VII, and Galactica from the 2004 Galactica series – these builds all struck me as sort of a mixed bag, some good work and a few shortcomings or glaring flaws. The Galactica, for instance, had some seams showing (to be fair, with all that “ribbing” detail it would be a lot of work to really clean up the seam lines properly). The Viper had some nice work done on the cockpit, but the fighter’s exterior was done with lots of fairly crude weathering effects. (It looked like it had been painted silver, then ghost gray – and then hit with sandpaper to grind away the ghost gray and show the silver – except that in some places it was showing bare plastic instead.) The Viper was also mounted on a mirror display base, which I think was a poor presentation choice, since there was very little to see down there. The landing gear bays were open, and the mirror gave a clear view of how devoid of detail the bays were… I didn’t get too good a look at the Cylon Raider, but I was disappointed that it didn’t have the Larson Scanner eye.
Then there was a Cylon Raider from the original Battlestar Galactica. This struck me as a good build, possibly the best decal work in the category, etc. – but there were some seam issues around the fighter’s perimeter.
Finally, there was a TR-2 from Thunderbirds. It didn’t interest me much so I didn’t look too closely.
I was also curious to see builds in other categories. Specifically I wanted to see if anyone had done some really good decal work. Honestly, I wasn’t impressed with most of what I saw. There were a lot of silvered decals, uncut decals bridging panel lines, and decals that had noticeably different reflectivity than their surroundings. There were maybe one or two builds where I really had to make an effort to spot the decal edge. But honestly, I think the best decal work I found in the other categories was about on par with the portions of my Zaku that I hadn’t messed up. I was expecting some fine decal work in the auto category, at least, but in fact the auto guys seemed to have been the worst offenders in terms of decal issues. The tanks and ships weren’t much better.
As usual for Granitecon, it took a long while to wait for the judging results. The show was supposed to end at 4, but they didn’t start announcing results until around 4, and sci-fi is always one of the last ones they announce. In the end I was pleasantly surprised. I came in second. If I remember correctly, the Cylon Raider got third (don’t know which Cylon Raider, though.) and the Viper got first. Or maybe it was the other way around…? Anyway, it was a nice surprise. While I was pretty critical of the flaws in other entrants’ work, I’m very critical of my own work as well. It was a nice treat to have my work recognized, especially after the knock-down, drag-out battle that it took to get it ready to show.

That’s about it for the HG Zaku build update. Read on if you want to hear my rant about Bandai’s decals.
The first time this issue really caught my attention was when I bought the decal set for the Real Grade Gundam. The decal set reproduced the various white, gray, yellow, and metallic markings from the kit’s sticker sheet, but without reproducing the metallic effect. The decal sheet included all the kit’s little silver and bronze-colored markings, but not in metallic ink, and everything other than the white markings were half-toned.
To me, this made most of the decal sheet worthless. If I could have gotten a refund without sending the sheet back to Japan, I would have. What’s more, Gundam Decal sheets are packaged such that part of the sheet is obscured until you open the package – and sure enough, the worst half-toned markings, the ill-defined, speckled yellow/red or black/white markings were almost all in this “hidden” area. The real heartbreaker for me was that it didn’t have to be this way. If they’d left out the decals they weren’t going to do properly (especially the metallics), the rest of the markings (especially the white and gray markings) could have been done properly.
Basically, when mass-producing decals, you have the option of tailor-fitting your color selection to the decals you’re printing. This allows you to print almost any color with no half-toning. But there’s only so many different inks that you can include in a single decal sheet. So if you design a decal sheet with a limited color palette, you can print it without half-toning. Since most of these decals only have one or two colors, this is very much a viable option.
The main case in which half-toning is necessary is when the decal is meant to reproduce an image with subtle color variations, like a painting or photograph, anything with either a large number of colors or any kind of gradient. In that case the printer’s color set is likely to be a standard color set – primary colors plus black and white, or something similar to that. This means that if limited-color decals are on the same sheet as full-color decals, the limited-color decals will probably be half-toned as well.
In this project, a lot of the decals I found in my collection (and a couple that I actually used) suffered from this half-toning. I really feel this kind of quality issue is inexcusable. I am happy that Gundam Decals are at least available, but I hate buying a sheet or two only to receive it and find a bunch of markings I don’t want to use on anything.

Since most of the parts were primed and ready for paint, the first thing to do was decide on a color scheme. The Zakus in 08th MS Team had two distinct color schemes: in the first seven episodes they wore a deep olive and forest green scheme, similar to the colors of the Hi-Zack or Zaku Kai, and then from episode 8 onward all the Zakus had a much lighter color scheme, like a combination between a desert scheme and the light colors of the Zakus in the original anime. I always liked the deep greens of the earlier episodes, so for this build I decided to use them as the basis for my build. The two versions of this kit each have their own color guide, and neither one resembles either version of the colors on the show – so I was left to my own devices when choosing the colors. Using the box art as a guide, I experimented with different colors in my collection as well as some promising candidates I’d picked up at the hobby shop.

Once I’d chosen my colors, I started painting. This is a very exciting stage of the project, as it really starts to come together and all the work earlier on pays off. But it’s also a very delicate stage of the project, and a little haste here can ruin hours of work. For this project I decided I wanted to paint with Model Master enamels, a slow-drying variety of paint that I hadn’t used frequently since I started buying Mr. Color lacquers in 2001. The slow-drying nature of enamels is great for hand-painting (as the paint remains fluid long enough for brush strokes to settle, and for the modeler to apply the paint without it getting tacky and catching the brush on successive passes) but it requires patience. Mr. Color dries crazy-fast, and that can be a challenge in itself, but otherwise it’s a very forgiving paint. If nothing else, there’s very little you can do with it that would prevent it from curing. The solvent evaporates, and the paint is cured, that’s pretty much it. Enamels are a different story. The enamels have to go through a more complex chemical reaction to cure properly, and there’s various ways to mess it up. I have heard that painting a second layer too soon, or too late can impede paint curing, or that painting one layer too thick can impede curing. I did wind up with one part that appeared as though it wasn’t going to cure properly: I painted the shield and then decided I wanted to add a heat hawk mount to the back of it, as I did on the HGUC Zaku. I think the process of handling that part while I was altering it messed up the curing process of the paint, so I had to remove some of it and spot-prime and repaint the part.

The rest of the paint job, however, went off mostly without a hitch. The only other problem I had was some paint lifting when masking tape was removed. Apart from that things went very well.

The head wasn’t painted at this stage because of the way I’m approaching the monoeye on this project. In my previous Zaku build, the head was modified so the whole exterior could be lifted off to access the monoeye inside – that takes a fair bit of work, but when it’s done, it makes things very easy. For this build, I took a different: The monoeye was assembled and painted first, and then the head was assembled around it and painted. It’s simpler to do it this way but it takes more time, since the monoeye has to be fully painted before it even goes in the head.

First, however, I had to be really sure the monoeye was ready to go in there. I did a light test and discovered that it was leaking light all over. In retrospect I should have done more light-blocking prior to painting, using adhesive foil or something. I wound up caking on the paint pretty thick to block the light – I just remind myself that people probably aren’t going to be able to see that.

With the monoeye taken care of, it was time to deal with the head. The monoeye was inserted into the head along with the clear visor part, and the head was glued together – and then, since it didn’t line up quite right, it was sanded and the lines on the head rescribed.

Along with the now-assembled head there were a couple other parts involved in this second round of priming and painting: the heat hawk and bazooka were initially left out of the project, but once I had most of the parts painted, I decided to build them after all.

So at this point the whole kit has its colors on. There’s still a bunch of stuff to be done; gloss, decals, gloss, wash, flat and weathering – and if I use enamels for all those steps I can expect it to take a while. I had hoped to have the model ready for the model contest deadline at the end of July, but in mid-July I only had the first round of painting done, not including some of the masked colors – so it became clear to me that I had to give up on the deadline. Kind of unfortunate but I don’t feel too bad about it. It feels great to be in the home stretch toward finishing a new project.

For those who don’t know, the design of the Zaku includes a bunch of externally-routed “power cables”. In the earliest kits these were represented with solid plastic parts, but starting with the MG Zaku in 1995, kits began providing separate parts for each segment of the cable, allowing cables to flex when moved. Most 1:144 Zaku kits, including this HG Zaku, don’t include cable beads and simply use the simpler solid parts for each cable – but early on in this project I replaced the leg and waist cables with aftermarket beads strung on springs. In the process of finally reaching the painting stage on this project, I had to, at last, deal with the gate marks left over when I cut the beads off their runner. A lot of Gundam modelers seem to hate Zaku kits because of the beads. Either they wind up losing beads or lose patience with cleaning up individual beads one at a time.

Guys, it’s really not that hard. :) The typical method, and the one I’ve used in this project, is to take the beads off their springs and string them onto a solid rod (with tape wrapped around it, to help keep the beads from sliding off). Then all the beads can be sanded at once – and then painted together as well.

I’ve tried to keep modifications to this kit pretty minimal, but a while back I decided that there was an issue with the side skirts I couldn’t let go: basically they’re supposed to have a little circular detail scribed in to the front and rear faces… But it’s not molded properly because the part is molded from the side. Lovely as it’d be to have this detail slide-molded in, it’s a simple enough thing to fix if you’ve got the supplies for it… I drilled out the holes, filled ‘em with epoxy putty, then pressed in a “recessed circle” detail with a piece of metal pipe.

The head assembly on this kit is complicated a bit by the fact that I’ve replaced the eye and the head internals – as a result, it must remain in a partially-assembled state until the internal parts are painted and ready for installation. To simplify the process of completing the assembly (and, hopefully, improve the looks of the finished model as well) I decided to replace the “snout vent”. The kit’s “snout” has a molded-in vent, with a seam line running straight down the middle of it. On earlier builds I’ve patched this up with putty, this time around I decided to carve the area out and replace it with a piece of textured styrene.

With all the structural work I did on this kit, it was a safe bet that, no matter how carefully the work proceeded, the first primer coat would show some defects. Sure enough, I ran into a couple problem areas. The one pictured is one of the feet: I didn’t get the contours at the front of the foot aligned quite right, so I had to trim and sand them down. In the case of this foot, the seam still didn’t line up properly, so after priming I had to shave it down, resand, and reprime.

There weren’t too many issues like this, I think it was just this and a few spots on the shield.

It feels good to be in the painting stage. It’s kind of a rare thing for me since I put so much emphasis on the structrual parts of the build and don’t always finish things. I’m eager to see how this one looks when it’s finished, and with a primer coat on I feel like I’m almost there.

When I started on this build, the first thing I worked on was the legs. I knew that I would want to address the leg mobility issues. The legs on the stock kit really can do very little: the knee joint has reasonable poseability but it does no good since the hip and ankle joints don’t have clearance to move much at all. I’d dealt with the hip joint issue in my first HG Zaku build, and I’d had a lot of success in recent Zaku projects increasing the mobility of the ankles using a joint system similar to that used in kits like the MG Hi-Zack or HGUC Zaku I: the ankle joint is a fairly simple ball joint in the foot – but it can swing out of the foot via a hinge installed near the front of the foot, giving the ankle joint more clearance when it’s needed.

To give the hips more clearance, I cut the plastic opening for the ball joint wider to allow more range of motion at the hip, and to give the legs more room to move, I removed the original peg system holding the front skirt armor in place and mounted the skirts with springs to allow them to move more freely.

I also spent a bit of time to fix up the panels on the back of the legs: the panel parts peg into the spaces on the back of the leg sideways, but they don’t fit quite right… It’s as though they don’t slide in far enough, and so instead of rising above the surface of the leg, it’s more like the panels are kind of unnaturally offset sideways. I went for a very simple fix here, just trimmed the parts so they could slide in further. A more complete fix would involve a more serious effort to putty in the gaps and reshape the edges of the panels to make them look right

The next modification I did was to the shoulder joint: I cut out the original shoulder peg and added a simple polycap system to allow the shoulder to swing forward for two-handed weapon poses.

I mentioned before that the shape of the shoulder armor on this kit is classically considered one of its more annoying flaws… I corrected that back in my first HG Zaku build by cutting most of the shoulder armor away and replacing its curved dome with an epoxy-reinforced styrene part I’d formed around a spherical wooden ball. This time around I’ve decided to stick with the HG Zaku shoulder’s original, generally unpopular shape. Although this build is about fixing the HG Zaku’s flaws, it’s also about appreciating the HG Zaku more or less for what it is. So the only real modifications I’ve done to the shoulder armor were to sand down the middle spike to give it a more regular conical shape, and to carve out the recessed thruster vents, which were represented with blank rectangles on the original kit.

The presence of exposed polycaps was a common problem with the HG and non-grade kits of the mid-1990s: the exposed polycaps would not take paint well and betrayed the toyish nature of the model. It wasn’t until the HGUC line that kits started to regularly cover polycaps. In the case of the HG Zaku’s elbow joints, the exposed area around the elbow polycap is pretty conspicuous. As with my earlier HG Zaku project, I solved the problem by creating joint covers from styrene tubing, similar to the joint covers on the MG Zaku. This time around I didn’t add any additional detail to the joint covers, they’re just blank cylinders.

Various parts of the kit have some pretty serious parts-alignment issues. Sadly the MG Zaku suffers from this as well. To deal with it, I cut off the snap-fit pegs so I could align parts more freely, then I glued the assemblies together and sanded them smooth.

The upper arm swivel joint on this kit is not polycapped, it’s a plastic-on-plastic joint. Initially I planned to leave this as-is, however when I got to actually gluing things together I had trouble getting the right tension on that joint – it would either seize up or just go floppy. So I decided a quick polycap rejointing was in order. It’s an easy mod, but I always have trouble getting the alignment of the peg right. This time was no exception. The arm looks fine when the arm’s in a neutral pose, but when you turn it, gaps appear. The white disc at the bottom of the shoulder block helps to mitigate this: when the gap appears the disc shows through, so the gap is less conspicuous.

Like most Gundam kits, the HG Zaku’s hands are pretty crappy. They’re pretty boxy and instead of a handheld item being gripped by the fingers and pressed against the palm, the handheld item instead slots into an opening in the hand beneath the palm. That’s just weird, and cheap-looking. Normally I’d solve a problem like this with aftermarket hands, either B-Club stuff or Kotobukiya or whatever. This time I decided to go for kind of a minimalist route: hacking up the kit hands and rearranging them into something a little more hand-shaped. Basically I cut the thumbs and palms off, separating them from the fingers, and glued the palms in place at the opening where the hand grips a weapon, and reattached the thumbs, setting them at an angle. The result isn’t as good as aftermarket hands but it took very little time to do and I think the effect is reasonably good.

The shield also required some attention: the back side of the shield is hollow, so I filled the hollow space and added detail similar to that of the MG Zaku’s shield. I also replaced the kit shield’s simple peg-joint with a ball joint stuck into a sort of cylindrical mish-mash of option parts. With the way the ball joint is sunk into the shoulder block, it makes the connection between the shoulder and shield look more substantial than it would if it were just a ball-joint peg showing.

The main thrusters of the backpack received a bit of attention as well: on the stock thrusters the deepest recesses of the thruster bell are just a flat face with a little hole in the middle. I dealt with this on my old build by cutting a bit of styrene tubing to make little “inner nozzles”. I didn’t have any reasonably-sized tubing handy, so this time I used aftermarket parts to detail the inside of the thruster bells.

I feel that the head is always an important focal point of a mecha model: various other parts could be oddly-shaped or vaguely-detailed, but the head, the face is something the viewers connect with intuitively… So it’s always disappointing when kits have poor detail there. (Even the PG Zaku has lousy detail around the eye!) Monoeyes are almost always a problem, Bandai usually just gives us a flat visor and a sticker for the camera assembly itself. Whenever possible I prefer to make the monoeye lit, poseable, and detailed. If I can’t do all three I try for at least two. I’ve used some fairly convoluted, needlessly complicated methods of making a monoeye in the past (for instance, with my HGUC Zaku project I completed last year) – this time around the approach I’m taking is very simple, and very similar to what I did in my build in 2001. The Monoeye is supposed to be a big camera lens assembly that travels around the head on a system of rails. It’s hard to make it actually work like that, so the simple cop-out is to make the “rails” circular, instead of following the U-shaped contour of the eye visor, and have them rotate with the eye instead of remaining stationary. Realistically, the viewer isn’t going to be able to see much in there anyway… But the important thing is that there’s something to see.

To make the clear visor, I used my old Mattel Vacuform. I bought this back sometime in 2000 or 2001 for model work. It’s a hand-pumped toy vacuum-forming machine, made back in the days where you could put a small electric hot-plate into something and sell it in the toy aisle. If you’re thinking of doing any vacuum-forming yourself I’d really recommend just building a vacuum-forming machine rather than hunting down one of these things on ebay. But it has served me well over the years, and the fact that it’s so self-contained is pretty handy. I used the same machine when I made the visor for the HG Zaku project in 2001, of course, and with a similar set-up. The tough bit is that it’s very hard to get the vacuum-formed plastic to conform to the whole kit visor part. It does the top end fine, but toward the bottom end the plastic is being pulled sideways by surrounding plastic, and it tends to fold into vanes perpendicular to the surface of the part rather than settling right down. Fortunately, in the case of Zaku eye visors, a little trimming usually fixes it right up.

There’s a few other things I did that I’m not covering in any kind of depth here: for instance, you may have noticed that I replaced the leg and waist cables with beads-on-springs (“Kotobukiya Mobile Pipe”) – pretty standard stuff, really. The main thing I did differently this time around was I cut some of the beads to fit them around corners better. I’m not sure at this point if I’ll be replacing the head-cables with beads.

At this point the project is just about ready for primer – which no doubt will turn up a bunch of stuff I’ll have to fix before proceeding. But most of the major structural stuff is done – the joint mods as well as most of the seam work. It’s been a fun project so far – kind of nostalgic in a way since the HG Zaku project was such a big deal for me back in my early days in the hobby, and also just fun since I can approach this project in such a relaxed way. I’m looking forward to finishing it up.

• It’s a nice kit, so I should enjoy it for what it is.

• Conversions are inherently bad because the modeler tends to do what is convenient to do with the base kit, rather than what is correct.
• So little of the base kit will actually be used in the conversion that I may as well just scratch-build the whole thing and forget the conversion.
• I was going to do this thing as a quick, fun project, and a conversion will make it a long, complicated project.
• It will distract me from working on other projects, like the Zaku Kai.

…And so on. All good reasons. But not good enough.

In the end it comes down to one simple thing: I want to build a Rick Dom II. It’s a design that keeps the outrageous flare and bulk of the original Dom, but wears it much better. The arms, chest, and head are simply gorgeous. (The same parts on the base kit, on the other hand, are incredibly bland. The head in particular just looks like a lump.) The weapons are very nicely designed as well. It’s kind of a rare set of circumstances that led to me getting this kit in the first place. It’s unlikely I’ll ever get another. So the way I figure it, if a bunch of parts of this kit go to waste, that’s OK: I’m still getting a strong inner frame that can bear the weight of the armor I’ll be putting on it, and perhaps most importantly – I wouldn’t have bothered making a Rick Dom II in 1:60 scale if I hadn’t gotten the Glorious Series Rick Dom. If the kit doesn’t provide a lot of physical parts to the finished model, it will at least provide inspiration.

So first up was to sculpt the arms… Those lovely, lovely arms… First, I stripped the kit parts down to the spindly inner frame. I built the new elbow joint cover from a few pieces of plastic and metal tubing. Then I cut pieces of approximately the right shape from floral foam, fitted them to the frame, and carved them to the shape I wanted. This bit took lots of trial and error. Finally, when I had a part I think would work out well, I rolled out some epoxy putty and laid it over the floral foam to create the part. Also around this time I made a 1:60 scale printout of the Rick Dom II line art, which I’ll be using to establish measurements for parts I build.

Unfortunately I wasn’t entirely happy with the first sculpt, there were perhaps too many problems with the use of floral foam as a base. It was very hard to get things symmetrical. So for the inner half of the forearm I tried again: this time I built up the shape out of styrene sheet, building it kind of blocky and making it fit tightly around the frame – then I used epoxy putty to fill out the curves. I then used this new part as a reference to refine the outer half of the forearm. All the parts went through a bunch of refinement work, carving, checking, bulking things up again with more putty, and so on until it started to reach a state I was happy with.

It’s not quite there yet, certain parts of the arm are just sort of wrong – but I like the direction this is going.

I drew up plans for a new bazooka – but without the large-size plastic tubing on hand to actually build it, it’s just plans for now. There are some scaling issues I need to work out: older model representations of the weapon portray it as being relatively small, about 15m in length, while newer versions pumped it up to about 18m long. Ultimately I’ll just have to see which size I think looks better…

Finally, I started work on the new lower legs for the Zwei. For this part, instead of working from the line art, I decided to use the leg from the original 1:144 scale Rick Dom II and scale it up. I think that old kit part is beautifully executed, so I think it’s worth copying. I transferred the front- and side-view plans for the leg to styrene, cut it out, and glued it together – then filled in with clay and rolled out a 3mm thick sheet of epoxy putty to create the surface of the part. It was time consuming but pretty easy. I think the hard part is going to be building a second one that matches the first.

So that’s it so far. The project’s in a somewhat awkward stage since the Dom is wearing a bunch of Zwei parts but most of the kit is still quite stock. That’s never a good effect in my opinion. The hands in particular are a problem: the Zwei has smaller hands, so the kit-stock hands dwarf the new forearms and mess up the overall look. All these things will be remedied sooner or later.

I think not a lot of Gundam fans appreciate this kit. It was the very first Zaku kit, released in 1980, shortly after the Gundam kits. It’s got kind of an awkward look, in my opinion – the broad, untapered chest right over the “tight miniskirt”, the fat head and kind of cheap-looking spike armor, the massive arms with tiny wrists… It’s got some appeal because of its similarity to the anime look, but I don’t think it pulls it off particularly well. However, one thing that’s pretty unique about the kit is the shape of the lower leg. It’s probably got the least bulky lower leg of any Zaku kit. The legs of almost all Zaku kits from the MSV line onward are massive by comparison. Even the legs of the 1:100 Zaku are a little bit bulkier due to asymmetry. But the 1:144 Zaku has sleek, symmetrical lower legs – fairly skinny (for a Zaku) but also kind of stumpy-looking – a look very typical of the anime. I think it could be fun to do a true straight build of this kit, but at present I’m more interested in tweaking it, trying to improve its look without changing it too much.

Leg Work

Much of my work on the legs follows avudabi’s example. The feet were made a couple millimeter narrower and shorter so they wouldn’t overwhelm the lower legs so much. The upper leg was made a couple millimeters wider (but not thicker, front-to-back, as in avudabi’s build). I want my build to be suitable for animation, so I also added a polycap joint system in the ankles, knees, and hips. The knee joints were parts that I created and recast in resin.

Chest Work

As in avudabi’s build I tapered the chest, to make it narrower at the top. This is often a good effect on older kits: taking the axis of the shoulder pegs off the horizontal axis can be a nice improvement. However, the broad-chested look of the kit is also very typical of the anime, so I had considered possibly keeping it. I may do that on another build… For this one I felt it’d be better to go with the taper. I tried to keep the change fairly minor: I don’t really want it to be too overt of a change.

Head Work

Avudabi’s build took a totally different direction with the head than mine is: in his, the eye visor was made taller in front, like he was giving it a force-perspective effect of looking up at the underside of the top edge of the visor when you’re seeing it straight-on… Or like the Zaku is just really worried. I decided instead to get rid of an aspect of the look of the head that was bothering me. The head on this kit is, discounting the snout, about as wide as it is long. It has a somewhat circular footprint, as opposed to the more egg-shaped footprint of more recent Zaku heads. From the front I feel like the face overwhelms the snout, so I took somewhere between 1-2mm of width out of the head to see the effect. I think it worked out rather well.

I’ve also been working on the skirt armors: with the added width of the legs, and the fact that I want the legs to be able to move, the hips had to be a fair bit wider. The skirts were also widened in avudabi’s build but for more purely aesthetic reasons, I think. Since I’m going for mobility here, I needed to make the skirts movable, which also means I had to add some structural support: in the kit, the skirt armors are the only think that connects the chest to the hips.

One of the frustrating things I’ve experienced working with this kit is breakage. Parts crack, it happens a lot actually. I think the parts are just a bit thin in places or something. I’ve found super glue to be very valuable in dealing with this problem.