Head Cables, Backpack Work, etc.

Since the last WIP update I’ve mostly been working on the backpack. The extra care taken this time through has really paid off, and the backpack part is nearly complete. I’ve mounted it to the chest block using styrene rods and polycaps: this makes it a lot easier to establish correct position and alignment for the chest parts and also a lot easier to take photos of the model as it currently stands.

Tonight I spent a bunch of time on the head: refining the cut of the eye visor, checking the halves against each other and re-joining them, trying to get the wall thickness of the part thin enough and more uniform, and adding the parts that host the ends of the power cables on the head. This all was a bit difficult since the head part as it is is a bit fragile, at least when put under stress (like being gripped while I sand or carve part of it down). The head came apart at the seams a few times and once or twice it came apart in other places, too. Rejoining the broken head parts gave me the opportunity to make the alignment better – but also the risk of making it worse, too.

I think this part, due to its shape and the way I made it, is going to be difficult to get really precise. The whole thing is one big compound curve, for starters, and the cross-section guides I used when sculpting it initially weren’t especially straight – which means that I periodically make the mistake of looking at the line where that guide was, expecting it to be a horizontal line, only it’s not. There’s no specific frame of reference for measuring what’s correct and what isn’t. If I can’t find a way to deal with this problem I may need to start over. Hopefully it won’t come to that.

I scrounged up some 1.5mm spring, magnet wire, and Kotobukiya Mobile Pipe to see how the head would look with its power cables attached: