More Old Zaku

My quest continues to execute a quality build and the best “I take giant cartoon robots too seriously” paintjob on this, the very first Zaku kit…
(edit): Actually I don’t know for sure when the various early Gundam kits were released – I had thought the 1:100 Zaku came before the 1:144… but according to this, the 1:144 Zaku came out before the 1:100 version. Makes sense, I guess…

At this point I’m most of the way through the basic painting stage. All the basic colors are on, the only coloring left to do is weathering. Since I was going for “Real Type” with this build the plan was to do a paint chipping effect. I couldn’t find the hairspray I needed, however, so I went for a salt-based effect instead. This was my first try at that and I think it could have gone better. Also, I didn’t want the Zaku to be all rusted up, and nor did I want bare metal showing all over… So for this build what shows through in the “paint chipped” areas is another coat of green. I guess the Zeons painted the Zaku in something along the lines of the classic color scheme, then decided to go for a more low-visibility look and painted over, but it got all chipped up somehow. <shrug> I’m not entirely happy with how the whole thing went down, for a dozen different reasons – but I’ve decided to go with it instead of repainting the parts. Hopefully it’ll look a bit more natural when I’ve got the markings on.

Oh, and would you believe it? When I took the model off the painting stand so I could assemble it and get a feel for how the paint chipping looks – I broke the damn hip peg! The hip pegs on this kit are jointed – each hip has a hip peg, which itself sits on a rod that acts as an axis, so the leg gets a little lateral movement. But as you can imagine a structure like that isn’t going to be especially rugged… When I was assembling this thing I debated whether to rejoint the hips with option parts – I decided against it ’cause I didn’t want to go overboard with extra work on this project… But as it turns out, I probably would have come out ahead if I’d just done the joint mod back then, ’cause my options for repairing the peg are quire limited. My plan right now is to not fix it – just carefully stick the leg in there on what’s left of the peg, and rely on the immobility of the leg to keep the hip peg from coming off its axis…

This build is for the MMC Old Kits Contest – at this point there’s one day left for the original deadline, in which time I’d need to apply decals, flatcoat, and various additional weathering steps to get the finished model I’m after. I think I could still hit the original deadline – and I’d like to, so I can move on to other things – but since the deadline has been extended I may take my time a bit more, make sure I do things right. I guess I’ll start with the decals tomorrow and see how it goes.