MP Guncannon – leg, foot, and wrist work…

So, work continues on the MP Guncannon… Since last time I’ve replaced the wrist joint with one that looks better, and I’ve begun the work broadening the feet and shortening the lower legs…

There’s a couple reasons I wanted to replace the wrist joint. The first reason is common to pretty much all robot kits – the forearm is usually a self-contained part, and the hand connects to the forearm with a ball joint… This results in an arm that doesn’t look very integrated at all – forearm and hand are connected by a tiny little peg. Additionally, I wanted the hand to be more recessed into the forearm, because that’s part of the look of the MP Guncannon…

For this build what I’ve done is hollowed out a portion of the forearm and installed a polycap deep in there – then I attached a Yellow Submarine ball joint to the hand itself – but in the reverse orientation of how the wrist ball joint usually works: instead of seeing the strut connecting the ball part of the joint to the hand, they’ll see the back of the ball joint socket. This gives the wrist and forearm a much more coherent look in my opinion…

I’ve taken the next couple of steps in improving the legs and feet: I cut up the feet to add varying amounts of width to different parts of the foot – I’m going to be adding height to the sole of the foot as well, and changing the angles of some surfaces as well – so the pronounced staircase effect seen now from the different amounts of added width will be diminished in later steps…

I also took my first crack at shortening the lower leg, by removing material from the bottom end. The idea is that I don’t just want the leg shorter, I also want to correct the leg’s taper at the same time, making it broadest at the base (by a small margin) as opposed to the stock kit part, which is broadest in the middle. In later steps I’ll clean up the contour of the end of the leg and add material to make the bottom end of the lower leg just a little bit wider than it is now… Apart from looking better in my opinion, this is also important if I want the ankle joing to be able to move, now that I’ve widened the foot… At this point I think you can really see the final look of the part starting to take shape.

I took a couple comparison shots with the old HGUC Guncannon showing the HGUC Guncannon stock kit hands compared to the Kotobukiya hands I’m using on the MP Guncannon…