Tonight I made the left lower leg narrower by 2mm (but made the knee guard .5mm wider), trimmed down the left shoulder armor, and reduced the length of the fringe at the base of the helmet by about 1mm. The shoulder armor change was something I decided on a while back: after looking at the […]

I cut the head apart – took the whole beard off the face and replaced it with Kotobukiya parts and Aves, cut the top of the helmet off and made it narrower and shorter (vertically). This all took a couple hours but I feel like it’s already made a big difference in the appearance of […]

I started a second version of the backpack based on the new construction plans: however, careless work introduced a few visible errors, so I decided to start again, and be more careful in the new attempt. Particularly, I want to be very sure that matching parts for the left and right sides match as closely […]

I’ve been doing more work on this project, hollowing out shallow-molded details like the open end of the grenade launcher barrel and starting the long road of assembly and cleanup work needed to get this thing ready to paint. Right now I’ve started with the weapons: the GAST rifle, the grenade launcher, the missile interceptors, […]

There were some issues with my previous attempt at building the backpack: some angles weren’t quite correct, some of the places where plates were joined inside the backpack were kind of sloppy (featuring gaps and, later, excessive filler) so I decided to start over using what I learned about box joins vs. mitre joins when […]

I decided early on that I wanted this kit to have LED lights, and so I’ve added some to the head already and am planning to add some to the thrusters. (The tough part of adding LEDs to the thrusters is that the thrusters are too shallow… So I had to hollow them out a […]

After earlier work I decided that the snout of the head part looked crooked. To solve the problem I split the head in half down the middle, to make it easier to take measurements relative to the center line. This was relatively easy because the part was built with a thin styrene plate on the […]

The third version of the chest block part had a few problems: in particular it was prone to warping and it didn’t have the holes on the bottom of the chest block drilled out, or even marked. As a result I decided to remake the chest block part from thicker stock, and drill out the […]

After constructing the second version of the chest block, I examined my design and decided that the chest block would look better if it were less tall vertically – so I determined that I would have to build another one again. Due to a problem with my installation of Blender I was unable to use […]

Since the last update, the head has been through a few stages of refinement, in which the head was bulked up with poly putty and sanded down again. The head still needs work (in particular, I think the back end of it is a bit lopsided) but I am hoping a couple more refinement passes […]