Most of the parts are painted now and just awaiting clear coating. The rifle had been painted navy blue – in past projects I’ve had a tendency to paint rifles and such in a single (usually metallic or grayish) color – for this project I decided I wanted to put a little more into it, […]

I’ve continued the work on replacing the back-side detail of the shield. This time, I decided to follow a suggestion from “Cecil” on the Gundamofficial forums, and build the outlines of the raised areas with styrene strips, and fill in between with polyester putty. The advantage of this approach are that I can build straight […]

With the outer surfaces of the shield more or less finished, I turned my attention to the inner surfaces. To give the back surface a good work surface I cut out some 25mm wide styrene rectangles to fit inside the back of the shield. I added some .5mm strips to the inside of the shield […]

The MG and PG Zaku kits all have very slender shields. The MG Zaku shield is about 82mm long and 22mm wide: about a 4:1 length:width ratio. The 08th MS Team HG Zaku kit, on the other hand, has a shield length of 50mm and a width of 20mm: a 5:2 ratio. It’s not as […]

Painting white in the Max Watanabe style basically means you first paint the parts a dark gray (I used Mr. Color Navy Blue – my favorite “black” for most purposes) and then paint them white again, starting at the center of the panel and moving outward to the edges. Because it takes so much white […]

I recast the kit-supplied wings, and then after a long time trying to clean up the feathers on the casts, realized that the originals were crap. So I built new feathers, recast those, and attached them to the cast wings.

After the my initial return to this project, the model looked like this: Beam Rifle:The kit includes parts to build the beam rifle as a single, twin beam rifle. The halves can be separated, but building them as two separate rifles requires additional work: so I made some changes. V-Fin: I rebuilt the V-Fin completely […]