Heh, nice. (day 69)

Although there’s no shortage of things that needs to be done on this project, sometimes it’s still hard to figure out what to do when I sit down to work on it. Today I decided to work on the thruster openings on the hips and the snout.


Today’s plan was to add detail to the hips and snout: the hips are supposed to have two recessed thruster ports near the bottom of the hips, and the inside of the snout is supposed to have some kind of vent inside it.

Cutting the recessed areas for the hip thrusters was a challenge: Portions of the inside of the hip joint are polyester putty, other portions are styrene plate. It’s all pretty hard at this point, it doesn’t cut easily and it’s hard to access.. Plus my chisels need to be sharpened. This whole task would have been completely unnecessary as well, if I’d simply incorporated the hollow areas into the part when I built it in the first place. Such is life. I cut the openings about 2mm deep and added styrene to the perimeter. The styrene on the perimeter helps give the interior a smooth look, and it extends to the exterior of the part, where it will serve as a starting point for the raised bevel around the opening.

I decided the easiest way to add the snout detail would be to put some epoxy putty into the snout and sculpt it to shape with a small screwdriver. With the small size of this detail it’s better to sculpt it than to try to build it from styrene sheet.