To Be Continued (day 100)

I haven’t made much progress or posted any updates in the final 10 days of the challenge – until this one at least. I did some more work on mounting polycaps in the upper leg and, in recognition of the end of the 100 day challenge, I put together as much of the model as I could and took some photos – not an easy thing at this stage since a lot of important joints and structures aren’t built yet (like the waist-to-hips connection, the ankle joint, etc.) and I haven’t made enough headway with the right leg to include it at this time.


The new work since last time is mostly in the upper leg, where I added more epoxy putty on the inside to create slots for polycaps to connect to the hip and knee joints. I also spent some time making the mating surface between the two halves more planar. It’s a bit unfortunate that I didn’t plan for that earlier on, but it’ll be alright, the two legs will match up well enough in the end.

I wanted to get an update posted for day 100, at least, but as I started to run out of time I really didn’t know what I could take on. In the end I decided to make today’s post more of a checkpoint. A lot has changed in the project since the last time I put it all together – and while it’s not really progress on the project itself it does help to contextualize everything I’ve been doing.

Finally, I decided to do a quick comparison with Bandai’s RE/100 Zaku Kai. I’m always a bit hesitant to do comparisons like this because I don’t feel like Bandai’s kit ought to be considered the standard by which my build is measured. Quite frankly I don’t think it even deserves to share the same stage with my build. But some people might wonder why I even build my Zaku Kai when the RE/100 kit exists, or might see my work and not know how the two models differ. And in many ways, they actually look very similar. Personally I think the overall impact of my model is a lot better, but I can see how someone might think there’s not much difference. So I’m not sure if this comparison is useful but I thought I’d provide it anyway.

With that, the 100 day challenge comes to a close. I posted updates on 45 out of the 100 days: not great, really. And somewhere around the halfway mark I think I started to get fatigued, and instead of 4 or more updates a week I tended to get 1 or 2. And at this point I am ready for a bit of a break, no question. But this exercise has been great for getting me working on the project again, dealing with it on a regular basis, and building a better understanding of what still needs to be done. I didn’t expect to finish this build within the 100 days, and, of course, I didn’t. But I think I could manage it by the end of the year, so I will be returning to the project within the next month or two.