I just realized, at this point I am one-third of the way through the hundred day challenge. I’ve known from early on there was a real chance that, at the pace I was establishing, I probably wouldn’t finish the whole build in the hundred days, but being a full third of the way through the challenge does kind of put things in perspective.
Today I did more detail work on the chest block. I decided the ridges on the front of the chest were too high, so I relocated them, and I added the similar ridged details on the sides of the chest block, and on the sides of the backpack.

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Tonight I didn’t really know what to work on. There’s no shortage of things to work on, of course, but picking one and moving forward with it in a meaningful way can require some thought. I decided to spend tonight adding a bit of detail to the chest block. It’s relatively simple work, the main thing about it is it requires a bit of care to get it right.

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Not a lot to show today as I spent a fair bit of time on some more-or-less dead ends. I spent some time checking the alighment of the backpack and came to the conclusion that, yeah, it’s probably a little bit off but its mounting posts seem to be in the right place so maybe it’s not a problem. I did various alignment checks on the chest block and concluded that probably nothing is far enough off to be a problem. Apart from that I did some more work on the monoeye mechanism, adding a round mold part to serve as the lens housing, adding styrene strips around the cylinder to look like “rails” for the monoeye to travel on… It’s not a lot but it’s progress.

With the basic shape for the head interior done I’ve started work on the monoeye. I do something like this for virtually every Zaku I ever build, though this time is a little different since I’m also thinking about how to make it in a way that I can cast copies in resin. I also did a bit of refinement work on the cockpit hatch, as it appeared to be off-center.

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Yeaterday was the first in-person meeting of my local model club since the Before-Times (the long-long-ago) – I spent most of my time there (and later, at home, in the evening) working on the new Hasegawa Regult. As a long-time Macross fan it’s very welcome to see Hasegawa finally making this kit, and overall I think they did a great job with it. So, no Zaku progress for day 27.
Tonight I worked on the interior for the Zaku’s head. This is something I do with virtually any Zaku build these days: I build out the interior space and build up the track system for the monoeye. This provides a little bit of detail and visual interest (which Bandai often neglects in their kits) – but for this scratch build, it provides other benefits as well.

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Continuing my effort to get the torso closer to its final form, I took a crack at building the cockpit hatch, and cut the notch in the bottom end of the canopy.

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It can be a bit hard to start a new piece of work. Lately I’ve been thinking that I want to focus on getting the torso of the Zaku looking a lot closer to finished – that way when I show a piece of work, I can show it in context of at least some recognizable portion of the rest of the robot. In the end I didn’t get much done tonight, but I got a decent start on the canopy for the cockpit hatch.

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Not the most productive session maybe, but progress is progress. I did some more work on the head, trying to improve the new snout as well as the cable receiver on the back of the head. Unfortunately this old head sculpt does seem to have some symmetry problems and it hasn’t got a clearly-defined centerline, either, which makes locating things properly kind of difficult.
After the head work, I busted out the sandpaper to bevel the edges on the chest block. This is one of those tasks that I’d always put off for various reasons – like working with the part before beveling it gives you a better read on the shape of the part, things like that. There was always the assumption that at some point I’d be done with whatever else I needed to do with the chest block while it was still all blocky, and be ready to give it the soft curves it’s supposed to have on those edges. I guess that day is today. Sometimes this 100-day challenge is all about just diving in and trying things, even if sometimes that gets me in trouble.

The work on the new sculpt of the shoulder pauldron has consumed the majority of my time since I started this challenge. There’s still work to be done on it, and unresolved problems with it, but I need a change of pace. So tonight I gave the pauldron one more pass (removing the front spike again, realigning it, and setting it in place with CA glue again) and a fresh layer of epoxy putty to integrate the front spike again… And then moved on to working on the head.

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Last time around I identified an alignment problem with the spikes on the shoulder pauldron part. Prior to that discovery, while the part is still in rough shape, I felt I was on the right track to get it where it needed to be. However finding the alignment problem left me feeling I needed to back up a step or two to correct the problem. Unfortunately, to do so at this point is a little complicated.

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