Since doing the basic form for the shoulder armor I’ve spent a bit of time refining the two parts – matching them relative to each other, correcting some minor mistakes I made in the templates, etc. In the mean time I’ve also begun work on the spike for the shoulder armor – I’ll be building […]

I haven’t been getting enough done on this project lately, so I started work on a new part: the shoulder armor for the left arm. I started by using the Blender model to create five cross-sections of the part – I then transferred these cross-sections to styrene, cut them out and assembled them, and filled […]

I had been updating my previous HGUC Zaku Kai post with different images as I found them – but I thought for this one I’d start with a clean slate… New, larger images of the fully colored HGUC Zaku Kai are now available… I’ve cooled to this new kit quite a bit over the last […]

I just found out last night that Bandai is finally releasing a HGUC Zaku Kai. This is exciting news but of course it’s a little scary, too, ’cause I don’t know what this will ultimately mean for my Zaku project, if I might lose my motivation or something as a result of this… But in […]

Lately I’ve been working on the design of the belly part of the Zaku, and thinking about how I can improve the model’s posability a bit. Part of me feels like this is a waste of time – better to make the model look good than to make it posable, and poor posability can be […]

Since the last WIP update I’ve mostly been working on the backpack. The extra care taken this time through has really paid off, and the backpack part is nearly complete. I’ve mounted it to the chest block using styrene rods and polycaps: this makes it a lot easier to establish correct position and alignment for […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]