Today I mostly worked on refining the head interior. I’m trying to work out how it should attach to the body, but I also need to work out some kind of keying system so the helmet can stay securely attached to it… Tonight’s work is mostly in preparation for those steps, getting the head interior […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Since the last update, the head has been through a few stages of refinement, in which the head was bulked up with poly putty and sanded down again. The head still needs work (in particular, I think the back end of it is a bit lopsided) but I am hoping a couple more refinement passes […]

Pressing onward: I drew out the bottom-view of the head so I could create a styrene template from it and glue it to the bottom of the head work-in-progress. This makes it easier to establish the contour and edge of the bottom of the head and also to create the snout (and to ensure that […]

Earlier this week I created “Head Ortho Rough #2”, another 1:50 scale drawing of the Zaku Kai head, which would actually be the one I’d build from. I drew in 1:50 scale to improve the precision of the drawing: to further improve its precision, I scaled it down and mirror-imaged it on the computer, then […]