Project: MS-07B3 Gouf Custom Part #2

War is hell. It is an old line, and a true one. For machines they bear the scars of war in the weathering of their bodies. The Gouf custom went through a couple levels of hell itself in the one episode it appears in. Just from the collection of screen caps to the side there you can see it took some beating, got dirty, and took some damage to it. So what kind of weathering am I going to try to do on the kit?

Well I’m going to try and go for an ‘inspired by the anime’ sort of approach, but not necessarily  a ‘dictated by the anime’ approach. What do I mean? Well the Gouf will certainly have dust and dirt build up, something that can be seen from the anime. It moved through a lot of dirt and debris, kicked up dust and sand and concrete dust and the like. So going to try and add various types of dust effect to it.

There are several times where the Gouf is being shot at and Norris is using the shield… well as a shield. In real life the shield would be showing damage from these sorts of attacks. The paint would be chipped, the shield would be beginning to show wear and year, possibly even cracking some. Am I going to try and copy the exact damage that would have been inflicted on the shield based on the anime? No. Gun shots to the shield. Okay that is good enough. Needing to try and map out each bullet mark based on the location of the origin of the shop, recording its trajectory as it impacts the shield and figuring out the contour of the shield to determine the extent of the damage to it… yeah, not so much.

At one point in the anime the Gouf attacked a GunTank artillery unit, using it’s sword to destroy the crew compartment. In the process it was sprayed by a lot of oil and hydraulic fluid in a scene I feel was intended to be reminiscent of several movies where the character stabbed another character and was sprayed by the blood. While very gritty and characterful, I’m not sure I’m going to emulate that particular bit of weathering.

In the Anime the Gouf was able to launch itself into the air using the thrusters on its back. While the viability of this could be debated, the fact is such a jet propulsion on the back of the mobile will leave marks on its back arm and the back of the legs. Particles will be kicked about scratching paint and discoloring the metal. The heat of the jet engine will cause heat distortion on the back of the skirt armor and the back of the legs.

The Gouf had a pair of vents on its legs at the base of the leg armor. Their usage in the Anime appears to be that of a secondary vent intended to vent heat from the mechanics in the legs as they are shown putting out large gushes of air or steam. Somewhat like the thrusters on the back, these would be somewhat heat discolored and may show some wear from dirt being kicked around.
So how am I going to go about achieving the effects I’ve talked about? Well, some of them I know pretty well how I’m going to do it. Some of them I have an idea but have never actually tried it before. You know that “Hmm that sounds easy when I read it” sort of situation.

So, the shield. This one I think I know what to do to get the damage type I was talking about. First thing I’m going to do is mark out where I want the bullet marks to go. Then using a variety of tools I’ll work to create dents, and cracks in the shield. Then I will need to come back with silver and grey paint to color the cracks and dents to color them.  I’ll go into more detail in my next post about how I do this as that will be the focus of that post.

The dirt and dust will be achieved by applying various greys, browns and yellows from pigments. The big deal here is to use the pigments to provide dust and grit build up, but not to use the pigments to actually color the plastic. I also have to do this last as the pigment powders will be knocked off when I’m working on the shield and other parts of the model.

The heat distortion is actually a simple effect to pull off and will be achieved by using Citadel washes in a selective pattern. If you look at anything that has been discolored by heat, you will see that it is largely purples and blues. Since the majority of the model is already blue, I’ll probably have to use more of a maroon color wash to achieve the distortion effect.

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Project: MS-07B3 Gouf Custom Part #1

The MS-07B3 Gouf Custom… this was bare none my absolute favorite mobile suit from the Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team OVA, though I will admit that such a sentiment may be influenced by the character that was piloting it along with the original Gouf from the Mobile Suit Gundam anime. In the original anime the pilot of the Gouf was one Ranba Ral, a career soldier who believed in what he fought for, but also knew the difference between being a soldier and being a killer; that being that while a soldier may need to kill it is only as a point of being on the opposing side in a conflict. This theme was carried over to 08TH MS Team’s Norris Packard, the pilot of the Gouf Custom. In both cases, the pilot of the Gouf was a highly skilled soldier with the determination to accomplish their mission even when accomplishing such a mission would mean their death.

In the 08th MS Team OVA, Norris single handedly engaged the protagonists mobile team and eliminated the GunTank artillery units they were protecting. Despite piloting a less advanced mobile suit, when compared to the ground type Gundams the protagonist and his team were piloting, Norris was far more skilled at combat and in mobile suit operations. He kept his sites set on the GunTank units, and only engaged the Gundams as a means to get to the GunTanks. The first two times he engaged the Gundam he used his heat whip as a repealing line when he dropped down the back side of a building, and because of that was able to avoid a retaliatory attack from the first Gundam who fired on where he would have been had he simple been falling and not used the whip in this fashion. The second time he used the whip to knock the gun out of the Gundam’s hand before charging into it forcing it back and then immediately jumped at one of the GunTanks. While the entire engagement only lasted a few seconds, the distraction from the charge provided Norris the time he needed to destroy the GunTank.

This battle scene has become synonymous with the B3 Gouf and there is a lot of influence from it in my enjoyment of the mobile suit itself. That being said, I still like the design of the Gouf Custom for itself. I have previously built a 1/144 and a 1/100 scale model of this mobile suit and when I originally purchased this kit I thought it was the same kit I had built years ago. I was rather surprised to discover that it is actually an entirely re-designed kit, with new articulation and new design approaches taken with it. After looking over the kit I was really enthused about this project, even more so then when I had originally decided to try using Pigments to weather it.

I’m going to cover the construction of the mobile in this post because… well I’m assembling it. And that’s about it for it for that part. I’ll only comment on the construction of it when I feel that there is a need to discuss that isn’t clear in the instructions. The real focus for this particular project is working with weathering pigments, and that’s what I want to focus on.

The kit itself is a fairly straight forward build and with a long afternoon you should be able to assemble it straight out of the box. In comparison to the older version I built a few years ago I do like the double joined shoulders, they give a lot of flexibility and options for posing which is a really nice bonus. Another really nice advancement over the older kit is in the tubing around the torso of the body. In the old version the tubes were solid plastic parts, and this rendered the torso basically static. The waist simply could not turn at all on the old model. In the new kit these tubed are cast in a flexible rubber sort of plastic. So this allows the waist to rotate about 10 degrees right and left. Not a huge difference, but it does allow an extra dimension of possibility.

The heat whip weapon on the right arm is built to be used in two ways on the model. First is a simple insert that slips into the housing. This is for when the whip isn’t deployed and just stored in the fore arm. The other way is as the end of a 5” long wire. The wire is strong enough to be self-supporting so it can simply be slipped into the base of the wrist housing once the insert is removed.

Beyond the basic construction of the model I did use paint in a couple areas of the model. The first place that got the paint was the inner surface of the thruster nozzles on the back pack.

The lens of the hand cannons also got a bit of a touch from the Tamiya red paint as well, but I went back and added a little lining from a fine tip black gundam marker to give it more depth.

I used a some silver paint mixed with the Tamiya red to create a kind of glittery sparkle effect with the paint and then colored the optic sensor on the head.

I did some experimental panel lining with the lighter blue armor. The only difference here and from the panel lining I did on the Wing Gundam and Heavy Arms was that I used a grey marker as opposed to the black. This provided some shadow and depth without breaking the blue out and making it look cartoonish.
 

So this completes the construction of the Gouf. Next time I’ll be talking about what is going to be weathered, and how I intend to go about accomplishing the effect.

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Project: Heavy Arms Rebuild #8

“This is battle 001, Pilots name: Trowa. Just for the record.”

So, the Heavy Arms conversion is complete! It’s an odd sense to look at the finished project, comparing it to the original kit design and note how much and how little changed between the anime version and the Endless Waltz version. The short version is that there are lots of little details that were changed (I’ll talk about them later), while the major stuff remains largely the same. The basic mech design stays the same, which is really what made this entire project possible in the first place..

The Heavy Arms Custom as it appeared in Endless Waltz compared to the anime version Heavy Arm.

Now remember: my goal for this project was to convert the Heavy Arms Custom Kai into something more resembling its anime counter-part. There were several places where I decided to keep the Endless Waltz design, either because changing it would be considerably more work than I was prepared to commit to this project, or because I liked the redesign better. There was really one part of it that I needed to change from the original kit and that was the mounting for the second set of missile pods on the legs. Everything else was either a case of gluing a part in place so it’s not an opening panel (The backs of the shoulders) or of building new pieces to be added on to the existing model. I’m going to talk more about these points in my project review but I know not everyone wants to watch videos all the time, so I’m going to cover the same points here in this post as well.

So let’s start at the top of the model and work our way down. The shoulders are the first thing that I had to change. The Anime version of Heavy arms had a single compartment in each shoulder that housed missiles, while the Endless Waltz version had 3. One compartment in the shoulder itself, two affixed the shoulder: one in the front that fold open and the second in the back that rotates out. For this conversion, I glued the back panel to the shoulder itself, removing it as a means to deploy more missiles. The second thing I had to do was not insert the plate that had the additional missiles into the forward panel that flipped up from the shoulder. To help make this part look more functional rather than ornamental I added some bracing to the inside of it with a strip of plastic.

I needed to fashion an additional micro-missile launcher to go on top of the shoulders. I did this both to be somewhat more anime-accurate and to cover the hole left by the uninstalled  yellow… dog ears? antenna?… whatever the large yellow hook looking things on the shoulders of the Endless Waltz design are. The Anime version didn’t have them and frankly I don’t care for the look of them anyway, so I didn’t put them on. Making the additional missile launchers was pretty straight forward. I used a length of ¼” square plastic and then added some additional 1/16” sheet plastic around that foundation to build up the housing. I cut out the missiles from the extra plates that I didn’t use from the shoulders and then glued the head of the missile to the form. Once those pieces are built it was just a matter of gluing them on over the holes.

The chest was a fun challenge, and honestly if I were to do this project over again I would do it differently. What I did this was take the heads of two of the Gatling cannons and cut down the length so that it would sit with in the cavity of the chest and then came back to build in the additional details later, as I talked about in a previous post. Were I to re-do this project I would scratch build smaller Gatling cannons and build up the details around them more in line with how the weapons appeared in the anime.

One of the changes that was made between the anime version and the Endless Waltz version was the removal of the Heavy Arms single close combat option, a large combat blade housed on the underside of the right arm. So I had to add that back into this model and I accomplished that by scratch building the weapon and attaching it to the arm. I wanted to go with something that looked more like an army issue combat knife as opposed to the large sword style blade the anime version used. This was where I made a mistake with this effort. I made the blade too small.

I made the blade about the same length as the forearm but didn’t compare that to the size of the arm over all, including the hand. So now the blade just barely clears the depth of the hand. I think I have a way to address this shortfall. I’m looking into clear resin casting for a potential project down the line. In conjunction with casting the piece I need for that project I think I can cast a beam effect for this combat blade, the energy blade extending out beyond the length of the arm itself. Future efforts on that front.

The Endless Waltz version of the Heavy Arms had deployable missiles built into the sides of the skirt armor. The anime version did not have these. To address that difference I simply glued the missile racks into place in their closed position.  As I talked about the legs previously, I won’t go into considerable detail about them now. Originally the legs were meant to mount 2 packs of missiles, while the Anime version of the Gundam only mounted 1 rack of missiles each so I modified the legs to remove the upper mounting points.

I made one modification when I built the feet, and that was to fill them with fishing weights. The Heavy Arms model is extremely top heavy and will very easily tip over by itself. To help rectify this I filled the feet with fishing weights to add close to 6 ounces of weight to the bottom of the model.

The Gatling cannon. That’s been an interesting effort. In the Anime the cannon was affixed to a large shield with a sheath that the Gundam’s arm slide into. With the Endless Waltz model the larger scaled double-barreled Gatling cannons are simple held by the models’ hands. In all honesty, they don’t hold it all that well anyway. Both approaches have their problems. The Anime version appeared to be little more than 6 barrels attached to a motor on the shield, with no hint as to where the ammunition was hidden. The Endless Waltz version is much more suggestive of being a functioning item and has space to suggest its actually carrying the ammunition for it. So I wanted to try and bring these two together to make something that looked like it worked. Well… put my efforts under the “partly failed” category. I took the double-barreled weapon, modified to have a single barrel, and then built the sheath for the arm. I took one look at it, and realized that any effort to build the shield on top of it was going to out-balance the entire rest of the model. So I abandoned the effort on the shield. I may come back to this somewhere in the future, and build something like the Gatling cannon and shield assembly from the Katoki redesign of it, which uses a large drum on the back of the Gundam to carry the ammunition.

So that completes my Heavy Arms rebuild project. Next up, the MS-7B3 Gouf Custom with weathering and battle damage.

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Project: Heavy Arms Rebuild #7

So the Heavy Arms Gundam model is coming closer to completion:

Here you can see the model is nearly complete. It only lacks the forearms, the Vulcan cannon arm, and paint on the back mounts.


I've used a variety of paints to change the color of the Gundam. The white was achieved largely by use of Tamiya white surface primer with the occasional touch up made with Citadel Ceramite white. The Red covering was achieved with 3-4 coats of watered down Mephiston Red, again from Citadel Paints. The Yellow on the skirt armor is Averland Sunset, a yellow foundation paint from the Citadel range. I was originally going to shade up to a brighter color palate, to give the model an overall more cartoon-y look, but once I saw the coloring at this stage I changed my mind, and decided to keep the grittier tones of the colors.

 Painting with the Citadel paints over the Tamiya primer was an interesting experience. The Tamiya provides a very smooth, almost gloss finish to the surface it is applied to. At first, I thought that this would make applying the Citadel paints over top of it more of a challenge. In truth, it was the opposite. I had to do multiple coats of the color with more water in the mix, finally settling on a 3:1 water to paint mixture. As you can see, it provides a solid finish that holds its’ color well.

 The metallic blue detailing on the chest and shoulders was achieved much like how I did the special coating effect on the Wing Gundam. I put down a layer of Tamiya’s flat aluminum and then, with that dry, I tinted it using a thinned down layer of Tamiya’s Clear Blue. Unlike the Wing Gundam, I only wanted to partially tint the silver, not outright change it to a solid blue.

 I had originally used Citadel Purity Seal to seal the head of the model following assembly and a little touch up paint on it. That turned out less than optimal. Remember how the head was turning out last time I talked about it?

 

Well, the Purity Seal had some very unwanted effects to that:

 I couldn’t find a lot of info about what caused this particular effect. Some people mentioned temperature being too low would cause that effect, as it would cause more aerosol to be sprayed compared to the amount of sealant causing the sealant to dry over top of bubbles of aerosol that would then evaporate. Others said that the humidity being too high caused it, reasoning that too much moisture would cause a similar effect to the cooled aerosol described previously. Still more stated that the Citadel Purity spray itself was the problem.

Whatever the specific cause of the crazing effect was, it still occurred. So, I can’t do much about it at this stage. If anyone has any suggestions about this, please post in the comments below.

It was recommended that I switch to Testors dull coat, which I was able to pick up a can of for about $6 at Hobby Town. The Dull coat went up much smoother and seems to be free of the crazing effect caused by the Purity seal. I did encounter one small issue with it, though: dropping the piece before the sealant had dried.

Here you can see what happened after dropping the leg only a minute or so after the dull coat had been applied. It caused a smearing effect, all but ruining the panel lining I had accomplished prior.

My thoughts on this? Citadel Purity Seal? Not using that stuff again. Testors dull coat? The jury is still out on that one. We’ll have to see how it works out later on with a different model.

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Changes to the page and an Interview with Dragon Forge Designs!

So if you've been following this blog over the last couple months you'll know there's been a series of changes to it. I deployed an entire new theme for the website giving it a cleaner more stream lined look and improved the navigational abilities in the website. I expanded my model exploration to beyond Warhammer 40,000 into Gundam Models. Well now I am expanding again, but this time into social media. Yes, I now have a Facebook page, and a Twitter account. The primary points for these venues are to get more exposure to the blog so while I'll post little tidbits on Facebook and Twitter, they will be with the focus of announcing new posts here on the blog. So want to follow me? Please do. I have also launched a YouTube channel where I will be posting video tutorials, project logs and additional information. All of this info will likewise be viewable on this site but still be available on the YouTube Channel who find it beneficial to see what I'm talking about. The Channel can be found here.

As a compliment to my new YouTube channel I've added another new page to the website that will list the videos and keep them organized.

Facebook  Twitter YouTube

I'm also making a bit of a change to how I work with this website. If you look at the “Projects” page you see new context there, including a "Upcoming Projects" section. Well that is where I will be listing projects I am intending to get to or have purchased the materials to undertake but have not yet begun work on. This is intended to do two things;  one is give my readers an eye into what I'm going to be working on over the next couple months and two help remind me what I had intended to do when I bought stuff. Yeah I suffer from the 'AW! That'd be cool!" syndrome of I'll have an idea for something, get the stuff to do it, can't start on it right away, so I put the stuff on hold and get back to it a few weeks or months later... and I've forgotten what my exact plans for the model was. So the "Upcoming Projects" section will be a place where I can list that sort of information and give you guys some previews of what I'm going be working on in the hopefully not too-distant future.

The blog is also going to be moving to a 2 post per week schedule with posts being made on Monday and Friday. This is largely so that the posts themselves will be worth reading. See I can make 3-5 semi-short posts a week, or I can make 2-3 solid length posts a week. What do I mean by that? Well a semi-short post is a post that amounts to about ¼ a typed page worth of content. It may have a couple pictures, but once everything is really said and done these types of posts amount to little more than “Hey I got this done. Looks cool, huh?” A solid length post is a post that when rendered into a typed page will be ½ page or more. How long will this be here on the blog? Well here’s a point of reference, this post up to this point is 1 page. This new posting schedule will begin next Monday. So just to be clear, that does mean that there is not going to be a post on Friday of this week.

Now, there is something else special I have to talk about. In the past I have talked about the quality of Dragon Forge Designs bases for 28mm scaled miniatures. Well over the last couple years I’ve gotten to know Jeff, the owner and operator of Dragon Forge Designs, quit well and a couple days ago he told me he was putting together a Kickstarter for a new set of bases. Hoping to help him by getting the word out about his Kickstarter, and to help my site out by getting more readers, I asked if he would do an interview with the Resurrected Hobbyist and he agreed.

So Jeff, my readers have seen me talk about Dragon Forge Design’s bases, and I’ve always been enthusiastic about my estimation of their quality. What was it that got you into working on models originally?

When I was about 8 years old, I got a World War II air plane kit. I can’t remember if it was a Warhawk or a Spitfire, but regardless I can remember it was a lot of fun to put together. With that under my wing, I’ve been putting stuff together for 40 years now because of that.


What was it that motivated you to begin making bases?


I was building an Imperial Guard Army with themed bases. And I had to make the same thing over and over again for each model.


I can see how being able to make 10 bases 3 times, rather than one base 30 times, by casting, for something like an Imperial Guard army would have its appeal. Can you tell us a little bit about your bases and how you make them?

The biggest challenge in the process is coming up with an idea  and then developing that idea into a concept. I tend to spend a lot of time on Google, looking for references and images. Once I have some good reference images and a more solid idea, I work out more specific details by sketching. Once I have the sketches complete, I can actually get into the process of creating my masters, collecting the materials I need and sculpting parts as needed.

Now you have several different sets of bases. How do you develop the concept for each set? For instance, how do you define the difference between your Ancient Ruins set and your Lost Empires set?

It varies a lot between the different sets. The easiest answer is to say I wanted to give the Lost Empires set a more alien feel to it, like it could be a lost non-human empire, while the Ancient Ruins would be something more human.

Speaking of ancient ruins, you've recently announced that you will be starting a Kickstarter for a new addition to the Ancient Ruins series of bases. Can you tell us a little about that?

Ancient Ruins is one of the older series I have yet it is still very popular. It has needed an update as it was always requested. I decided to use the Kickstarter process as a means to both announce the release of the expanded series and to get greater exposure for it.

I've used the Ancient Ruins set myself several times. It does add a considerable amount of characters to a model, particularly with armies like Word Bearer Chaos Space Marines, or Black Templar Space Marines. What kind of update is it going to be getting? Will the current range get replaced by new sculpts or are you adding more designs to the existing range?

Nothing is being replaced. The Ancient Ruins series will be getting an expansion through the Kickstarter. The new bases will ultimately be available on my site (http://www.dragonforge.com) once the Kickstarter pledges have been filled. The expansion will add additional bases in all of the sizes, everything from 25mm up to the large Knight Titan sized bases.

Nice, so this Kickstarter will effectively be doubling the size of the Ancient Ruins range. What kind of Time frame are you looking at getting the pledges completed?


Everything will need be sculpted and molded. Honestly, time frame for completion will all depend on the size of the pledges from the Kickstarter. It’ll be easier to cast a $4,000 worth of bases, then say $30,000 worth of bases. I’m a one man operation so I need to protect myself and give a date far enough in the future to make sure I can meet it. I want to avoid becoming one of those people who promises that something will be ready in X months, and then two years later I’m still working on completing it. Since this is my first Kickstarter, I can’t honestly say how long it will take to meet all the pledges.

I can appreciate your situation and I feel my readers will as well. You're only one person, and while you produce exceedingly high quality products, the tradeoff for that high quality is the time factor. But I will stand by my prior statements, regarding your products, that as long as the quality remains as high as it currently is, I have no problems waiting 4-6 weeks for an order. Thank you for your time Jeff, and I’ll be looking forward to the Kickstarter when you get it up. Just a reminder to my readers, the Dragon Forge Kickstarter should be up with in the week. And I’m sure all of my readers will be checking it out. I will be posting a link to the Kickstarter when it goes live.

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So, trying something...

So on a pure "Hmm that could be cool" kind of moment I picked up a set of 1/100 scale MS Effects. These are clear plastic pieces that are meant to be used to present beam saber and engine blast effects. I didn't have a particular plan for them. I just got them because... hey maybe I'll have an idea for them down the line. 

Well I had an idea for them. Specifically mounting an LED inside of them, and coloring the plastic so that it lights up yellow or red.  Made my first effort today:

Using Tamyia Clear Yellow coloring I tinted the plastic yellow. Then I used a series of drill bits to bore out a space in the plastic for a white LED. While I like the way it turned out, when/if I do this again I think I'd use a yellow LED to match the yellow coloring of the paint.

So I know this was a particularly short post with little real merit to it (though I'm sure some folks were curious about the idea here), but I've got a lot more energy directed to some stuff that's going to be revealed tomorrow. So stay tuned.

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Project: Heavy Arms Rebuild #6

Okay, so the name of the game today is "Fabrication". As you've seen I've made a series of changes to the model to bring it more in line with how the Heavy Arms appeared in the anime series and with those changes comes the need to actually build new parts. The best example of this is in the chest, where I used the 2 larger gatling cannons to replace the four smaller ones.

 The part of the model that was originally intended to go in there is a single insert piece that had all the details and cannons head molded into it. Well, I didn't use that so I have to make parts and pieces to fill in the space in the chest.

These are three pieces I made for the chest cavity. The piece at the top is going to go in the center of the chest between the 2 cannons barrels, while the piece on the left will go in the left section under the barrel leaving the last pieces to go in the right cavity. They're meant to be suggestive of machinery rather then actual parts of any sort. A lot like when I built the engine master for the Thunderbolt I'm not building an actual machine or functioning mechanism, but rather putting enough details there to make it look like it could be doing something. Same principle here. What's that piece that's going in the center of the chest? I have no idea. Could it be some sort of gyroscope to help the gundam maintain balance? Sure, why not?

Now there are other items that I need to fabricate in order to facilitate the project. If you look at the Heavy Arms as it appeared in the Anime series it was equipped with a couple other things that it's Endless Waltz counter part didn't have.

There is a single micro-missile on the shoulder right about where those bit yellow... horns or whatever they were would be. So I need to make those. The anime version was also armed with a sort of Gundam sized army knife that flipped out from under it's right wrist. So I need to make that.

Well I need to make something close to that anyway:

I rather hate the flip-out style the knife had in the anime, so I went with something a bit more workable to my mind: A magnetically driven slide deployment mechanism! Well, that's what it's meant to look like. The idea is that the knife slides out of it's housing.

The micro-missle launchers are simple styrene boxes topped with missile heads from one of the extra shoulder launcher pieces that I didn't use for this build.

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Project: Heavy Arms Rebuild #5

The head is coming along:

So, just getting the colors on here: I've got a Tamyia white spray base, Citadel Mephiston Red, and a Gundam Marker Black for the lines. 3 separate companies products, with 3 different colors on a piece the size of a my thumb. I find some kind of weird irony in that.

Also got the eyes, and head optic colored as well. The black is the basic Tamyia black paint, with the eyes and optic picked out that nuclear waste light green from Tamyia.

Now, put it all together:

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Project: Heavy Arms Rebuild #4

Managed to get some paint down on Heavy Arms today.

Well, okay a pretty good amount of paint. As you can see I got the chest painted, primed the shoulders, touched up parts of the torso, and did some detailing on the shoulder cannons. I need to come back around with a second coat of white for the shoulders.

The shoulder cannon housings were painted in that Dark Sea grey color Tamyia paint. Then I came back with Nuln Oil from the Citadel Shade range. It took two coats but I think it made a really good visual difference between the colors.

The orange around the chest is Citadel's Mecharius solar Orange. It's a very thick paint intended for base coating. It took two coats to get the color you see here. To help keep the color from rubbing off I applied a layer of Citadel 'Ard Coat varnish to the chest sections.

I used the Nuln Oil once again on the cannons in the chest. It helped add a lot of shading to the weapons.

Next time, I get to work on the head.

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Project: Heavy Arms Rebuild #3

So, I encountered my first real 'oops' moment for this project: The chest. Or rather the covers for the chest cavity. The larger gatling cannon barrels I inserted sit just higher enough compared to the original part that it very very slightly interfered with the panels staying closed by their original design mechanism. Well I used a trick from my warhammer projects to rectify this problem: Magnets!

Yep, I counter sunk 2 pairs of magnets on the sides of the panels. these magnets are quite strong enough to keep the chest panels closed, but not so strong as to be a hindrance to opening the panels if I so choose. I used kneaditite modeling putty to secure the magnets and then used super glue to adhere them in place against the panel sides.

I also got a layer of paint down on the shoulder cannons. This is the same "Dark sea grey" I used on the Wing Gundam Buster rifle. I still need to come back and pick out the cannon barrels.

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Project: Heavy Arms Rebuild #2

Show some leg baby!

Okay, maybe not. The idea of a 200 tonne mecha doing a Can-can is slightly terrifying in my mind. But I am working on the legs of the Heavy Arms model.

The Endless Waltz version of the Heavy Arms mounts 2 missile pods on each leg while the TV version only had one such pod on each leg. So for my model, one of  'em had to go. Simple enough, just don't use the 2nd pair of missile pods. The catch is that leaves the mounting point for the second missile pod. So that needed to be addressed.

When I first started working on the left leg I tried to cut down the extruded mounting portion before I tried to fill in the space with model putty. The work involved in it was incredibly tedious and I realized it's not gaining me anything in the long run.

 So with the right leg I filled the space with putty first and then worked to shave it down. Frankly, it's less effort this way even though it's more difficult due to having to grind through the cured putty before filing down the surface.

With the required drying time elapsed the putty had hardened up nicely and I was ready to proceed. The left leg was honestly more difficult to sand down despite being a shorter stack of putty to work through. It took a solid 2 hours to sand it down with various files and sand papers before getting it somewhat smooth.

The right leg was easier and was finished in about 45 minutes. Using a jewlers saw I simply cut off the mount right about at the same depth as the surface of the leg, and then came back with some files and sand paper to smooth it out.

 

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