New Video posted: Project Review of the Heavy Arms Rebuild

Some time back I started work on a conversion project where I took the 1/100 Scale Heavy Arms Custom Kai from Endless Waltz, and convert it into something more like what appeared in the Anime series. I had finished the project some time ago but hadn't had a chance to finish the review video of it. Well it is up now!

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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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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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Project: Heavy Arms Rebuild #1

So first progress in rebuilding the Endless Waltz Heavy Arms Custom into the TV version of the Heavy Arms, namely converting one of those monstrous double barreled Gatling cannons into a single barreled version.

Converting it was actually fairly simple. Take the front mounting plate, the part that would otherwise have 2 mounting points for the two barrels, and cut off the mounting ports. Just make a clean cut right down the bottom of them. That gave me a mostly smooth front, but I added a layer of Sheet styrene to help build up some detail on it. I was then able to build the cannon barrels and simply glue them into place.

In order to help the cannon mount on the fore arm I took a trick from my warhammer models and installed magnets, one in the fore arm and one the base of the cannon itself. Thanks to the face that the cannon itself is hollow, the magnet holds it in place very well. I'm still going to build an enclosing arm sheath that the form arm will slip into more like what the Heavy Arms had in the tv series. Got some ideas about how to add some additional mounting support to hold the cannon to the arm better. Stay tuned for more details.

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New Gundam project: Heavy Arms!

So with the 1/144 Wing Gundam now complete I've found myself revisiting Gundam Wing in other ways. The OVA follow up the original series Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz introduced re-designed versions of the major Mobile suits that had featured in the series. All of these Endless Walts versions received 1/100 scale version models of them, even if the original version never got one. The Gundam Heavy Arms is one such example of this. There never was a 1/100 scale version of the original TV show design of the Heavy Arms, but there is a 1/100 scale version of the Endless Waltz variant. Well, I've become inspired to convert the 1/100 scale Endless Waltz Heavy Arms Custom into something resembling the TV Show version of the original Heavy Arms.

Time to bring Ole' Painless out.

So we can see a comparison of the Endless Waltz version on the right, known as Heavy Arms Custom Kai, and the original mobile suit Heavy Arms as it appeared in the Gundam Wing TV show.  There's numerous details that I will need to address and a couple that I'm choosing to not deal with because I like the way they look on the 1/100 scale Heavy Arms Custom model. First really noticeable difference is the weaponry. The Heavy Arms Custom is equipped with 2 Duel Gatling cannons while the Heavy Arms is armed with a single gatling cannon mounted on a shield. The large yellow... erm... antennae? Those big yellow things on the shoulders. Those need to be replaced bu the single micro-missile launchers of the tv version.

And finally, there's the machine guns on the head of the mobile suit. The Custom version has the machine guns mounted on the cheeks while the standard version as them on the sides of the head. I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do about those. Add gun barrels, and cover the helmet mounted ones? Add the ones in the head? Leave them as the they are out of the Custom kit? I think I'm going to keep the check mounted guns from the Endless Waltz version.

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