What else can go wrong!?

Warning: Text Heavy (grab a beer)

With the end in sight I have been making the final push in the hopes to have it completed by this weekend. For some unbeknownst reason I had decided that the time was now! Having said that I ran into a few problems. Not just small problems of the kind that can be ignored. No. These were larger problems that upon attempting to correct created even larger problems. Let me explain.

I noticed this when I came home from work on Thursday.



What the hell?










My guess is that I didn't wait long enough for the decal to set before spraying the topcoat and the force of the spray bent the decal back onto itself.


Time for some decal surgery!

I had only one ZERO left so I was a little worried. I decided to cut the zero into two halves as I only needed to repair less than half the original decal. This would give me two attempts at it.













..and it only took one try. Although the picture doesn't show it due to the curvy nature of the armour the fix worked really well. I did wait to apply topcoat again. In fact, I still haven't done so. I will do the whole mecha once the weather decides not to be wet.








After I had assembled this beast into torso, lower body, and backpack sections it was time for the final assembly (theme of final countdown plays in head).





However!!! The backpack wouldn't go on. It is supposed to be pressed into the hollow and then pushed down on in order to click into place and while I had no problem inserting it (ya!) it simply wouldn't go down (no!). Why? Why, I thought to myself. I took my design knife and started to carefully remove plastic but it still wouldn't work. So what did I end up doing?

I ended up taking off the fuel tanks to give me more room to work with.

I decided to take off the arms and shoulder armour so I could take off the torso armour and have a look to see if something was in the way.

But, Nooooooooooooo!

While attempting to pull off the arms I moved the shoulder armour too much. I may have failed to mention this before but while assembling the shoulder armour for seam removal and painting I overextended the piece that snaps onto the shoulder frame and attaches the shoulder to the torso. It was going to break so I glued it together and continued with the assembly but I did order an extra one from Bandai just in case. And the 'just in case' turned into 'I need you now!'. I cut the part from the sprue, sanded it, painted it, and topcoated it in about 20 minutes and then let it sit for an hour while I started to take apart the shoulder.

Because I had glued the armour together to remove the seamlines I had to gently pull up on the top of the shoulder armour enough to allow me to move out the broken piece and put in the new one. As I was doing this I heard POP! and the shoulder armour came right off. AARRGH!

So my Sinanju now looked like this:


Luckily there was no damage to the plastic or the paint. I knew it would be difficult to get that piece back on when the time came so I prepared for it by cutting the pegs at an angle so that when I had to place the piece back on I would be able to do it from the proper angle which would be least intrusive on the paint.

And it worked out perfectly! No damage to piece, plastic, or paint! 安心しましたよ。

While I was waiting for top-coat to dry I decided to do something about the power pipe on the skirt. According to the manual you assemble it with 8 pieces of power pipe on each side. Done in this way leaves gaps between the pieces and shows a lot of spring which is unseemly. I had added an extra piece of pipe to each side of the torso pipes so I tried the same thing for the skirt.

The result:

Awwww Yeah!

But back to the backpack! With the torso unassembled I was able to get the backpack to slide down into position. I took it off and put it back on a few times to make sure it would work. After rebuilding the torso and attaching it to the lower body I tried once again to attach the backpack, but to no avail. It still wouldn't drop down into place. AARGH!

By now frustration was setting in. It was after midnight and I wasn't going to stop in the middle of a major problem like this. I took the fuel tanks (and the parts in which the fuel tanks are inserted) off the backpack, took the torso off the lower body and pushed it together like that. I did hear a loud POP! and became instantly dreadful but the sound was it snapping into place never to move again. I then attached the torso and backpack to the lower body, attached the fuel tanks to the backpack, and put the shoulder armour and arms back on. Phew!


And here is what my work-table looked like at the moment of completion. Trust me, there is a table in this shot.

Only part of the backings from the decals.
Gold foil garbage.
But it was all worth it!

Everyone

hail my
CANARY OF DEATH!

強い感じる。
A pic using flash.
There is a theme behind this machine and I will go into detail about it in the next entry.