Nearing the end...

...of the easy part at least.

Every section of the Victory is assembled and panel lined. The next step, which I started yesterday before the rain started falling, is to gloss coat in preparation for the decals. As this is a Ver. Ka kit, I am going to go out on a limb here and state that it will take me longer to decal this kit than the actual assembly took. No problem, I like decal work

Here he is in Hexa form:
And here are the core fighters with a couple of pieces left off to make decaling that much easier:

A problem and a solution

The Victory Gundam comes with red ring sticker for use on the knees, elbows, and side skirts. As the red is no longer my trim color I had to come up with a way to make my trim ____. My solution, which I had previously used on the Sinanju Shield parts, was to keep the red ring stickers on the backing but pull of the surrounding sticker part leaving just the rings and the centers on the backing. Prime and paint later...
I then put the rings on the gundam as one normally would, then with the centers I cut small pieces out of them to use for the side skirts.
Because I primed and painted the stickers they are a little thick and I did try to trim some of the thickness away but the paint started coming off easily so I left well enough alone.

This week will see me up at 6 am each day to try and get an hour's worth of decaling done in the hopes that I could possibly be ready for final topcoat next weekend. Cross your fingers. As for myself, my fingers will be uncrossed as I need them for applying ridiculously tiny decals.

Should Bandai released a Perfect Grade Victory....?

This just in!

Literally. It showed up here yesterday and it's already on my desk. I held off on the PG version and had to satisfy my curiosity by reading fellow blogger's WIPs. (Thanks Buster and ASM!)

Now it's my turn!

Aurora Eyes, Core Fighters, and the elusive Victory Crab

I knew this would happen. When I noticed that the stickers for the eyes were partly red I became instantly apprehensive because this red would clash with my chosen red-substitute colour. I gave it some thought and decided that I would paint the clear piece black and then make eyes myself. I have a sheet of lovely green aurora stickers that I purchased for the Sinanju build and had been wanting a shot at making 'Aurora Eyes'. Lo and behold, thanks to my awesome skills (read: so simple a donkey could do it. A donkey with a hobby knife, anyway) I was able to cut away a tiny corner of the tiny aurora triangles making a mech shaped eye. I look forward to the photo shoot simply for the eyes!

I wonder how my co-conspirator will fair in this regard.

And now, because I like to keep everyone in suspense, the rest of this entry will be in black and white.

Two heads are better than one

Yes, I evoked that old cliche, but in the case of the Victory Gundam it is mostly true.
Here's the Victory and Hexa heads. I am more partial to the Hexa head myself. Perhaps because it looks Patlabor-ish.
You can see my panel lining in this shot. I have yet to panel line the rest of the head but due to the size of the facemask I opted to panel line it before putting it together.
It took me awhile to assemble the Hexa head. I kept dropping, and having to search for, a ridiculously small piece. Can you guess which one? What's really mind numbing is that I will need to apply a decal to that small piece! My eyes hurt just thinking about it.

Here I am! Rock you like a hurricane!

Yeeeaaaww! Ya, so anyway, here are the two core fighters. Well, the front half right now. I have yet to fully assemble them. Panel lining on these will also be time-consuming and test not only my dexterity but also my patience. The hexa is on the left. no right.. now wait, I can't remember.

And here are the.. um.. well these hold the.. Okay. You got me. I have no idea what these are for. They fit inside the arms of the mecha but flip out when it transforms into I-can't-remember mode. Let's come back to this.

Oh!

Look at that!

Sshh.

It's the rarely seen Victory Crab!
Oh no! You scared it. Now it's running away.

The right to bare arms

And we're back. Joining us today are the Victory Gundam's arms.

As you can see they aren't fully assembled yet. This is because the last pieces were painted and have yet to dry. Fortunately for us, the assembly involves putting those pieces on almost at the end so I was able to put the rest of the arms together and take some pics.

I will restate how impressed I am with the engineering of this kit. Not only do the arms assemble in a way that facilitates transformation, but the individual pieces, though small, are highly detailed. Check out the mold of the hands!
The thumb is just like any other MG thumb and has movement but on the Victory Gundam the fingers are molded as one piece. Because of this, Bandai included three different sets of hands.; open, closed fist, and one for holding weapons.
How small are these hands? They are so small that my camera has problems focusing on them, even on macro setting. Damn camera.
It was at this point that I decided to test build the head. There I encountered...

...the problem.

Look at the size of these stickers! Well, putting on a ridiculously small sticker isn't too hard, however if you look carefully at how they are cut you will notice that the sticker for the eyes has some red with it. But my mecha is no longer red. I had to think of a solution.

And I did! And it worked out great! And it looks awesome! The next entry will detail how I went about getting it so.

'Til then, a sneak peak at the feet. I love Gundam feet! (Gundam foot fetish?!)

The little things

There are lots of them!

The Victory Gundam, although very small when compared to other MG kits, has the transformation gimmicks requiring it to have a lot of articulation. In other words, there are lots of small parts.

My partner in crime on this build, The American Salaryman in Tokyo has already blogged about the size/pieces of this kit so I don't feel the need to repeat him. You can read what he has to say here.

Instead, the first thing I will talk about is polycaps. Yes, all gunplars should know what those things are and most of us have a rather large collection of spare ones as the runners for polycaps are often interchangeable between kits.

The polycaps for the Victory Gundam, on the other hand...Those are them. All six of them. At first I was rather surprised as I have not encountered this before, but then after some thinking I realized that these are awesome! Normally the polycaps for joints are a half circle, concave piece into which you push the ball joint. This is seen in many a gundam's hip joints. I have found that those concave polycaps tend to expand with use over time creating a loose joint.

The V Gundams polycaps are pushed onto a rod and attached like so:
I am going to hypothesize (ya, take that! I still have a large english vocabulary) that this will allow the joint to stay stiffer, longer [giggety]. I mean, it will hold up for a longer period of time.

Here you can see the groundbreaking polycaps used on the waist unit.
While I am mentioning the waist unit allow me to say that the design is very cool. Of course, we expect that kind of thing from Katoki-san, ne.

Here is a shot of the waist unit closed and then opened. Notice the little latch that catches to keep it closed.

Other than the waist unit the only other sections of the V I have assembled is the legs. I have left a piece off until the painting process is complete. I will explain in more detail at a later date.

I have also prepared the blue and red pieces for painting. Some of the pieces are very tiny, even by MG standards. For these pieces I have left them on the sprue and just cut away a section of the runner.

The rest are staged as I normally do it; yakitori sticks, chopsticks, and Australian Blue-tac.


The weather is supposed to be very nice this weekend so I will have the painting and touch-ups done by Sunday night. Then nothing will stop me on my quest for world domination, I mean, for assembly of the V Gundam.

Sometimes ya gotta play around a little.

As everyone calls me GaiGun now on the internet gunpla message boards (Gundam Guy was around long before I was so G.G. is his and rightly so), I thought I should make up something to go along with my assigned moniker.

It's a guy with a gun. Pretty self-explanatory if you ask me.

No, it's not in bad taste is it?

This may end up being a logo that gets printed as a decal and slapped onto various kits I make.

(Work was slow today.)

Will it end in Victory?

V is for ...

And so begins the build on my part of the V Gundam Collaboration. Still not having much free time, most of the building will take place between the hours of 6 and 7 am before my family wakes up. 6am?! What am I thinking?! I will endeavor to build on sundays, if possible, but that means I will have to keep my daughter occupied. Fortunately, she likes Gundam too.

"ガンダム楽しいね！”

This is her playing with my 1/144 HGUC RX-78-2 recycled Gundam. I say playing, but I am sure in her mind she is building just like me. "こやって”

The first thing I noticed upon looking through the manual is that this is a complex build. This kit has lots of gimmicks which means many parts. Add to that the fact that this kit is rather small and you have many, small parts. Did I mention it's a Version Ka? I think it will take me longer to decal this kit than build it. But I am getting ahead of myself here.

As laid out in the press release (nicely written by the guy that isn't me), the white armour parts will be left as is while the painting will be done on the blue/red pieces.

These pieces won't stay blue.

As I plan on painting these pieces I am reluctant to go through the assembly process with them until the painting process is complete. But this would mean that I can only build a small part of the mecha until I can get outside and paint. (It's snowing as I type this.) Fortunately for me (and the American Salaryman) this kit is part of the 30th Anniversary Clear Parts Campaign so the blue pieces can be set aside yet I can continue the build using the included clear parts.

So I decided to start with the legs. And these small things took an hour just to (almost) assemble the frames.

Flexibility is key!

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

GN-X Gallery

Kit: MG GN-X

You can read my review of this kit at the bottom of this entry.

I wanted to like this kit. It looked cool. And for the most part, I did enjoy the build as it was quite different from any MG I have built before. However, this kit has a major problem which cannot be ignored; the looseness of the joints. To put it bluntly, this thing can't really stand up on its own anymore. I was hoping to get some good action shots for the gallery, but it was a struggle just to get it to stay on its feet. When the ankle and knee joints were able to support it, the hip joints would fail and it would inevitably topple backwards due to the wait of its tail. Also the funky looking, insect-wing fins pop off easily. Far too easily, in fact. When trying to position its legs for a photo, the wings would simply fall off and lie on the table. As I mentioned previously, the build was enough to keep my interest, and the look is unique so points there. The fact that Bandai included a large amount of dry-transfers is also a plus in my books. Unfortunately, it loses a lot of marks for simply feeling so fragile and weak.