All right, new year and new projects. I’ve started a challenge with my Gunpla mentor Lincoln Wright, a plamo (plastic model) industry veteran of many years. The challenge is one complete plamo per month for three months, with, one accompanying blog post per week.
So we’re starting with the real star of Gundam UC, the Stark Jegan.
This is Mr Stark out of the box. I’m not usually a fan of the proportions on grunt suits, and this is no exception.
It always looks to me as if something has sat on the MS, squishing it.
My usual remedy is (1) extend the torso, then extend the arms (2) and legs (3) to match.
For other builds I’ve also extended the ankles and neck, but it’s not neccessary here.
Just ignore me, I’m here to fix wonky wordpress formatting flappery that I just can’t seem to fix despite everything I’ve tried <_<. WordPress is great, but man alive, the formatting can be right painful sometimes for a feeble mortal such as myself.
1.a Torso armour
1.b. Waist ball joint
Note: this method of extending the ball joint is perfectly fine for a joint like this, because it is neither tight, nor is it under much stress. We would need a different technique for a stong joint, like those in an arm or wing peg, which is a topic for another post.
Since I’ve extended the torso, I also need to extend ball joint in the waist. That begins with cutting the ball off, which I did with a hobby saw. I then flattened the bottom of the ball and where it connected to the waist with a rough file. I don’t want it smooth, I want it flat and rough for better adhesion. Similar to the waist, I cut 2 x 1mm thick plaplate roughly into shape, and then glue them all together. As this joint won’t be seen, I don’t bother shaping the plaplate any further. To ensure the ball is positioned properly, I reconnected the torso and waist before the glue had set and repositioned it until it looked right. I also used A LOT of cement. After that I didn’t touch it for several days.
2.a Bicep Armour
Like the torso, I can extend the bicep by sticking plaplate directly onto the top of the arm. Here I’m cutting the rough shapes out with strong scissors. I figured that using these L shaped pieces of plate is easier than cutting the centre out of a square. Whenever we’re using plastic cement, it’s good practice to rough up the surfaces being glued so they connect better. Here we’re coming to the end of the gluing phase. The little gaps between the L’s will be filled in with putty. Here’s a look at the piece towards the end of another round of puttying and priming. Getting there. Almost there, you can see the surface is almost completely smooth. Just a bit more!
3.a Leg Armour
Now the leg armour is going to be more complicated as I need to cut the armour and extend the area between. I decided to make the cut just below where the hip connects to the leg. Unforunately, the cut is a bit crooked which made following steps more difficult. I’ll need to do another tutorial at some point to cover this in more detail. For now, remember to make your cuts straight. Like the bicep armour extension I need to cut the middle out of the plaplate. Here it is glued on. And here is the pruning phase. You can see that crookedness I mentioned earlier, but, overall it’s coming along well. Here the two halves are glued back together. You can see it’s really rough. Some time later you can see it’s still a bit wonky and rough, but no matter, there’s always my mighty file and … … MORE PUTTY!! Although in this case it’s actually surfacer neat from the jar. It does a better job in filing the small gaps … … like these ones! Another round of surfacer barkeep!! Yes, the original cuts were wonky, but I put this here so that you know, that even if there are hiccups, we can still make it work. This was taken before the final coat of primer. I love this picture because you can see all the various layers of putty, surfacer and primer that have gone into smoothing out the surface. The purest white is surfacer, the off white is tamiya putty and the grey is spray primer.
2.b & 3.b Extending Pegs
Note: this method of extending pegs has worked fine for me, but I’m not convinced it’s the best way of doing it. The extensions are easy to snap off during the filing stage, it’s time consuming, and the final peg connection doesn’t have the same strength as the original (though the difference is minor). I will update this in future if I come up with something better.
Within the arms and legs,
there are pegs.
I made a rhyme!
These are the pegs in the legs. Below are the ones in the bicep.Since we made the extensions to the armour, we’ll need to do the same for these pegs. This is another easy one, I just glued on small bits of plaplate, waited for it to set, then filed it down until it fit within the receiving piece. Now you have to be very careful as it’s easy to break this piece off. No worries if you do though, just glue it back on. For the leg, I also decided to increase the height of the frame for stabilities sake. I just glued on strips of scrap plaplate, then filed them to fit. As this section of frame won’t be seen I didn’t make it look neat.
The result
Here are the original proportions as seen on Dalong.net And here are my custom proportions. What do you think?
That felt like a lot. I hope you find this useful, and I encourage you to give this a try next time you’re unhappy with your Gundam’s proportions.
Next week we’ll look at filling in the Stark Jegan’s seam lines.