My next kit is a Zaku from The Origin line, of which there have already been more than ten different variants. It’s not surprising because this is a great little Zaku with plenty of detail. There are a few annoying seamlines that are common throughout the line, so here is my take on how to fix them.
Forearms and shoulder
The most obvious seamlines are on the forearms and the round shoulder armour piece. For both of these I used the technique ZakuAurelius shared a few years ago in this video. He makes great content, highly recommend you check him out.
I made one small modification from the video, which was to glue on a small piece of runner to the frame piece within the shoulder armour. No one will see it, but it will make pushing the the shoulder armour into place.
Legs
Head
This is the head straight out of the box, and the entire back half of the head has another seam. I don’t want to glue the pieces together because I haven’t finished painting the eye piece that goes inside. So instead I’ll be using this edge scribing tool to turn the seam into a detail! You hold it at a 45 degree angle from the surface of the piece, then pull the scriber towards yourself. As with using any other type of scriber you want to apply a light touch and use multiple passes. Here’s the head piece done. Looks much nicer and can still be disassembled.
Torso
There’s another seamline on both sides of the torso. Luckily it’s a very easy fix that doesn’t need any modifications. Just apply plastic cement and squeeze together, and sand it down later. While there are some frame pieces inside the assembly, they can’t be seen once everything is assembled.
Minigun
Both of the shoulder mounted guns have seams down the middle which are easily fixed the usual way. For the gatling gun, however, there’s no way to install the unmodified ammo belt after the two halves of the gun are put together. If you cut a section of the loop that attaches the ammo belt, you can push the it on after the seamline is removed. The gatling gun barrels have almost no depth straight out of the box, which looks lame. So I used a dremmel to drill them out … … and it looks much better.
That’s all for this post, next time we’ll move on to painting! Thanks for stopping by.