By Loran
After many hours spent watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes on my laptop with my hobby knife in one hand and putty in the other, this kitbash is starting to come to a close. Thankfully. I have to say, this thing has made an even bigger mess than the GM Sniper Custom was, if that was even possible-I’ve been finding shards of plastic from this thing in my hallway! But, of course, I’d say this came out about as well as I figured, albeit with more jagged edges than I hoped for. That may be a bit premature, though, because I still have to paint the bugger…
Seeing as I’m planning on going with the White Dingo color scheme from the Dreamcast game “Rise from the Ashes”, I decided to equip it with the clip-fed machine gun all of the Federation suits from The 08th MS Team have. What always bugged me about the suits designed before 08th carrying these guns were their lack of spare ammo. So, I ventured into my spare parts bin hoping to find some hip armor from a Gundam or GM from the series, and lo and behold, I did. Unfortunately, the way the part was designed, it doesn’t properly sit on the skirt as I’d hoped. Oh well, I guess he’ll be stuck with just one clip for battle…
It now came time for my least favorite part of these kitbashes-the knee joint transfer. Cutting the joint from the HGUC kit was easy, even if it required a fair share of chopping down. The part on the MSV kit was another story, because it needed a lot of knife work and almost hammering with the knife-I had to take the part off, but I didn’t want to damage any other areas of the leg. Doing this four times was a huge pain, for the record.
I made sure to glue the halves of the leg together before putting the joints in because it makes lining it up much easier-it would really suck if I couldn’t fit the polycap in because the holes were too close to each other or too far apart. The part went on pretty easily, but unlike the GM Sniper I’ll have to use a lot of putty.
Next came the more… gruesome part of cutting down the remainder of the leg. This is always trial and error, and I don’t quite like the method, but it gets the job done.
The first leg managed to fit in pretty well, and I used the foot as a guideline to make sure I didn’t get the issue of the heel being too “forward” like it was on the Sniper. It actually came out pretty well.
The other leg wasn’t so lucky, unfortunately, and I might have carved off just a bit too much plastic. I took one of the shards lying on my bench and glued it in place-now the leg joint stays in place.
As far as the construction goes, the GM Cannon is mostly finished. I haven’t put the feet on yet, mostly because I’m afraid of forcing the joints inside the legs-I’ll wait until they’re painted and use the hot-water trick to get them on. Welp, I guess I should start painting now…
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