Ha ha, I bet you guys are getting tired of seeing these, aren’t you?
Were it the summer, this little project would be done already. Since I’m stuck at school or work pretty much every day, I don’t get much time to build Gunpla; and when I actually DO have spare time, I’m too tired to actually consider it. But don’t worry, you’ll see progress. After this one, I’ll be all set with this project and onto the next one. Can you say, “Zeta Gundam”? Well, I guess you can, since two of my last three projects have all been suits from Zeta, heh.
I’m at the point now where the Hyaku Shiki has its arms, binders, and waist all assembled. Now, as an older kit, this one isn’t really that impressive, as far as engineering goes. Back in 2001, the only differences between Master Grades and High Grades were the scale and the title. Some may argue that, but looking back at it, some of the early HGUC kits do it better than their Master Grade counterparts. I’m looking at you, Qubeley.
All things considered, I’ve been enjoying using the light red on the gloss yellow surface, but the darker red has been another story. British Crimson is a hard color to work with in general, considering how thick it is, but once you add it to that surface it just takes so many coats to look good. Usually it looks fine after only one or two coats.
A HUGE point of frustration was the binders. Somehow I pulled this off NO PROBLEM on my Delta Plus but here it was a complete nuisance. I even tried masking and that didn’t do enough. Blugh. I used enamel gold as opposed to acrylic gold, since acrylic gold isn’t nearly as good. At least it looks decent from a distance…
Part of my reason for doing this project was to clear out some of my old decals. But even then, I STILL had to buy some extras! Yeah, I grabbed a set of Earth Federation decals just for the numerals. I didn’t have a single set of decals with numerals that would work…
Also, there are some minor structural differences between this version and the regular Shiki. The first one you’ll see here, is with the binder struts. For the ballute pack, longer struts are included for the binders. I chose to use the standard version since I have no intention on using the ballute for this version; I’d rather save that for a standard issue Shiki.
I absolutely LOVE the mechanism for storing the beam sabers. The parts are mounted on hinges, so you can take the sabers in and out without scratching any paint whatsoever! It’s much better than even a polycap mounting, trust me.
The hands are great, too. You receive two pairs of hands: one for sabers, the other for the other guns. Each hand slips into a little wrist armor, so you only have to paint the one piece instead of making two complete sets of hands. I quite like this!!
The project is coming to a close, and don’t worry, it’ll be all done next week. All I have left are the legs. Remember folks, you can probably get your Gunpla done faster than me, so stop by FPNYC to see if you can prove me right!