Model Building

The Southern California Gundam Model Competition was this past weekend, Nov 11, 2023. If you were there, thanks for coming! I mean, I chatted with folks from New York, Boston, Washington DC, Pittsburg, Denver, etc. A good number of these folks flew/drove out here specifically to this show. One of the folks from Pittsburg came up and said hi to me and I completely didn’t recognize him – the last time I saw/talked to him was 2006 (a good 5 years before our first SCGMC – and SCGMC has been around for 12 years now – ugh, I suddenly feel old AF). So if you missed it this year, try to make it next year and here’s what you missed:

Panels we had:

The Vendors:

We don’t have a date/venue nailed down yet, but we’ll be working on that for the next few months. That said, we do have next year’s theme announced: “Seed” The theme usually ties into something Gundam related – for instance, next year will be the release of the Gundam SEED movie, and with that, there should be tons of Bandai merch on the subject. But for those that know us, things can take a very creative or dark turn as you guys are very good at the outside of the box thinking we look for; I mean, you guys ought to be after 12 years of SCGMC theme training. For those not familiar, the theme is an overarching “add-on” game of sorts that can be part of any of our 16 categories

We had 101 individual entrants this year with 316 competition kit entries. This doesn’t include all the display kits that folks also brought that were not entered into the contest. Not bad for a Gundam focused model contest. We got most of the pictures of the kits and apologize if we missed yours. There is quite a bit happening behind the scenes to get this running as smoothly as we possibly can. Right off the bat, below is the link to a PDF file with the winners and pictures.

2023 SCGMC Winner’s list

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This is a kit that is at least 12 or so years old. I think my friend picked this up while we were in HK (the conversion kit version). This is a recast of that conversion kit and actually recasted the MG Zaku II 2.0 parts needed for the kit. Well, almost all the parts. I found one missing part that I ended up having to recast myself from one of my built Zeeks.

So a nicely packaged resin kit, craptastic photocopied instructions. I needed some help from the MG Zaku’s 2.0 manual and the old MG Kampfer manual to help guide the build. I also did a quick paint spoon test for colors I thought would work on this project. Top of the spoon down, we’ve got Mr Color Orange Yellow, Finisher’s Light Gun Metal (the color I really wanted to use for this), and Mr Color German Grey. At least I have the main color scheme figured out – I can get to resin clean up.

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This is going to be another long post as this encompasses a little over a month’s work for this little project. This actually just starts off with Kaneda’s bike from Akira. I picked up the 3D file from Gambody and just printed it out. I had the forethought to print a few things in clear resin like the windscreen, tail lights, side markers and the wheels. In the anime, it looks like the wheels are light up green, so I figured I could replicate that with some LEDs. We get to more of that later. I was also just going to throw a gunpla kit in as “Kaneda” and get it all painted up like Kaneda with his jacket and all that jazz; but the fit wasn’t quite right. The Beyond Global RX-78 was a little too small, and the HGUC Nu Gundam was a little too large. I consider myself a lazy modeler, so if I can fit something in with minimal work, I’ll go that route.

Well, with that out the window, I scrounged around my backlog to see if I could find a figure kit that would work. The bike printed at about 1/16 scale, so I found a luftwaffa girl kit that I hadn’t built (anime girl with WWII airplane bodies as legs) Yeah, not sure why I got this ORIGINAL kit either. Anyways, from the test fits it looked pretty good and shouldn’t be too difficult to mash.

Add in the head from an SD Nu Gundam kit as a helmet, along with the 3D printed bike, Beyond Global Gundam at 1/144 and the Luftwaffe resin anime figure, I was ready to start bashing away. Story continues after the jump.
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