A mixture of Gunpla, Cooking, SCUBA, Corgis, and Life

Read more about the article Back to work on the RGM-79SP-2

Back to work on the RGM-79SP-2

Finally getting back to work on this project. Taking a two week vacation really breaks the momentum I had going for this kit. I actually thought about bringing pieces of the thing with me to work on while I was in Tokyo and Hong Kong. Then, knowing my damn luck, I would have lost said pieces. So I just quit cold turkey and left everything here. Plus, I really didn’t have time to do any sort of model building while I was gone. Hell, I even got to catch up through the first half of Iron Blooded Orphans by marathoning it on my flight back as my attempt to reset my biological clock and fix the potential week long jet lag. It worked, I only ended up taking an hour long nap before landing back in LAX. Ok, enough digression. My trip to Tokyo and HK was quite fruitful. I ended up picking up a bunch of new tools that I immediately put into use. While in Hong Kong, I visited the Man 66 Hobby shop on the 7th floor of the Richmond Commercial Building in Mong Kok. I saw a damn cool cutting tool, “the Chopper II” which is an improvement on “the Chopper” that I had picked up a couple of months ago. So my first order of business when I got back was to order this via Amazon. It is pretty damn difficult to get back into building mode. So it took a few days. I didn’t quite know where to start; or actually, I wasn’t motivated enough to actually start. But over the last week, I started slow on a few pieces here and there. The majority of the work for this post is focused on the legs. We’ll start off with where I last left off.

So the last update on the project, I had cut up the outer calf parts. The problem is that the cut isn’t precise. So after sanding an opening, I needed to glue some plastic back into place to rebuild some of the screwed up areas. So this past week, I’ve been slowly adding more plastic, sanding it down, test fitting, then adding more plastic back, and resanding, etc. I also glued the two halves back together so that I have a solid connection on the ends. It seems counter intuitive to cut the part in half only to glue it back together, but it makes for a much easier process for this kind of a mod. The last picture in this series shows what it currently looks like. There is still some cleanup work; but I’m progressing. I also added some strips of styrene to the back of the thruster housing. I still need to sand and prep that bit of detail.

Continued after the jump!

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Read more about the article Shopping in Tokyo and Hong Kong 2017

Shopping in Tokyo and Hong Kong 2017

No updates on the MG Sniper 2 because I’ve been in Asia for the past week and a half. I had a trip to Hong Kong planned since last November. But once the news about the last days for the 1:1 Gundam in Odaiba Japan came out, the last day was actually a few days after I arrive in Hong Kong. So the wheels started spinning in my head and the wife had always wanted to go to Japan, so we booked a flight and used some points I had from Hilton to book a few nights at the Hilton spitting distance from the giant Gundam. Out trips to Hong Kong are always mule trips. Not that we hide balloons of happy powder in our nether regions; but bring over a ton of hard to get items for our respective parents that both live in Hong Kong. So when we arrived in HK, the first order of business was to drop off the packages, hang out for a little bit, then back to the airport to fly to Japan.

I had been to Japan when I was very young, so I don’t remember shit. Ok, I remember very little. It was the early 80’s; man if I had gotten some cool toys and kept them in mint boxes. Well, learning the railway was a bit of a rough crash course. But enough of that, I’ll have a more detailed blog post later. Lets talk about where money went.

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Read more about the article MG GM Sniper 2 Progress: gun works, scope works, some feet and more priming

MG GM Sniper 2 Progress: gun works, scope works, some feet and more priming

It’s Monday, time for the blog post that brings everyone up to speed on last week’s Sniper work. The main focus for this update will be the sniper rifle which I finally revisit after the very first post with a half-assed slapping of a new barrel and new stock onto the sucker. In the below picture, you can see that quite a bit of work has been done to transform the standard GM Sniper 2’s rifle to a one that the GM Sniper 2 would pick up in New Vegas.

Other than the rifle, I got some work done of the arms, started in on the feet, and got the upper half of the body primed. Details after the jump.

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Continue ReadingMG GM Sniper 2 Progress: gun works, scope works, some feet and more priming
Read more about the article MG GM Sniper 2 Progress: Front skirts, new antenna, and some chest mods

MG GM Sniper 2 Progress: Front skirts, new antenna, and some chest mods

This is going to be a fairly sizable update. This includes the work from last week as well as over the weekend. I’m starting to focus and get more and more work done as the inspiration continues. The front skirts are REALLY plain looking. Yes, it’s a grunt suit, so it should be relatively simplistic cannon fodder that all GMs aspire to be; but it’s just plastic, so what’s better than cutting the plastic and then gluing more plastic to the cut plastic? There are still some scattered bits of work here and there as is typical with this kind of build. While glue or putty is drying, the focus on other sections keeps the work going. All the while, I’m taking pictures of all the progress.

Full details of the work and pictures after the jump!

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Continue ReadingMG GM Sniper 2 Progress: Front skirts, new antenna, and some chest mods
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