led mods

Read more about the article Wiring the 1/144 Heat Hawk

Wiring the 1/144 Heat Hawk

A few days ago, I posted about making clear resin heat hawk by making a mold of the existing heat hawk, then throwing in a string of LEDs in the mold when I poured the clear resin. The resin has had some time to cure and I’ve had some time to ponder the next great question. “How the hell am I going to power this damn thing up?” One of the TGG folks not so innocently asked the question. For which I honestly answered that I had no idea and that I would solve that problem eventually. I already had a few ideas, I could replace the upper handle of the axe and run some wires through there and then through the hands, through the body, and have the battery and switch assembly somewhere on the base of the project. That seemed a little too much work. Laziness is the mother of invention. I decided to completely self contain the power source as well as the switching assembly. Here’s a video of that through process and how it all works out:

After the jump, I go through the pictorial and more wordy version of what I did in the shot 6 minute long video.

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Ver Ka Saz Lighting

Time for another Ver Ka Sazabi update. Today’s update will cover the process of making LED embedded resin thruster parts. The why of it all, well, we’ll get into that later. Going back to when the kit was sanded and dismantled; the thruster pieces were singled out and I started to plan out the process for adding some lighting mods. I had lit the HGUC Sazabi, so I figured this much larger scale shouldn’t be much of an issue. My experience from working with lighting the 1/144 scaled Sazabi helped make my decision on the direction.

Seven thruster parts are identified. Granted, I’m ignoring the square thruster pieces all over the body, as well as the round one at the back skirt – there’s something to be said about going overboard with lights. And these seven, effectively 14 thruster pieces should be enough for the effect.

With these seven thruster parts picked out, the LED count for just the bells is 32. Lets do this!

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Read more about the article So, you have a SISTER!

So, you have a SISTER!

Last week was March’s build gathering, and since it was a week away from Kenken and Latte’s birthdays (March 24th), we also invited their breeder’s sister who owns Crumpet, Kenken and Latte’s sister. Oddly enough, she’s also a model builder that has been to AX and does some excellent work with resin kits. Crumpet is a bit antisocial so we were hoping that the large gathering of strangers and 5 other corgis will help break her out of her shell and shyness. She was fairly timid at first and rather unfriendly, but I think she started to get used to the dogs and started to play. And by the time they left, she was definitely more comfortable, so hopefully she’ll continue to visit during the build gatherings.

In other news, I’ve been doing a great deal of modifications to the HGUC Dreissen, which will be most of this post.

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