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

Read more about the article Gundam X Girl X Akira Project

Gundam X Girl X Akira Project

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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Read more about the article Entry Grade Nu Gundam: the two week build

Entry Grade Nu Gundam: the two week build

Kicking off at midnight August 1st, I cracked open the box and clipped a few parts off the tree and called it a night as I had an early morning.

But a day or so later, I started getting into the clean up work for the kit. The V-fins always need shaping to sharpen them up and remove the kid friendly non pointy bits. There were only 2 seams, well, two seams *I* dealt with, the chest and the gun. I guess the shoulders could have a seam, but I was too lazy to deal with that. There were however, a shit ton of mold lines. They were everywhere. I even missed a few and needed to go back to sand those down even after I had gotten the part painted. Second layer of paint too.

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Relationships

Story time boys and girls and maybe a little history to support things and give some perspective. As a model builder (gunpla included); I’ve been in the plastic model community for over 20 years now. Going back to forums like Hobbyfan, gundam.com, childofmecha, etc. I’ve known a good number of my fellow model builders for just as long. I’ve had this site since December 2003, so that’s creeping up on 20 years. Basically, I’m an old fuck; and my peer builders are all old fucks too. I guess you can chalk this mindless rambling as a disgruntled old man griping about shit. At least it should be entertaining.

A few years into establishing my webpage and establishing myself in the local model building community (IPMS and various So Cal model groups), my fellow builders and I thought we should start building together on a monthly basis; and our monthly build gatherings were born and I got to meet a ton more builders. Some are still very close friends to this day. Born out of these gatherings, we now had a crew of folks that built gunpla and we hit up all the local model contests, and collectively, we were known to the model clubs as “those gundam guys”. So the name stuck. Also born out of this is the need for a focused contest for our niche, with our own set of rules that fit – so that we just don’t keep walking away from the other local contests disgruntled old fucks complaining about getting a raw stick up our asses when it came to getting our gunpla kits judged. Southern California Gundam Model Competition (SCGMC as most of you guys know it) was born over 10 years ago, we’ve had 10 contests and should be on #12 this year, but we lost a year to COVID. SCGMC is THE BIGGEST live gunpla event in all of North America. I’m just so proud of my crew that helped us get here!

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