1:100 Zaku Kai

[tetsujin]

It's got a leg now. I can't say "it's got a leg to stand on", though, 'cause there's no hip, knee, or ankle joints installed...


Zaku Kai Update: 2010-1-20

 

[Junkie]

Cool.

 

[Shark]

Cool subject. What is going with the sculpted areas?

 

[tetsujin]

Cool subject. What is going with the sculpted areas?

What do you mean?

 

[Shark]

I don't know if I missed something or what. Are you building a kit, or scratch building it? It looks to me like the torso and left arm are a skeletal structure that have been filled in with some material. So I was just getting a feel for what we have going on.

 

[tetsujin]

I don't know if I missed something or what. Are you building a kit, or scratch building it? It looks to me like the torso and left arm are a skeletal structure that have been filled in with some material. So I was just getting a feel for what we have going on.

Oh yeah. Full scratch based on plans I drew up. Everything there, I built.

 

[Shark]

Sweet!

 

[JMac]

Cool.

 

[elend]

Oh cool! More pictures please. ;D

 

[tetsujin]

Now that my workspace is finally getting back to a usable state, I'm taking another crack at the lower leg...


Zaku Kai Update: 2010-6-18



I think this method seems a lot more promising so far than the other approaches I've used. The placement of those edges is important for getting the right look and for symmetry when I build multiple copies, so putting a guide right on the edge seems like a great way to accomplish that.

 

[sunsanvil]

Very ambitious to say the least. Looking sweet so far. I'll be following this one for sure.

 

[Fruit]

Wow, that takes a bunch of courage and skill to modify Gunpla. From my point of view that looks great! I can't wait to see how the lower leg turns out. From the picture of the ribbing of the calf (?) it looks structurally sound.

 

[sunsanvil]

Wow, that takes a bunch of courage and skill to modify Gunpla.

No kidding. I'm dabbling with a few minor mods on my MkII, nothing of this caliber, and I'm finding it a little daunting.

 

[tetsujin]

Wow, that takes a bunch of courage and skill to modify Gunpla.

It's not really "modification" at all - it's a scratch build...

One slight difficulty with the leg parts I'm making now is they have no hollow openings for the knee and ankle joints - they're just big solid blocks of styrene and epoxy putty. I'll probably just recast it to make a hollow version when the time comes...

I made a second lower leg half - I felt like it was a little harder than the first - probably just because of the added pressure to make the two match. So I've got two more lower leg halves to make (the lower legs are asymmetrical - so I need to make left and right halves for both the left and right legs) and then maybe I can start turning them into actual, usable parts.

 

[tetsujin]

Eating a whale, eating a horse, and the elephant in the room (July, 2019 WIP)

This project has been going on, very very much on the "back-burner" for a very long time. I'm making an effort to get back to it and finish it up, and I can't think of any recent news that might impact those plans.

 

[Robotism]

There is a RE/100 Zaku Kai coming out really soon. Would you be better off picking that up?

 

[tetsujin]

There is a RE/100 Zaku Kai coming out really soon. Would you be better off picking that up?

No. (I mean I am buying one, and it's already en route to me in fact, and I think they did a pretty good job on the design of it, but no.)

 

[Robotism]

Are you planning to modify that kit too or stock build it?

 

[tetsujin]

Are you planning to modify that kit too or stock build it?

I don't really build anything stock, but I probably won't make any radical changes to the RE/100. There's no point, 'cause I've got my own build which is better. I put a lot of work into my design plans, and I have a lot of confidence in the choices I made when putting those plans together. Modifying the RE/100 to look like my design plans would be possible, but it'd be so much work that I'd be better off just scratch-building everything myself. If I went half-way, incorporated some of my design and left other things alone, I think the end result would be a bad mix of incompatible design choices, a combination of choices I made with great care (and, most critically, choices I made because they worked in the context of the rest of my design) along with leftover design choices from the RE/100 - things which I kept in not necessarily because they made the model better, but rather just because they were "good enough". Because I have such a specific idea of how the model should look it doesn't really make sense to spend too much time making something that isn't that.

So I'll probably build the RE/100 more as a point of reference, and the mods will be things like replacing the power cables, lighting the eye, and fixing garbage like the cheap hands, hollow skirts and heels, various little draft angle issues, etc. I think there are some aspects of the RE/100 that are actually kind of interesting, so I'd like to experience it for what it is (and continue scratch-building my own, vastly superior take on the design)