ModelMakerMike-Thanks man. I really appreciate the compliment. There are a couple small companies out there that make metal thrusters and detail parts. I bought a bunch of metal thrusters from this site called MechaSkunk a few years ago, really cool stuff, they went out of business unfortunately, none of them are the right size for this build though.
Steezy & Sunsanvil-Thanks guys. I use a couple different scribers along with dymo tape. I'll post a pic of them in this post.
Grendels-It certainly is. For me its one of the less enjoyable aspects of building but at the same time it can really set an otherwise plain model off the charts.
Cool. So, Got a little more done this week. Hopefully I can get everything ready for primer by the end of this week, if not, definitely by next week I should be on to painting.
I worked primarily on the skirt armor this week, adding some detail and more scribed panels. Here we have the the two front skirt pieces.
After a scribing session and added some bolts from Wave
Here is the underside of those parts. As you can see the the bottom of the bolts I added are visible since I had to drill through the part. So I want to build this up to hide the bolts and also add some interest to the underside of the parts.
Started with blocking everything out with some sheet styrene siding.
Added some styrene rod to give it some more character.
Added some bolts to the rear skirt. Originally, I wanted to scribe some panels into this piece but I ended up breaking the part into two pieces. Once I repaired the fracture and smoothed everything out again, I figured I should just leave well enough alone
Again, to hide the underside of the bolts and add some interest to the underside of the part, I built it up with some styrene and bits from the spare box. The blue stuff is Aves.
I then added some Kotobukiya parts to the side skirts to make them a little more interesting.
Here we have the skirt assembly all modded up and ready for some primer
I think the underside looks a lot more interesting
For the guys that were asking about my scribing tools, I primarily use two different scribers in conjunction with one another, along with dymo tape. I tend to eyeball the position of the scribe most of the time but for more complex patterns like on the shoulders I'll make a template out of sheet styrene.
The pointy tool with the rubber grip is a Hasegawa scribing tool. I always use this to make my initial lines. Then I'll deepen and refine the line with the the other tool which is a scriber made by Squadron.
Well that is all for now fellas. More to come next week. Hopefully we'll see some primer on her.
