Kit Information :
Scale : SD
Grade : N/A
Made by : Bandai
Completed : May 2011
Box Art :
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SD Zeong
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The SD Zeong kit is a wonderful little kit to build, so wonderful in fact I decided to take the plunge and try and squeeze in as many LEDs as I could into it!
I began by building the kit and then trying to work out where LEDs were going to be mounted and how I would achieve this. One thing I wanted to really do was light up the finger tips as they are actually beam weapons in the anime. So I decided that there would be 1 LED in the head for the monoeye, one in each hand to light up the fingers and as many as I could in the thusters to get them lit up.
The inner head needed some carving and cutting to make room to fit the red LED and once that was done, it was secured in place with some CA glue (after testing). The wires were then run through the head and down the back of the neck so they were hidden.
With the hands, I tried just using straight LEDs in the wrists, but the light wasn't reaching all the way through. Using my rotary tool, I cut channels inside the hand so the fingers were completely hollow. Trying again, the LEDs still didn't work, so I ended up using some small lengths of fiber optic cable to transfer the light from the wrist mounted LEDs to the finger tips.
With the large thrusters, there were 6 recessed areas already there and were ideal to mount the LEDs into. I drilled them out and mounted two chains of 3 series connected LEDs into each thruster. The four chains were then connected to each other in a parallel cirucit. I was going to light up the 5 small thrusters using fiber optics as well, but that just got to be a bit hard for me at this point, so I mounted in some IC pins for added detail.
All wiring went back into the skirt area and then down the mounting pole (which is aluminium tubing) which then goes into the box it is mounted on and into where the circuits and batteries are hidden.
Because I used 3 different colored LEDs, it became difficult to power them all with a single 9V battery which I preferred. I ended up using a 9V battery and some resistors to power the blue LEDs of the thrusters and then used 2x AAA batteries in series to power the 2 green and 1 red LEDs that were connected in the same circuit. The power switch I used was a DPDT type (double pole / double throw) meaning that I could connect both circuits to the one switch and they would activate together when the switch was toggled.
For painting, I went with OOB colors that are generally used on the Zeong and used some decals from another kit to add some detail. The details underneath the kit were hand painted with Mr Metal colors.
The base is an electronic jiffy box that I covered with styrene 'cladding' and then detailed with styrene shapes. It was painted then weathered using the hairspray technique and pastels.
All up I am not 100% happy with the outcome as the hands and arms don't look as good as I wanted but they are the best I could get them. I am still happy that I managed to fit 15 LEDs into an SD kit though!
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