In-Progress : Zeta Gundam
06-01-08 : My entry for this years Project WOOB...
It's that time of year again for Plamo's Project WOOB competition, and this years topic is down to a specific kit rather than scale or timeline period as per previous years with that specific kit being the High Grade Universal Century Zeta Gundam.
So far I have test fitted the kit :
 |
 |
 |
|
The plan I have so far for this kit is to add some details such as chains for conduits and pin heads for other details. As for painting, the scheme is still in the air but I'm leaning towards the 'honeycomb' style pattern on the chest, forearms and/or legs.
07-01-08 : A few cosmetic changes to the legs ...
Started on modifying the legs for cosmetic reasons. First up, I added fine mesh to the inside of the leg armour :
 |
Pretty simple to do -
- Took the armour piece and decided to remove the inner section of the side 'vent'.
- I then took my pin vise and drilled a hole in the center. That hole was widened with my knife and finally filed square with small files.
- Mesh was cut to size and fixed from the inside with appropriate glue.
Mesh chain was then added for the power conduits that run down the backs of the legs. Replacing the piece I had to remove looked rather silly, so I ended up drilling holes at either end of the knee / thigh piece and threaded a length of mesh chain through. This chain will flex and bend as the leg does.
 |
Next up was adding thrusters to the backs of the legs. For this, I used AkoHobby thrusters and added a small length of brass rod to support and pin the thruster in place.
 |
 |
 |
As you can see in the second picture, a small amount of surgery was required to get the armour to fit back on. I removed one of the female pegs to allow it to reseat after the addition of the brass rod.
Next up, I added small screws to the lower parts of the leg armour. At present, they look fine but I may change them for pins later on as the screws look, well, a little like screws.
 |
 |
Finally for this update, two side by side shots so you can see the legs before and after :
 |
 |
It's my birthday today, so why not do some more modeling! I've done some modifications to the forearms :
 |
|
On the elbow armour, I removed the little nub that is meant to be a bolt or something by sanding it back. I then drilled out a hole in each side and added small screws to it. As with the legs, I'm not 100% sold on the screws yet and I might change these to pin heads as well. Here are the before and after shots (apologises for the slightly blurry pics) :
 |
 |
I'm starting to prepare pieces for painting too. Next up is starting on the upper arms and torso which I plan on adding raised styrene areas.
09-01-08 : Changing the arm and shoulder modifications ...
After posting the previous update on a few forums, it was pointed out that the chain area on the forearms are a little bare (in particular, the chains too thin). A few suggestions were made and I took them on and added my own idea to come up with this on the right here : All I did was add some styrene to each side to enclose the area a little and added mesh underneath to give the area some details and make it less boring. It was suggested also to change the size of the chain to the next size up, but size restrictions prohibited me from doing that (the holes would need to be made bigger and that was not possible as the holes already made were border line on being too big.) Just need to putty and clean up around the piece now. |
 |
Now onto the shoulders. I decided to increase the thickness of the top armour by adding some 1mm styrene (below). I also opened up the end of the armour to allow for the addition of mesh (below bottom). I did this the same way as the legs (drill hole, cut wider, file square) The picture to the right is the before and after shots for the shoulder armour. |
 |
 |
|
 |
10-01-08 : Torso modifications ...
Next up is the torso mods. For this I have decided to widen the shoulder area by 1mm and increase the height by 2mm. To do this, I added styrene to each section and cut them to size. Once that was done, it was puttied and then sanded when the putty had cured. The picture to the right here is how the torso started out. |
 |
To increase the height, 2 1mm thick pieces of styrene were added to the bottom, glued and then clamped like so :
 |
Once the glue had dried, around the styrene was puttied and the hole for the lower torso peg was located and a hole was made using the pin vise to make the hole and a knife to widen the hole to allow the peg to fit :
 |
Next, I widened the overall width of the shoulder area of the torso by 2mm by adding 1mm thick pieces of stryene to each side. First, I made an appropriately sized hole for hte peg to go through :
 |
The over hanging styrene was cut back as close as I could get to the edge as possible :
 |
I then used a knife to shave back the styrene further and then sanded it as close as I could to the edge of the piece. Once that was done, putty was applied :
 |
I also filled the inside section with Milliput to make the piece 'whole'. Once all the putty had cured, I sanded it all back so it would be ready for priming :
 |
Once the primer is applied and dried, I will go over these pieces once again to fix those small flaws created when sanding.