Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Waist

I did not use the waist block to make the robot skinner. This leaves openings on the waist, which is filled with Milliput sculpted with some details.

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The front skirt armors serves as canards in MA mode. They are attached to the crotch from the side, instead of attach to the waist. The canards folds back and locks the armor in the forward direction when in MA mode.

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Right arm and rifle

The right arm has similar construction except I build a mechanical arm at the elbow to connect with the rifle.
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When not in use, the arm folds into its housing.

The long rifle is carried underhanded with the help from the elbow arm. It is a bash from the wing gundam rifle. I glued plastic cards to modify the exterior. When transformed into the MA mode, the rifle can be stored under the MA. The handle is inserted to where the model stand would go. In order for the model to use the stand when in MA mode, I removed the front part of the booster and attach it to the gun.

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Monday, August 13, 2007

Left Arms

I milliput cast the HDM for gundam NT to get the hand. Scratchbuilt new lower arms.

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The elbow joints are double jointed. I removed the piping that connects the elbow to the upper arm since they will hinder mobility of the double joints.

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Now that the shields are mounted on the shoulders, the elbows are free for other stuff. Some of you Five Star Stories fan might recognize where it comes from.

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It also acts as a small missile pod.

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At this point it might be a good place to do a sanity check to see if the whole thing is transformable. Yep it does.

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Monday, August 6, 2007

upper body

I hated the original chest. I changed the design to a more FSS type of design. In fact, the inspiration came from the Last Junchoon discussed in this forum thread.

Last Junchoon

I glued a few pieces of plastic sheets to the chest as guide and filled in with epoxy putty. Here the milliput comes in handy since the surface can be smoothed with water. Once the putty cured, I only have to sand a little bit.

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A bit of scribe and knife works adds some more details to the chest.
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Since I mod the chest close to FSS design, I wanted to mod the waist to follow. Making the whole snake skin style waist would be crazy. I have some ideas of how to go about it, but that will be a different project. I just thin down the waist by not attaching the waist block. Where it use to be I turned it into exhaust(heat) vents.

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flying shield complete

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The bottom of the flying shield was equally bare as the top. I added things here and there to detail up the bottom. Mainly there is the gun housing. A binder that cover up the slide rail that make the front slide into the back portion of the shield. I didn't like to look of the compacted shield so I just glue it in the fully extended configuration.

Underneath the thrusters, I added two wings for the flying shield and detailed up the large flat surface with another thruster vent.

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When I take the finished pictures, I will write up the shield as auto attack bits for NewTypes.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Shoulder

There is a cavity in the shoulder piece between the joints and the outer surface. I cut out the surface and use the cavity as a missile bay.

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Ultimately I want the Gaplant to be able to wield weapons freely. Elbow mounting the flying shields seems counter intuitive so I made a shoulder mount for the shields. The mounting replaces the armor flaps that protects the upper arms. The original strut for the elbow mounting is modified to pivot off the two members of the shoulder mount using a 2.5mm PVC rod as the pin. An additional locking strut is built to provide lifting support for the mounting since the flying shield is too heavy to be supported by the pivots even when I use PVC rod.

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Flying shield

Gaplant is the one transformable MS in the gundam universe that I like the most. However, the flying shield with large flat area didn't look right to me. I built additional engines similar to the thruster shield of the Hazel gundam.

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