From Bandai
1/144 scale plastic kit + B-Club 08th hi-detail parts
+ B-Club 08th action parts
From Bandai
1/144 scale plastic kit + B-Club 08th hi-detail parts
+ B-Club 08th action parts
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My GM Sniper custom II needs a playmate, so I started toying with the GM Sniper kit from 08th series. Before I know it, I was cutting and sawing the whole thing. For as long as it exist, I pretty much dislike the overall design of this GM type (and the Gundam ground type as well), and was trying to change many aspects of the basic settings. The project was done in 3 phases. Each one with a few months of hiatus inserted --either from tight schedule or lazyness. I started around a Christmas break in December 2000, left it for 5 or so months before coming back to it again in May. As I thought I was going to be done with, I got too busy again. The sucker's finally got painted in at the end of December 2001. All in all taken roughly a year, which doesn't speak much for the amount of work with all the stops occured. |
Phase 1: December 2000
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Legs It wouldn't be wrong to say this part is the bit that start the whole project. You see, I bought the B-Club detail-up parts for RX-79(G)and as there is a possibility of using it not only on the 3 Gundams, EZ8 from the story, but also GM, and subsequently GM Sniper. As such, it is decided early on that I'd duplicate the whole thing. I wasn't paying much attention at the time to the different between the lower leg portion between Gundam and GM (this was before B-Club, naturally, decided to do one conversion kit for EZ8 and GM as well). As the mold/casting finally out of the way, I began to use the some of the earliest cast (with a bit of flaws here and there) to fiddle about trying to fit it into GM. The result pretty much dictates the final look. The (conversion) kit is fixed-pose in the ankle area which is quite odd considering the rest of the kit is to remain posable. It was also quite awkward the fact that the feet was divided into 3 pieces (not including the guard). My solution was simply to emptied out the ankle area (with large drill), fill it with SSP, and dip the ball socket in. It works fairly well, but the feet has a tendency to fall apart due to small contact area between the 3 components. As always, the upper leg of 1/144 kit is way too short. Here, it is lengthen for 3mm (or so I remembered). I like long front skirt armor, and it looks rather weird if it reach down to the knee gaurd. Unless I was going for Kondo aesthetic, that is. |
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To my surprise, I managed to make quite a bit of progress in one sitting (which was quite unusual in my case). Here's a features breakdown: |
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Main Body The inside of the chest will need some kind of internal structure to hold all the addition joints I had plan for. I want a double jointed shoulder, double jointed neck, and a ball joint for the torso. The medium sized joint used for shoulder comes with 2mm pin, while the hole in the upper arm polycap is 3mm. No biggie, I collared both sides with 3mm pipe. To allow the movement in the torso area, the chest was enlarged (thus larger interior), while the torso block was greatly reduced in size. On top of the said block, I piled up 4mm of plastic to mount the ball joint socket. |
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Waist This waist block is also from B-Club's. It was intended to coupled with the plastic kit's rear skirt which would sandwiched the side polycaps in between. Here I chose to adopt side/rear skirt from Blue Destiny GM (which is longer and sported some interior details), so the mechanism is changed to small ball joints instead. The crotch piece is, ahem, enlarged to get rid of the ugly slope with SSP. |
Fast forward some 5 months later. >>
Send comments to maestro@monoeye.org
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