Friday, October 24, 2014

Detail-up and Supplier

In the early days of my model building life, building a model kit out of the box without any modification was pretty much all I could do. Modifying model kits was a subject unknown to me back then, until one day a classmate brought a copy of "How to Build Gundam 2" to school. On the cover was a 1/60 RX78 Gundam modified to full open. That book was an eye-opener for the young me - there are ways to build models other than just following the instructions!


Knowing is one thing, being able to do (or being able to afford doing) it is a different story. Saving up enough money to buy a model kit was difficult enough. The memory of that one time I went to the hobby store hoping to buy that Heavy Metal L-Gaim with Land Booster kit from Bandai, but ended up going home empty handed because I was a dollar short is still vivid.


Back then, the lack of skills, lack of money, lack of tools and lack of supplies, meant that I have no other option but to build things out of the box.

Since I can only hand make very simple items, I rely heavily on off-the-shelf detail-up parts. But getting those parts have been a challenge. I used to be able to get some of the Z-Model parts through a Japan based online store, but they are gears more towards injection molded items and larger scale items rather than 1/43 scale. Most of the Z-Model parts that I want are usually listed as either "backordered" or "Discontinued". Luckily, I found a new supplier - Model Garage ROMU! Their website do not have the capability to handle overseas orders, but I can place order through email and they can process payment through PayPal. On top of that, shipment is fast. I will certainly do more business with them.






Sunday, October 19, 2014

Front Turning Vane


I cannot believe the amount of work that I did this weekend. A very productive weekend indeed. Yesterday was the bargeboards, aka main turning vanes. This morning I did the front turning vanes. Still need to work on a number of front and rear suspension pieces, front wing support and the brakes. I guess it will take me a couple more weekends to complete the test fit.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Bargeboards


I do not know where the motivation came from. I did way more this rainy Saturday morning than what I did in the past month. The barge board supports were attached to the base, bargeboards cleaned. 


Found out that the right bargeboard needed some adjustment to fit. Since it is made of white metal, it was pretty easy to bend.





Sunday, October 12, 2014

The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountain



Here's the wikipedia page for the old Chinese myth about The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains. It is a story about being persistent. Chipping away a mountain little by little and eventually succeeded removing it.

This FW29 project is kind of like that. I am doing things little by little. Someday, someday I will get it done.

This week, drilled the body for mounting the rear suspension arms, cleaned up the tail structure (the piece with 2 wings sticking out). As usual with cast metal kit, the wings are a little bit on the thick side and required some shaving.

Thats' all for this week.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Recent Acquisitions

Again, not much to report on the progress of the Williams FW29. Only managed to clean a couple of white metal pieces.

Somehow, Amazon's algorithm has gotten smart enough to know that I am interested in 1/43 model cars and suggested to me the book titled "In The Beginning: The Early Days of 1/43 Modeling" by Wayne E. Moyer. I think it would be an interesting book to read. I will have a report once I finished reading it.


Originally, I was planning to participate again in WS43-san's "Everyone Let's Build" project this year. The subject is Mazda. When asked about which car is the most well known Mazda race car? The answer has to be the 787B that won Le Mans in 1991. So, I hunt down 2 787B kits, one from Provence Moulage and the other from Starter. And I bought reference materials. Then life threw me a big curve ball and I have to drop the plan. Now that things have settled down, it is already October and at my building speed, there is absolutely no way that I can complete building anything before the deadline. I hope I will be able to join the project again next year.

Anyway, one of those reference materials that I bought was a book on Japanese Group C cars. Back then, other than Mazda, Nissan and Toyota were also competing in FIA Group C. There is a special article on Toyota's effort and it is from there that I learned about Toyota 94C-V. The car competed in Le Mans in 1994, almost winning 1st place overall,  ended up finishing 2nd overall and took 1st place in LMP1 class. So when I came across a kit from Starter on eBay, I just could not resist the urge to buy.