Gundam WiP – Points of Interest

by | Mar 28, 2012

So this is where I am at present, after a few hours work this evening, I've assembled the shoulder housing and finished both arms. Assembly is proving to be slow going, partly because everything needs to be repainted to a varying degree once it comes off the sprues. If I ever do a Gundam again (which won't be any time soon), I'll be taking a radically simplified approach to the painting so the "tidying up" stage for each piece is a lot quicker.

Plus I've had a bit of a disaster with the electrics at home which meant my painting space was unusable for a few days. All fixed now though. 


I'm going to briefly talk about something we normally don't have to worry about painting Warhammer miniatures, articulation. Thanks to Swelter for their comments, which prompted me to think about this. Thoughts after the cut.

The Gundam Master Grade kits have a lot points of articulation. I've identified three obvious points here, but the blue air vent housing on the torso is also slightly hinged to give the torso flexibility.
This is a close up shot of one of the shoulder pods and as you can see, it has a hinged element, which allow the shoulder pods to swing up and down, giving the arms freedom of movement. Until I started assembling these pieces, I had no idea that little hinge was there.
The hands (two for each arm) all have varying degrees of articulation. This "fist" hand only has an articulated thumb in addition to the wrist joint. The other hands (which we'll come to) have slightly more articulation.
And finally, here are all the points of articulation on the right hand side of the model and within the torso. I may have missed some. But as you can see, there is quite a lot going on here. These things are designed to be highly poseable.

Now this will be great for standing the model up in a variety of interesting ways when I'm done building (haha), but it is a pain for assembly. The reasons for this are threefold.

1. The kit is precision moulded in a way that far outstrips anything that Citadel does. It is designed to fit cleanly together in its raw plastic state. Even a thin application of paint (as done via an airbrush) messes this up and means that things don't stick together as cleanly as they should. More importantly, it makes joints sticky or almost impossible to move without cleaning some of the paint off. Of course if you move too much paint off and remove some of the plastic, the joint becomes very loose, which is even worse!

2. Actually gripping the model to move the joints means your fingers are rubbing paint off the model.

3. Moving the joints causes the paint to come off around the joints.

So that's where I am at for the moment. Articulation as a blessing and a curse.

I'll finish with a spot of trivia. The height of the Gundam 00 Raiser, according to the Gundam Wiki, is 18 metres tall. This makes this mecha somewhat taller than a Warhound Titan and only slightly shorter than a Reaver Titan. Fortunately, I'm only working at 144 scale, as I'm not sure where I'd fit a Gundam kit that was to the same scale as Forgeworld's fabulous Titan kits!