Delays

I’ll admit, this build is taking quite a long time. That is because I am trying to do a full body weathering job. I still don’t have a lot of experience with weathering, so I have to (and want to) take my time. If I don’t have a couple of solid hours on a given night to work on the model. I simply won’t try. Lately, the problem has been more that I haven’t had the energy to build, but there’s not much of a difference between “I don’t have X hours to spare” and “I can’t stay awake for X hours”.

Last night, I took a look at my pile of finished pieces and realized I had almost - but not quite - enough of them to justify writing about. I decided to grit my teeth and stay up a bit late to knock out a few more.

Runners

First things first - this is made out a lot of runners. A lot of small, oddly shaped runners to be precise:

I cannot think of an obvious reason why, say, the three black runners couldn’t have been combined into one large one. Same thing with the brown runners. I’d understand if they were separated out by body part, but that clearly isn’t true in all cases. Whatever the reason for this layout, I thought it might be nice. My theory was that small runners would mean less time spent hunting down pieces in a sea of monochrome plastic. That turned out to be true, but it was offset by the fact that it hasn’t been as easy as usual to mentally map each runner to its ID (A, B1, B2, etc). For instance, you’d think the two small, thin, black runners might be labeled B1 and B2. Instead, they are A2 and D2. Meanwhile, the two brown runners are B1 and E. Any time I have to look for a new part, I end up digging through the entire box to figure out which runner I actually need.

PS - I haven’t forgotten the fact that the kit comes with a piece of wire. We’ll get to that eventually.

Machine Gun

The drum-fed Zaku II machine gun is by far one of the most iconic weapons in the entire Gundam metaseries:

Just by looking at the pieces here, it is clear that this is not that gun. Not even close:

These parts are very boxy, and there is no sign of the long stock found on the original gun. But I do think it is going to look pretty cool in its own way.

This one was fun to weather. I started with a coat of black satin paint, followed by a generous layer of gunmetal modeling compound. After that, it was a matter of adding some scratches, scrapes, and rust. Here is the finished result:

Hmmmmmmmm. This looks an awful lot like a Thompson sub-machine gun with the drum barrel mounted on the side. That is a very different look than the typical Zaku gun, but I am going to convince myself that it makes sense here. This is a secondary gun for the Zaku Sniper, a backup if you will. It makes sense to make it as light and compact as possible.

I think the weathering came out very well. All the paint and modeling compound makes it look a lot more like a gun and less like a piece of plastic.

For the sake of comparison, here is the gun next to two other, more traditional Zaku machine guns:

Feet

Lots to talk about here, so I’m breaking out the h3 tags.

Weathering

I wanted the bottoms of the feet (the black parts) to be covered in sand, and the tops (the tan parts) to look dirty and scuffed. The tops came out nicely, but the bottoms? Not so much. The sand doesn’t quite look gritty and grainy enough. Either I need to use a lighter touch next time, or devise a way to strip off some of the paint to make it less more uniform. Maybe I could add some more colors to - just a touch of black or brown might help it look more like real sand.

Parts Separation

Compared to a modern High Grade Zaku II, the Zaku Sniper is severely lacking in parts separation. However, that’s not really a knock against the Zaku Sniper so much as it is a complement to the modern High Grade Zakus, which somehow manage to incorporate features originally found in Real Grades and make them even better. Compared to most standard HG kits, the Zaku Sniper’s part count is par for the course.

Articulation

This is what’s going on inside of the foot:

This is a fairly complicated combination of polycaps that can actually rotate up adn out. This gives the foot (or really the leg) a crazy amount of forward tilt.

Yeah … that doesn’t look nearly as impressive in a still image. Trust me, it is way more impressive in real life.

And hey, there’s a glimpse of the leg, so let’s take a look at the rest.

Lower Legs

Weathering

I went a bit overboard with the weathering on the legs, especially that long stretch of rust on the left thigh:

Overall, it doesn’t look quite as bad now as it did the night of the build, but I know I can do better.

One thing I am proud of is this scratch I painted into the knee:

This is an idea that came straight from that detailing guide, one that I attempted in multiple places across both legs. This is the only one that ended up looking good (it is also the only one I applied to a flat surface, so maybe that has something to do with it).

Kick Stand

Let’s take a closer look at that sweet kick stand on the right knee. It replaces the normal knee armor, and it folds up nice and flat:

When extended, it folds out quite far. You have no idea how much easier it makes kneeling poses like this:

Let’s zoom in a bit to look at a particularly nifty detail:

Look at the shape of the plastic here. When the kickstand flips out, it locks into place so that it doesn’t collapse under the weight of the model. Clever!

Seam Lines

Generally speaking, I don’t mind seam lines on my model kits. This may be due in part to the fact that modern kits try hard to hide them, but even when they _are visible, I don’t tend to notice them.

That’s not the case here. The seam lines running up both thighs are noticeable and unseemly. The good news is that they’ll be mostly obscured once the skirt armor is in place, but nevertheless this is the first time that I’ve felt the urge to go get some seam line remover.

Conclusion

The weathering isn’t quite what I had in mind, but after showing it to Mrs. Wolfe (and getting some compliments), I am at peace with the end result. Practice makes perfect after all, and I feel like I learned a lot already that I can apply to the upper half of the body.

Other Thoughts

• Normally, polycaps in a model kit are numbered (ie. PC1, PC2, etc). On this kit, they use letter designations (PCa, PCb, etc). I think I like the letters better, though I'm not sure why. Maybe it has to do with the fact the the particular polycaps for this model are unusually unique in their shape and size:

  
• Normally I build the weapons first, and _then_ the mobile suit. Or vice versa. But this time around, I felt a bit intimidated by the sniper rifle, which is why I segued from the machine gun to the feet. I intend to finish the rest of the Zaku, then switch back to the rifle and backpack.