Ryurai Kai Suppression Vanguard custom

Took around 5 weeks to complete, on and off of course interspersed with family life and activity. All-in-all I really like the design of this model, it has a real chunky, thick-armour feel and is the closest match to what I can only describe as a walking tank!

The addition of the gatling gun was a bit of a whim, but it did give me the idea to call it the "suppression vanguard  with the idea of this machine being a pure, frontline mech with artillery and ballistics combined. Its heavy armour would make it ideal for initialising battlefield operations by laying down a spray of gatling cannon bullets along side long-range artillery, enabling other forces for drive forward with less challenge.

In summary, assembly was easy and straightforward, the inner frame gets very loose, very quickly and the model does suffer a lot from "droop". The additional armour bits are really cool, although I kind of ran out of steam to detail those parts properly so they returned to the box where perhaps future frame arms will utilise them. Would I get another frame arms model? Yes, if i like the design of course. Some final pictures below:

Late November Gunpla Update

Hello Gunplanatics! It's been an action packed weekend of blowing up balloons, wrapping presents and putting up decorations in celebration of my sons 3rd birthday, so not much Gunpla wise has actually happened. Despite that, I did receive some new things from HLJ, and purchased some amazingly awesome things in the recent sales, even though I can't really afford it.

Anyways, here is a short video of me rambling in your face about stuff:

Ryurai kai continues this coming weekend with some detailing, panel lining and decalling. Should have it all wrapped up pretty soon.

Ryurai Kai - WIP 3

Quite a productive weekend this for a change, well, that and I had a lovely day off work on Wednesday and spent it all painting. All airbrushing now completed.

Managed to do a lovely Norwegian flag on one of the shoulder armour parts - take a look in the video below which is mostly me unmasking things.. :)

With a little luck, should have this completed by next weekend. Got to give it a gloss coat, do some decal work and some panel lining, then we're done :)

Ryurai Kai - WIP 2

With a rudimentary thought of colour scheme now figured out, the work on painting and slightly modifying has begun. I decided to make the grey parts a light blue, with a shading of royal blue. On top of this, with some masked off parts will be a JA grey. I also scribed in some additional lines in the leg armour - to better the separation on the masked parts and to serve as additional detail. Further colours are yet to be decided but I am leaning towards a beige, along with some stripy motif of some kind.

Took me forever it seems just to prime the gray parts. Once it was all primed (after several airbrush clogs and cleans) I had already lost half the day, and doing the masking and first undercoat of royal blue took up the rest. Lessons learned here - if your brush is consistently clogging, your not thinning it enough. Although I trusted the primer to be adequately thinned for my needs, it was a false presumption. I knew I bought a bottle of thinner from plamo UK for a reason.. Next time it will run smoother I hope.

Once the royal blue was completed, it left a bobbly, dirty residue, in which after some deliberation I decided to stick with as a "texture detail", some of course would grin with a sceptical comment about laziness, they would probably in all fairness be half right :)

Anyway, a video of the preceding described WIP below. Turned out quite nice in the end, and with the discovery of the additional Gatling cannon hidden in my spare parts bin, this Ryurai-Kai I have decided to title:

"Model 38 Ryurai-Kai: Suppression vanguard"

Now I need to hunt for some suitable decals :)

Thanks for watching and reading, more soon!

Frame Arms: Ryurai Kai first impressions

Throughout the week I have been doing the usual cutting/sanding, getting the most laborious task out of the way in preparation for assembly this weekend. 

Now it is complete, I can summarise it as a pretty enjoyable build, with a few flaws and some cool extras. Lets start with the problems. The frame itself. Its loose and flimsy. It may be just my copy, but I had to unfortunately glue it in some places otherwise the legs would be coming off by a gentle breeze. Some parts were a little tough to fit, while other parts snapped on a little weirdly and sat at odd angles (the plates of additional armour on the front of the legs a prime example). 

Model 38 Type 1 Ryurai Kai Frame Arms

Now for the good stuff. It looks amazing. To my surprise it came with some alternative armour parts I was not expecting. This way, you can wither make it the mean-looking, heavily armoured artillery type or the more streamlined, infantry type. The benefit to this of course is that I can paint all the parts, and effectively get two models out of it! 

Will I get another one? Well, maybe. On looks alone it's totally up my street. On build, I enjoinder it but when parts started to drop off with no effort at all I could not help feeling disappointed  In balance though, it gets a thumbs up for sure. Coming up next time, let' see how well it paints :) 

Here's a vid of the assembly: