MG RX-78-2 Gundam V3 – Gunpla.Paulie.Cool

Head Down, Chest Out

Posted on December 17, 2024December 17, 2024 by pauliegon

After completing the little fight jet thingy, I’m finally getting into the meat of the mech — the chest unit, backpack, and head.

One of my favorite things about Master Grades that continues in this particular model is the ease of assembly, but even with each design iteration some frustrating things remain.

The RX-78 head came together fairly easily, but even after disassembling and reassembling it several times, I could not get the “cap” of the head to fit flush with the other pieces. There’s a noticeable gap and it doesn’t feel like it fits quite right.

The good news is I got the eye sticker straight on the first try, and since we always celebrate the small victories, I will carry this rare achievement forward.

Even if the V crest falls off if you look at it wrong, but at this point it’s a tradition and why mess with that?

Next up was the chest unit, which was probably the fastest I’d ever put together an RX-78 chest, but I was pleasantly surprised that the yellow slats in the chest were actual moving slats. This is my first MG version of the model, so it was a first for me, but I got a kick out of actually being able to move those things after all these years.

The one part that seems off for now is the yellow collar piece on the chest unit doesn’t seem to be very secure. It wasn’t so loose that it just fell off with gravity, but I found that it easily disengaged with only slight pressure, so it’s something I’ll have to keep in mind when attached other pieces to the chest unit and posing it.

The last big thing from this session was the backpack, which had a lot of extremely thin stickers that I needed to apply to the nozzles. You know I hate stickers, but I got some new tweezers and I managed to get all eight stickers applied without too many issues.

As an added bonus, they were all straight with no wrinkles! Another rare sticker achievement on my part. But I still hate stickers. #decals4lyfe

The backpack also has transparent pieces inside the rocket nozzles, which is a nice touch, but I think from an aesthetic standpoint they’d look better if they’d been tinted an orange or an orange-red color. If I’m feeling froggy, I might paint these later on down the road.

Once I got all these pieces assembled together, I could finally see the size and detail that this MG model will have and I’m happy with what I have so far. It’s a nice, clean model of an old standby. They’ve had 40 some odd years to learn lessons and get things right, and I’m liking what I’m seeing.

Here are the tools and discard piles from this section. We also emptied out another sprue:

One Little Ship

Posted on December 9, 2024December 9, 2024 by pauliegon

This is the first MG build that I’ve done in well over a year, having taken time off to do traditional vehicle and aircraft models for awhile.

I also just completed the gold-plated RG Unicorn Gundam, which went as smooth as silk, but I was really looking forward to getting back into my favorite grade of Gundam models.

The MG RX-78-2 that I’m working on now is the third version of this model type and it includes a little ship that the pilot can scoot around in when he inexplicably doesn’t want to pilot a giant robot war machine.

One of the great things about a Master Grade model is that the pieces tend to be larger, making them easier to handle and assemble with less room for error or breakage compared to HG and RG types.

However, we have this wee ship that we’re supposed to assemble, so the pieces are kind of small, but one of the things that immediately became apparent was that I was going to have to bring out the file and polisher.

The Gold Plated Unicorn Gundam I’d just assembled had spoiled me–the pieces were mounted to the sprues in a way that any stress or similar marks from the mounting points would be either hidden when assembled or under-gated if they were going to be seen. The plating also turned out to be surprisingly forgiving and I didn’t really need to do any filing, sanding, or polishing on the pieces.

But I got snapped back to reality real quick on this guy. All of the blue and red pieces needed to have at least some sort of filing & sanding with a subsequent polish to remove sprue marks from the pieces.

Depending on the type of plastic used, these marks stand out like a sore thumb, especially on colored pieces, so a lot of time can be spent cleaning-up the pieces before they’re assembled, so it can be slow going at times.

For this ship, the red and blue pieces would be the ones I’d have to clean up. The clear and white pieces don’t really need much work because you can’t see the imperfections too much (I always check after assembly to be sure and if it’s obvious, I’ll take them apart and clean them up as well).

Other than that, the little ship went together smoothly. It has a couple of transformation options, with folding wings, and a nose assembly that can either be retracted into the main body or fully extended.

It’s not a piece that’s incorporated into the main Gundam body, so it’s an accessory. That makes it an odd choice to be the first thing to assemble (instead of with all the other accessories and weapons at the end), but it turned out to be fortuitous by allowing me to get back in the habit of filing and polishing pieces before working on the main Gundam parts themselves.

By completing the ship, I also emptied my first sprue, which has to be a record. They almost always design these things so that you’re basically using all the sprues until nearly the very end, but this one had a sprue dedicated just to this ship.

I’ve also included a picture below showing all the tools I used for this part of the model. It’s something I always wished more people would include in their videos and pictures of their model builds — they always show the model itself, but not all the tools they used to complete it, so that’s why I include a pic at the end of all these posts.

Master Grade RX-78-2 V3

Posted on December 3, 2024December 3, 2024 by pauliegon

Oddly enough, out of all the RX-78 models I’ve done, this is the first Master Grade version that I’ve started. This model in particular is V 3.0, so it has some updates to the model construction, as well as a separate little ship that wasn’t in the original anime or models.

I’m looking forward to this one, since it’s been awhile since I’ve done an MG, but also curious to see what the main differences are between this construction and a High or Real Grade version of the RX-78.