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.
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