Mule

While a perfect transformation would be great, I just don't think it is a physical possibility. As stated in some other threads, there is a lot of anime magic happening with that plane. I opted for the big swapable parts. I know not many here will agree with me on that. I would not be a fan of replacing the whole torso, but the lower legs, and the cod piece may be a necessity. I don't play with my Yamato VFs too much. I have them out for display more than as toys. For display reasons, I'd rather have a YF-19 that looks great in all modes than have a perfect transformation that looks great in one mode, okay in another and outright craptastic in the third. My $.02

There is a lot to resolve in this last episode. We'll just have to see what they come up with. I am hoping to see a VF-1 though. Although I doubt they'll do it, I wish they would make a movie version. I think it would flow better than the OVA. Since the episodes have been so short, they just seem kind of disjointed to me. Maybe once I see all of them together, my feelings will change.

Thanks for the scribing and rivets suggestions! This thread has been most useful.

Are there any CA glues out there with at least some work time? I've had very little experience with resin, but the CA glue I used bonded almost instanly. So the position that the parts were in when they made initial contact contact is the position they stayed in.

Are there templates or something to remake sanded off or putty filled rivets? Also, what is the best tool to use for remaking rivet marks? How about the best tools for rescoring pannel lines?

That sounds like a great Idea. I'd hate to buy a whole super kit only to have to exlude half of it. Besides, I've got a VF-1S sitting around with nothing to do

I haven't looked at this thread until now. This is utterly fabulous work. I love the thruster bell. keep it up!

I think it and his other works look great. And the price ain't that bad at all. In a drawing class I had in college, I was told that a good price for your work is to charge minimum wage for all the hours you spent working on it. That plus materials would put it much over the $135 he's asking.

I use Tamiya and Gunze and Future for a sealer. I haven't run into the 'soft' issue that you described.

Darkening every single panel line is overkill. I also feel that panel line pre or post shading is a bad idea. On real planes, some panels do have a shading around them, but that is usually because something is leaking between them, or the seam isn't aligned right and a mist of dirt gets caught in the wind shadow. The reason it seems to look good on some models, is that it causes a mottled effect so the surface of the plane isn't all one color, but on closer analysis it just looks wrong. It's become one of the easiest tests for me to tell it a plane in a picture is real or a model. The best way to determine if a line should be shaded or even visible it to look at pictures of the real thing, or in sci-fi modeling's case, something simmilar.

I've been avoiding the VF-0 models (and toys if and when they come out). The design is too much like a VF-1 of which I have 2 yet to build. But if they make a VF-0D, I think my willpower will fail me. The box art is really cool. I do agree that it's about time for another Hasagawa Macross box art calendar.

I'm so confused I thought Hasegawa didn't renew the license on the VF-1 planes. Guess that changed. Love the box art, but I already have one of these that will never get built

Babylon 5 also has exellent space combat concepts. Mac Plus still had the planes flying as though they were in an atmosphere (go where the nose is pointing). In space the direction the nose is pointing is unrelated to the direction you are flying.

I go with the Tamiya thinner for thinning and Windex for cleaning. That's partially based on the recomendation or our resident modeling instructor, WM_Cheng, but also based on experience. I've tried using PolyScale thinner with Tamiya paints and it seemed to cause the pigment to clump up clogging my airbush in short order. Since then, I've only used the Tamiya thinner for Tamiya paints. PollyScale thinner still seems to work with Future and Gunze-Sanyo paints.

Great idea! I've been looking for a place to store my 1:1 VF-1 model squadron. The wife is getting a little tired of having them being parked in the yard. Air tight doesn't mean hurricane proof. A ziplock bag is air tight, but I wouldn't want to sit out a storm in one or take it into space.

A friend of mine that used to work on flight sims for Boeing in St. Louis told me of a poster he saw of a Super Hornet with a load of 14 AMRAAMs. One on each wing tip rail, one on each outer wing hard point, two each on the middle and inner wing hard points and one on each fuselage hard point. He may have been mistaken about the wing tip rails. Those may have been AIM9s, although he does know his missiles. Not really a practical loadout, but a pretty impressive picture.

I've got a 1/100 Glaug almost done, but I took time out to build an F-18E for my dad as a gift. For my next trick, I might try to finish the VF-1S that I started on over a year ago... Nah

I'm new to it as well, so if I were to answer the same question in a month, the answer may be different. For now, I just layer it up until I don't see the depression anymore then sand the whole thing down. It seems to be easier to sand off than putty, so a slight glob isn't as tough to remove as a glob of putty or CA glue. One thing I have noticed is that with very small pits, you need to jab the stuff in the hole. If you don't it will just sit on top of the hole and when you sand it off, there's the hole again.

I've seen large firecrackers make mushruoom clouds under the right conditions. It's caused a large expansion of gas in the first part of the explosion then a rapid contraction coming back in and billowing up in the second part.

I've been using Mr. Surfacer 1000 on my current model. It goes on great with a small brush for pretty precise coverage, and I've been cleaning it with Testors laquer thinner. It takes several applications to fill in most things like ejector pin pits, wayword scribing mistakes, shallow seam gaps, etc... but I'm quite happy with the results. I can't find 500 in this area right now, so I can't really give you a good comparison.

I've heard of some other folks on this board wanting to try that. Has anyone actually done it, or even started on one? Just wondering what the experience was like and how things were turning out.

I used 90lb card stock. That worked fine for a monster scaled to fit on 8.5 x 11 inch sheets. Some large areas had to be reinforced by laminating another sheet underneath, but it worked out well. If you plan on making it larger, I'd go with heavier paper. The 8.5 x 11 scale is vaguely HO scale (measuring by height). I'd also suggest using an inkjet printer vs. a laser printer. I used the laser at work and the toner would flake off at the folds. I'm betting an ink print would fold better.

For those interested, he started putting up the how-tos. Great pictures, but Japanese descriptions That's what I get for not being multi-lingual.

With a little bit of cutting, it isn't too much of a stretch to get many of the planes into a partial GERWALK mode. The arms stay stowed while the legs are positioned forward.

I always tell myself models are cheaper too, until I look at how much I spend in paints, tools, and time. I have hundreds of dollars of tools and equipment. But the feeling of having built the thing myself beats the Hell out of buying a toy any day Too bad I don't have the mad skillz that these guys have. I'm still drooling over these creations.