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Here I dabbed some Mr. Sufacer 500 on all the sprue connection points to the pieces. The plastic is so soft (as I mentioned earlier) that its tough to get a clean slice when you are removing the excess sprue - so I thought this willl be safer to sand this portion down again.

I just love how all the pieces are designed so the seams follow the contours or panel lines of the aircraft. Additionally, the side packs, really hide where the top and bottom of the main fuselage comes together.

Here's a rear shot showing the lower plate in place with the added styrene "panels" so it prevents you from seeing into the "hollow" of the plane. Note I started to lay in some Mr. Surfacer 500 around the seams awaiting sanding (yah not!)

Here's the top side of the rear of the big underside fuselage piece that will cover this leg transformation section. I sanded off the center mold injection circular pin marking (you will see this when the model is completed) and I sanded down the trailing edges of the "doors" or bevelled the edges since it looks odd to have a squared rectangular surface on an aircraft. It kind of looks more like trailing surfaces of a wing now.

I noticed that when you glue the large underside fuselage plate in you are left with this huge gap at the rear of the plane. I guess, if I were truely nuts, I would scratch build the bottoms of the foot assembly in this space. I looked through all my line art and animation cells to search for a detail for this area and couldn't find any - they mostly drew this bird from the front or in the animation cells, they conveniently blacked it out. So I decided to add a panel to close in this area. I had some styrene sheets what was corrugated (same stuff I used to close in the Valkyrie tail when I didn't have the photo-etched part) - I think they sell them in model train stores as siding material for scale buildings. I trimed them to fit into the space following the same angles as the tail plane.

Here we have the cockpit further along with a little oil wash to pick out some of the recesses. I drew in some controls and yellow warning details on the forward control panels and detailed the throttle and joystick. I realize that I probably won't see much of the interior when the canopy is closed - oh well, I think I may of gone a little overboard. However, the cockpit will require a ton of extra work if you want to display it with the canopy open (lots of those little tiny ribbon wiring). So I've chosen to close the cockpit behind the canopy on this bird. The pilot is painted in the background, I used the cover to one of the "This is Animation" Macross Plus books as reference. The black lines are drawn in with a gundam marker, the helmut was painted silver, then a dark gun metal and finally a clear blue for the glass pieces. Hasegawa was kind enough to provide decals for the helmut glass sections, but they were black, and I wanted a bluish look to it.

Hi all,

I am back at it again - still no work yet, the film business is really slow in Toronto, so if you guys have any producer friends, convince them to come up to Toronto to film

I've finally started on the YF-21 (gotta make room for that VF-0 at Christmas time!) Boy its nice to work on a Hasegawa kit again (they are nice and well engineered). First off, the plastic is so much softer - the Bandai kits seem to have harder more brittle plastic. So it took a little getting used to back in this kit, becareful you don't cut too much plastic away when trimming the pieces off the sprue. What struck me is the fact that this kit has some pretty huge honking pieces - which also translates into a quick easy build. So far it seems as though this YF-21 is the easiest of all the Hasegawa Macross series to build. I think the tough sell here is trying to make the blue paint scheme look convincing - again, its in the final paint stage where this kit comes alive. I think I might vary the blues in the panels a bit, and vary the finish (gloss/matte) on the surfaces like the Yukikaze Mave model to give it some interest. Doing post-shading on dark colours is always difficult to show though - I might experiment with a lighter post shading (an reverse effect maybe). Well see.

On to the first section which is the cockpit area. It all came together pretty easy, there are some really small parts. This picture shows the initial dark grey background that I painted first with a few metallic grey highlights.

Man, I really feel for ya!! Sh@t happens sometimes and it will probably take more time to figure out what really happened than to strip it down and redo.

We are here for you brother

Yes, they were at Pacific Mall. Oh, I didn't know that Pacific Hobbies were affiliated with Advanced Hobbies, I've been there once or twice, but found that they catered to the R/C crowd. Does this mean that Advanced hobbies would be carrying japanese models now??

Hey I bought that kit too - must of been 6 or 7 years ago. It was tiny, around 7 inches at 1/1400 scale eh? I remember trying to mask and spray that aztec pattern on the hull and doing the decals in photoshop and getting them laser printed onto decal paper - boy that brings me back a while. Here's a shot of it.

Hey UN Spacy,

Its pretty much a great model out of the box. I was just a bit anal. I think it would look amazing without any of the work - its so well engineered, I would highly recommend it to any trek fan.

The only bit of caution to those planning on building it is, follow the instruction steps to the letter (I skipped ahead to paint and fill and sand) where the engine struts connect to the warp nacelles and where it connects to the secondary hull is a really tight fit. You really need to attach them to the nacelles while they are still halved so that you can push back behind the nacelles. Then you really have got to jam them into the secondary hull - I had to pad it up with tissues and use a big pair of pliers to push the pieces together. But once your are done - it is a very solid and permanent connection. I found gluing most of the assembly ends up making the overall model much more solid.

Good Luck.

Yep, thats the one, great stuff. What I like even more is the 50498 Solvent (comes a metal can). It really good a cleaning clogged airbrushes.

Unfortunately even US shipping still dings me with really bad customs & duty, then brokerage by the shipper, and of course 15% tax (PST & GST). We are taxed to death in Canada!! Any good Canadian online retailers?

Hey guys,

I case some of you are interested in why the delay from the Hasegawa YF-21 - I've been temporarily distracted. Take a look here...

http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?...26&t=1293&st=0&

Hope you like it, its kind of a toy, so I didn't take as much care as I would a "rear" model and left some of the assemby seams.

I would highly recommend this kit to any Trek fans out there. Its just a little pricy.

I love how they lit the warp nacelles and the impulse reactors.

Oh yeah, I airbrushed the front clear deflector array in a clear blue and gradiated it to a darker blue near the edges. The included piece was just clear.

Hey all,

This is what I've been doing for the past few days. I thought it would be a really easy build 3-4 hours since it was all painted and everything - but a few things bugged me and I ended up taking up more time to correct them. Overall it's an excellent kit, amazingly well engineered and its lit to boot! Additionally, the entire kit is pre-painted with all the subtle aztec panelling and really fine federation stenciling. After seeing what they could accomplish in printing these kits on these complicated surfaces, Yamato has no excuses in giving us a sticker sheet for a $200 toy! I pretty much built it straight out of the box, but I did drill out the lower arboretum windows (large blue ones) on the secondary hull and the rear lounge windows behind the bridge on the primary saucer section. I don't get why these were just printed on, there was obviously light behind them. I filled all the windows in with Krystal Keeler - a kind of white glue that dries absolutely transparent and glossy to simulate the windows instead of just drilled holes. Lastly the biggest job was to eliminate the crack/seam separating the two halves of the warp nacelles. Of course since I had to fill and sand the seams, I had to spend the next 2 hours trying to mix paint to match the pre-painted surfaces so I can repair what I sanded. I also filled in the crack/seam in the front of the saucer section that just stood out like that ugly gap in your front teeth (those who own this model knows what I am talking about). Overall I think I found a pretty good match and I am happy with it - its kind of a cross between a toy and model. Here's some shots, excuse the blurriness, I didn't properly set up a tripod for these slow exposures to show off the lights.

Hey fellow Torontonians and GTA MWers!

Pacific Hobbies is gone - sniff... sniff... Man it was a good hobby store - now where can I go for models? I know about Animextreme on Spadina, they have toys, but the model selection is pretty dismal - lots of Gundam (like everywhere else ). There is also Fata models also on Spadina, but their model selection is really small too. I hate waiting for HLJ and paying the exorborant duties and taxes, but are there no more good hobby stores that sell Japanese models besides Gundam??? Pacific hobbies was the only store that I have seen that had almost the entire line of Hasegawa Macross kits in stock.

Please let me know if there are other bricks & motar alternatives.

Damn! they are re-issueing a VF-1S Roy's colours?? I wish I knew - its too expensive for me to get it again Its one of my favourite colours schemes - I guess Hikaru's VF-1S will have to do...

Yes, I did an oil wash on my 1/48 Yamato Valk - I mixed up a light grey for the panel lines and a darker grey for the moveable surfaces - black is still too contrasty. The wash is a much finer line than marker - plus you can mix the colour to your liking.

Nope, I haven't recieved my decal set yet, Anasazi has been kind enough to let me know whats happening, there was a screw up with his decal paper supplier, so he is behind a week or so. He didn't expect over 90 orders from us - so he's trying his best to keep up with demand. I will post a soon as I recieve them and apply them to my naked bird.

Hey mechamaniac,

Its the same process I use for my plastic models. Look here: http://www.macrossworld.com/cgi-bin/mwf/ik...=8;t=4555;st=20 Its on page 2 about 3/4 the way down - I hope it helps. I used the same stuff on the fast pack - just artist oil paints thinned down with low-odour varsol (mineral spirits). I didn't leave the stuff on too long on the silver painted stuff (you never know - but it was fine) - but its safe on the coloured plastics.

First you need to have the thinner made for it - I don't thin it down as much as paint - but maybe 2:1 clearcoat:thinner sounds about right. Basically you want as thick of a clear-coat as your airbrush can handle without clogging up (clear-coats especially flat/matte tends to clog up in the airbrush faster than paints) - the thinner is just to make it flow better. So its an experiment with your particular airbrush and the paint, but I usually use 2:1 or so - I don't really measure. I vary it sometimes too, like white would be 3:1 or even 4:1, but dark or metallics could be 1:1 or 2:1. Good luck.

I hope my wife lets me buy the Hikaru VF-1S and the fast packs together I don't know if I can wait for them to be separated again

Hey Recon, I just painted them by hand with a brush - the old fashion method. Its a small enough area, and the delineation between the parts are pretty clear. I still need to give the nozzles that little spritz of black, the silver is too bright, and the little black hole at the end looks a little out of place.

Is anyone bugged that the packs came in green instead of the blue that we saw in the Yamato photos? I would of personally preferred the blue - more DYRL like. Just nitpicking... Don't shot me.

Still can't put this toy down - just love it to bits still.

I'm one of those unlucky few that even has a bit of that problem when I roll it without the fast packs. It doesn't collapse, but it does move back a bit - especially now with the fast packs - so I don't think I'll tempt fate and make an already poor situation worst. Unless I can figure out a way of tightening it though.

Man, I am one of those who rolls it around - I mean its a toy!, and I zoom it around too - I don't necessarily do that to my models, but I can with this toy!