PG Astrays - WIP 5

Too much bending is bad for the joints

In WIP 4, the foot armor was left in the undercoat silver. Having decided to do a Blue Frame, I picked up the candy blue spray from a hardware shop nearby and started painting the armor parts.

Parts waiting for the paint to dry

 

Also mentioned in the previous post that leg will be split into 2 sections: The upper and lower leg. This is to not mix up too many parts together. Another reason is my box is not big enough for all the armor and inner frame parts to go in. By doing this I get to reduce the workload and hopefully don't get burnout too soon.

Starting with one side of the upper leg, the nub marks have been removed. They are waiting to be prep for painting. The thighs will have a total of 4 different colors which consist of gunmetal, light gunmetal, silver and gold.

Parts of the thighs before and after spraying

 

As with all 3rd party kits, the parts doesn't fit in together properly and some strength will be required. In order to avoid pulling my hand muscle while assembling the kit, I recently acquired a mini vice for MYR 5 from Daiso. It is small enough to put in my bag and easy to install. It has a suction at the bottom to hold the vice in place.

 

Mini vice

 

It does its job but some care will be needed when using on a painted kit. You will have to properly place pieces for the vice to grip. If done correctly, the pieces will snap together without any issue but if done wrong, the vice will take off some paint from the pieces. I'm thinking of putting some sponge or some kind of protection at the mouth to protect the paint job.

 

With the pieces painted, detailed, panel lined and assembled, this is the outcome of the upper leg of the BF:

 

360° of the thighs

 

Following the same process in WIP 4 for detailing the pipes at the feet, the pipes on the upper legs are colored blue.

 

Bending mechanism of the upper legs

 

This is the best feature of all Perfect Grade kits. The working mechanism of the inner frames. How they interlock with each other and moves accordingly. From my perspective, building a Perfect Grade is the closest thing you can get to building an actual Gundam.

 

I'm not sure if the issue lies with me, the kit or the quality of the product. While I was admiring the bending mechanism of the upper leg (maybe a little too much), a part broke.

 

 Broken connection

 

I tried to use Mr. Cement S and super glue but that did not fix the problem. It will be ok if I were to bend it up but when I do it the other direction, the part will break again. Any suggestions on how to rectify this issue? Worse case scenario is to manually move the armor parts if I position the legs and hide the broken part as best as I can.

 

Now that the upper leg is done, it is now time to start on the bottom leg. Originally my plan was to complete both the upper leg for BanDai and Daban but decided to just complete the entire leg for one brand first and then start on the other.