mickyg

This thread is so full of awesome it's insane! I just saw that first YouTube link above an nearly cried -that's probably the first Lego space set I ever had and I'd totally forgotten about it until now. Good times...

Beautiful! Very, very nice work.

I had a bit of time over my lunch break today to do a mini photo shoot. The colours are a bit more accurate now, compared to the majority of the ones above, which were taken on my iPhone (a few were from the "good" camera). Having said that, the blue on Michael's 25G are not that vivid or bright in real life (at least on my monitor, that is). Everything else looks pretty close.

Awesome!

I should probably add that I managed to fix the NUNS triangle with a truckload of patience, a flat surface, some wax paper to set all the parts on, super glue, and a bit of baking soda to fill the gaps. The wax paper keeps the parts from sticking. It seems to be holding well and was fairly easy to sand the baking soda/super glue muck off the part when it dried. So far so good. The other broken parts are still sitting with a crack. Nothing has fallen off yet so I'm no rush to fix it just yet. Probably worth noting that if these parts are ABS (and I'm actually not sure) super glue is notoriously bad at bonding to this type of plastic. I'll just have to keep an eye on it.

Fantastic news! And given that release date, I might actually have a shot at getting one.

Thanks man! Your custom work is partly what gave me the inspiration to how it a go. That and I'm never happy with "out of the box" anymore! I've been meaning to take some better photos all week and just haven't had time. I think they'd do better justice to what this looks like in person. That said, weathering is in my plans. Flat coating too. The end result with the painting is a sort of semi gloss. And that won't hold any pastels or much of anything else for weathering. So that's a must. I've got lots of other things in line too so I expect the "finishing" will be pretty slow. Thanks for the comments all!

Awesome! How's the paint holding up and what sort did you use?

What's with the release date in Australia though? I thought it was Feb and when I go to book tickets, discovered it won't be here for a few months.

Thanks! I love your suggestions. I know they're likely to take me an eternity to attempt but I expect I'll give it a crack. I've never done a dot filter but have seen a few YouTube vids on the technique and it looks amazing. On a FM millenium falcon at least. Come to think of it, that has a very similar look to the armor. I have no idea how I'd apply that to the teal but as I said, your idea has real merit and I'd certainly e willing to try it out. And, I've got spare wings to practice on...

As in too light in the movie or too light on the toy? I aimed for being as close in colour to the movie as I could. I do think there's an awful lot of contrast between the armor and the Valk itself. It's certainly not as pleasing as say, the VF-25 series (especially the G variant).

Agreed completely! I forgot to mention that ie got plans for that too. And the real question remains: would any of it be weathered out in deep space?

Wow! Love your choice on this one. Looks great!

I had my first chance to play with the Trumpeter riveting tool tonight and it was a great experience! I'm working on the Airfix A6M2b kit and needed to add some rivets for a few wing panels. It was my first attempt at riveting and it went really well! I also had my first go at creating some missing details with a scribing tool. These also turned out really nice. I'm beginning to think I'm becoming a card carrying model geek...

That is unreal! I built a Legioss when I was kid and still can't believe I never even took photos of the darned thing. Now we have real contention for a Lego produced Macross kit. I'd buy several!

Things like the metallic silver accents-they're all almost black if you look at the movie versions. I might still do that. But the overall finish is what I'm not yet sure about. I don't know if it looks "real" enough for my liking. I should also add a couple of general observations as well. The parts are moulded in blue and a very dark grey/brown. Any part that is blue, appears to be moulded in that colour. However, parts in the dark grey/brown are occasionally painted this colour. But no always. Why is this important? Parts that are unpainted (the nozzles, any blue areas, and any unpainted dark grey/brown) clean up very nicely with Windex or alcohol if you get any unwanted paint on them. Provided you're using Tamiya or Gunze acrylic paints, like I have. Parts that are painted not only don't seem to "let go" of the paint if you use Windex, but if you use alcohol or Tamiya Acrylic thinner (which is alcohol based) it will actually start working on the original paint, and you'll end up with an unwanted mix of your overspray and underlying paint. Does not make for a nice paint job - trust me. Acrylic washes are great, provided you use a very fine brush and don't just "blob it on" like you might with an artist's oil wash. The paint tends to stick a little too well to the base coat and is difficult to wipe off. Might be a no brainer but worth noting as it caught me out more than a few times. Bandai's paint applications are very, very good for a factory applied paint job. There's room for improvement of course but overall I was very impressed with how far things have come in the last 10 years.

I recently bought a VF-171 (CF Version) and Amored Parts set from a member here (thanks again Kurisama!) and decided to get to work on making it “Accurate” according to the second Macross Frontier movie. The TV version never shows the Nightmare “dressed up” unless it’s the EX version. While the movie version shows the CF version all armored up, but the colours are always grey. What to do? I figured I’ve got plenty of grey paints and an airbrush, so why not paint them? Here’s how I did it. After extensive screen caps of the movie, I made an educated guess that what's seen is basically a light and a dark grey. Easy enough. For the light grey, I went with “Light Ghost Gray” or FS36375 and for the darker gray, “Gunship Gray” or FS36118. The darker grey only got used on the chest armour, the "missile box" on the forearm/vertical stabilizer, and hinge parts for the shin armor, as the rest of the parts seemed to offer enough contrast with the darker plastic already there. Figuring disassembly would be the easiest approach to painting seperate colours, I hit my first hurtle - the chest piece was the only part I had any success breaking down. Luckily the rest of the parts were not terribly tricky to mask. I painted the bottom portion dark gray, and the top part light gray, being careful to incorporate the darker plastic for a “preshade” effect in the overall paint application. This may not be movie accurate but I like the look and contrast. I'm almost certain the middle chest piece should be the same as the outer parts, but decided to keep it as is. And then “tried it on” to see what I thought. Not bad… So here's what I had, after a bit of playing around, showing some parts painted, others in their natural "Blue" colour. Moving on to the other parts, I used Humbrol Maskol for the fine vents and grills, and thinly cut strips of Tamiya masking tape for everything else. A combination of tape and blue tac was used for the rocket nozzles (and they were a pain). Paint was applied in various coats, always being careful to use heavily thinned, semi transparent layers to give me a lot of leeway in the degree of “preshade” that came through. This was a good thing, because I had a lot of trouble getting the paint to spray properly. I ended up with a lot of spatter, which seems to come from not thinning the paint enough, and it drying on the tip. I usually get the paint consistency right, about halfway through my painting process. This time was no different. With it finally all painted, I concentrated on applying a very thinned wash of lightened black acrylic paint. I managed to thin a bit too “hot” with windex on one application, and removed some of the base paint on one leg armour piece. The rest went without too much problem, as I started thinning with plain water instead. I also applied a dark grey wash to the Valk itself, to help bring out some of the panel detail. Here it is, all properly dressed up now (with the parts just sitting on the Valk, not snapped in). While I'm not completely satisfied "it's done" I do feel it looks a lot more movie like now. Maybe some dry brushing with a lighter colour on the edges of the armor would be something worth trying? Any thoughts?

My thoughts exactly! I didn't think they'd do Frontier so soon and they have. And the VF-25 is so rarely seen without extras that it seems silly not to have that in the pipeline. They did a super for the original VF-1, so why not? I suppose you could argue that they've offered no "extras" for any of the other licenses they hold but that's not entirely true. For Zero, the VF-0S comes with the fast packs in the box. For Plus, well I'm thinking that goes against my argument. What about the VF-11 releases that are for "Macross the Ride"? That's money in molds that don't even feature on screen. With all that in mind, I think it's certainly possible that Hasegawa would cash in on some additional Frontier stuff. I'm happy to be wrong, of course.

Wait, I don't understand why hasegawa wouldn't release their own. Can someone run that by me again?

Nacelle is just the term for the elongated "pod" that houses the engine. In the case of a valk, usually the leg. Just a generic term that I probably use more often than I should.

Now they just need to announce Super, Armored and Tornado packs and I'll be all kinds of broke again!

Thanks! I actually knew about the engine warning stripe - I'm just as much an aviation nut as I am a Macross one. I should have explained better that I wanted the valk to keep those stripes as they're consistent across all VF-1 variants in the show. But if you study the NSAWC F-14A this build is inspired by, you don't see the nacelle stripes. I wanted to make sure this was consistent with the NSAWC theme, while still being unmistakably "Macross" when you look at it. I hope that makes better sense. Thanks or your comments! You guys all keep me wanting to finish this. EDIT: Just checked my own references and the stripe on the NSAWC Tomcat IS there, it's just not as long as it is on more common schemes (it doesn't cover the whole side of the nacelle). Carry on.

It's a really great kit for the money, and some of its detail surprises me. Take the seat adjustment for example, the rope is depicted, even! And the engine is also very nicely done with cooling fin detail that grabs a wash very nicely. There are some other "issues" with it though, like fiddly cockpit/fuselage fit. The top of the instrument panel glues to the top of the fuselage where the guns are and if that's not assembled properly, it pops the fuselage/gun part out of alignment with the rest of the fuselage. So test fitting everything here is a must. I did not, and had a difficult time filing things to get it all to sit right. It's still not right and will require some putty and sanding to correct. The wings are also undersized, compared to some 72 scale plans I've managed to print out. The panel lines are way too overscale for my liking as well. But overall, it's a great kit to throw together with a little bit of care and will certainly do the trick to get some motivation back to building a multitude of other kits that've been sitting. And did I mention it's cheap? Here's some more progress on the armor for the Nightmare Plus: I'm using Gunze Aquous Light Ghost Gray and "preshading" by actually post shading, I guess. The dark blue is so dark that if I just mist heavily thinned coats around the areas I want dark, and "fill in" the rest, it gives it a pretty good effect. The overspray I'll deal with later. I have a nice approach where I just "paint" the spray with a brush dipped in windex. I can wick the excess paint from anywhere that I can reach with my brush. I'm not sure I like the look yet, though. I thought it looked really good at first, but now I'm wondering if it looks too artificial. Any thoughts? Still more to do, obviously. Some parts are mostly done and the rest are just started.

Much appreciated! I definitely need a good kick in the pants occasionally. I'm glad I have this thread because I honestly forgot where I was with the build. I think I need to resolve the intake trunk painting and then work on the corroguard on the intake and leading edges of the wings (that's the stuff that looks like metal on a tomcat, in the same places). And then I think I need to work on the landing gear a bit and she'll be nearly ready for a final couple of clear coats.

Got too weeks off work and do you think I can he any time on this? Nada... I am building an Airfix Zero though. While that's a distraction, I'm sure, it's also a strategic move to help get my mojo back... But thanks for the reminder - I'll get something done soon.