tekering

Merry Christmas from the Rogues' Gallery!

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Your Photoshop skills are sublime -- I particularly like the beer missile! -- but that Super Valkyrie model has the boosters sitting much too high. 🤨

Yeah, displayed at the 2011 Shizuoka Hobby Show. Nor the hindsight to know which variants would prove most valuable, amiright? 😉

They did indeed. No structural reinforcement. 🤨 Well-noted, my friend. Two of the tips have been buried 30cm in the dirt for the past fifteen years. 😅 I don't think so... 🤔

You mean this one? It's a shame we've only ever gotten a Korean bootleg in this color scheme. Come to think of it, it might look nice in brown, too. ☺️

Neither, actually. It's an architectural model of a real high rise condominium in Shibaura -- custom-built to demonstrate the design to construction company executives -- and probably cost over a million yen to produce. It somehow ended up in the possession of a used furniture store in the hills north of Tokyo, and was eventually listed on Yahoo! Japan auctions (where I bought it earlier this month). ☺️ However, since the model wasn't intended for sale (much less transportation across the country), it was not built to last... and what I ended up receiving was badly damaged. 😱 There were hundreds of broken panels rattling around loose in the box... ...and with no internal support structure, the whole building just collapsed in on itself as soon as I removed the plastic wrap. 😭 So now it's just a giant puzzle to reconstruct, without blueprints or instructions to follow. 🤕 Of course! In fact, it came lined with eight individually-wired LED strips that run the full length of the building. I intend to create a seemingly random, disorganized lighting scheme using a variety of tinted yellow, orange, and smoke-tinted gels to vary the color and brightness of each apartment, giving the appearance of a real condominium at night.

It certainly would. A heavy matte coating is the only way to ensure stickers stay put (or look halfway-decent). 😉 The condo's starting to take shape... I need to rely on the force of gravity to hold these acrylic panels together until they're securely bonded, so the orientation (be it face-down or upside-down) is temporarily dictated by distribution of weight... ...and I need to make use of whatever's on-hand heavy enough (like the bicycle) to support the walls, at least until the glue starts to set. I'm glad somebody thinks so. My wife thinks I'm certifiable, spending hundreds of dollars on a model that's too big to assemble (much less display) in the house. 😅

Feelin' the holiday blues? That's the ThreeZero on the left, for the sake of comparison.

Now you're in the ballpark. It's a Japanese high rise condominium. Once completed, it will be nearly as tall as I am. 😅 You gotta add this stuff to your toolkit: It fuses waterslide decals to the surfaces they're applied to. I never apply decals without it. 👌

Oh, that's where Big Dai-X comes from!

You guys seemed to have missed my other hint, "Earthbound," as in bound to the earth... 😝 It doesn't fly, it doesn't transform, it doesn't move at all. It does, however, consist of hundreds of laser-cut acrylic panels...

Man, that's beautiful. As much as I love 3D-printing, I wish there were more PE upgrade parts available for spacecraft conning towers, antennae, etc. At the moment, however, I have more Earthbound concerns... Guess what this metal framework is intended to support? Hint: it's a 1:48 model.

The couple is reunited. Ben Dixon's... VF-1J? 🤔

So nice to see The Ubiquitous is still getting put to good use! 🥰