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Last night I started working on this old kit. The decals have aged poorly and they maybe unusable. My plan is to use my sheet of Autobot decals and build it as Jetfire from Transformers. I don't forsee spending a ton of time on this, hoping that it might be a quick build. I'll post pics later as I go along. I never noticed this until last night, but while the box art looks nice, the artist made a big mistake. Look at the central thruster pod. It's facing the wrong direction! That's supposed to be an intake, but the thruster nozzles are pointed forwards instead of being in back. Oops!

Hi, I'm new here. I've occasionally lurked for many years, but never created an account. I see a few familiar users from the Starship Modeler Forum (hi Thom and VF-1 Grunt), where I go by TurkeyVolumeGuessingMan. Anyhow, I'll share this build here. This is the old 1:100 Heavy Missile Regult battle pod by Arii. Proportions for the Regult itself are great, but the missile pods are a bit top-heavy. It makes the model look a bit awkward. I have a Toynami sofubi toy which I assume is 1:72 scale and with them side-by-side, the Arii's missile pods are nearly as tall. I used Wave's H-Eyes parts for lenses and Kotobukiya's MSG for the thrusters. I used Mr. Color 323 Light Blue and 311 Gray for the white parts. The gray was a mixture of 32 Dark Gray and 72 Intermediate Blue. the decals were still usable after all these years. They were a bit yellowed, but I taped them to my window for several days to bleach them. They went on fairly well. I also used my pinvise to drill out the cannons because out of the box, they had protruding parts that look more like bottle nipples than gun barrels. I believe I used a 2.5mm drill bit for the larger cannons. There is no ball socket articulation with the cannons. They must be glued into place. Comparing Macross models between Arii and Imai, the Imai kits had better overall proportions, but Arii implemented polycaps and has better molded surface detail and decals. Case in point, the red lenses on the top of the head are represented in Arii's molding, but these details are merely decals for Imai's 1:72 Regult. Arii has raised detail for the Regult's foot lamps, but they protrude too far. I cut them off and affixed those Wave lenses instead. I have a pre-order for the 1:72 Hasegawa version of this kit, which will be released next week.

There's a local modeling competition in less than 3 weeks. Suddenly felt the need to enter into the scifi portion of the competition. Last year a friend of mine entered with a very basic HG gunpla kit he did in candy colors. I think I can top that! My idea is to use this wave 1/100 VF-1A I got from a convention a couple years ago and turn it into some kind of a low-viz scheme with some kind of a Macross First twist like Hikaru's VF-1J, not so crazy though. But I also thought I saw someone did a custom job on their take of the brownie but I can't find it anywhere. I'd like too if possible try to even replicate that. I may even go as far as to customize my own decals since I'm a bit of a graphic designer and we got excellent printers so long as I'm not doing white. Any suggestions you guys got to help make this kit stand out would be appreciative as I'd like to take home my first trophy. Couple things I'm curious over are seamline removal since there's 4 locations I'd like to fix in the nosecone and fuselage and than the underbelly at the knees up to the thighs. Also how to properly paint the canopy if there are good easy to follow tutorials. Some of the ones I found on youtube seem to have some really bad dislikes for some reason.