IHP VF-11C Recast finished

[Jarrod]

Thanks again to Valk009 for providing these great recasts!

Anyway, this kit was far less of a pleasure to build than the SHE VF-4. Parts fit was not that great, the engineering is simple (and seems half-assed) poseabilty was/is horrid, the sculpt clearly uses parts from the 1/144 Bandai kit, the instructions are nearly useless, especially for the tranformation, and finally the included recast polycaps were pretty useless(not that I expected resin recast PCs to be any use to begin with...)

First thing I did was replace all the resin joints with some Kotobukiya polys I had laying around. This included adding hinge joints to the elbows and knees as opposed to the ball joints the instructions recommended. Then I added some actually hip joints. The kit orginally had the upper hips/intakes fixed to the waist/fuselage by a thin, fragile sheet of 2mm thick resin...which promptly broke.

Then I had to remove a good deal of the rear of the head and shoulders so that everthing would fit properly in fighter mode...it seemed like IHP never actually checked to see if the head would fit in fighter mode!

After that, I changed the position of the shield to attach to the top/inside of the arms in fighter mode instead of the bottom/outside as the kit seemed to suggest. I also added some extra pegs and holes so that the Fast Packs were interchangeable.

Finally I mildly reshaped a number of parts for a better fit and added a clip for the heatshield so that it would attach in Battroid mode.

And after all that, I am quite happy with it. Battroid mode looks fantastic, far better than any other VF-11 I own. Fighter mode is prety good too; the nose sculpt looks pretty close to perfect to me. Unfortunately the rear wings do not slant outward but only stick straight up, and the feet looke way to much like folded up feet instead of engines. Gerwalk mode is only mildly possible(the legs just dont bend near far enough forward), and it appears it was not even designed to do so.

Anyway, on with the pics:

[Jarrod]

Transformation is simple and straightforward

The extra parts needed for Battroid mode(the shield is the same as Fighter, but does need to be removed and reattached)

[Jarrod]

With FPs

Thats about as much as it can pose, about the same as the 1/144 Bandai kits...

[Jarrod]

Without FPs

And finally, with some other 1/100 scale kits for size comparison

Thanks for looking!

[jardann]

Hey, your build looks good, and I actually like the fighter mode the best. It really looks best with the FPs I think.

Battloid looks a little funky to me, especially the arm/shoulder joints.

Your finish looks nice and clean. Thanks for sharing the pics and keep up the good work!

[Valkyrie addict]

woa dude! great job!! I got one of Valk009's recasts as well of this kit.... but haven't had time to built it, good job! now I just hope mines get to kook as badass as yours...

good stuff

is your VF-19S painted or did you use those ugly foil decals it brings!?

[Valk009]

Great work there, Jarrod! Sorry to hear the difficulites you encountered with the kit. Out of the three IHP kits I have the YF-19, YF-21 and the VF-11, the later two casting quality are not that much to write home about.

Nevertheless, it is good to see what you have made out of it

[Valkyrie addict]

yeah, I bumped with those fitting issues and the annoyance of the recastes pollycaps when i was preassembling and it put me off from building it and went on to another project

I'm just curious, would the Wave polycaps sold by HLJ work on this kit?

[promethuem5]

With a little putty I'd assume they would... I just finished fitting a whole variety of them into a plastic Scopedog kit that they are darned useful little buggers.

[Jarrod]

is your VF-19S painted or did you use those ugly foil decals it brings!?

Oh, it is most definitely painted(Bandai foil stickers, FTL)! I applied the foil stickers first and scribed the lines on, then removed the stickers and had perfect lines to mask around.

I'm just curious, would the Wave polycaps sold by HLJ work on this kit?

Possibly, however, I specifically used parts from the following sets:

http://www.hlj.com/product/KBYD-721B

http://www.hlj.com/product/KBYD-718B

http://www.hlj.com/product/KBYD-107B