Hasegawa YF-19 Battroid (WIP)

[tetsujin]

Hasegawa's VF-1 Battroid kit made a big impression on me when it came out and remains one of my all-time favorite kits. I wasn't sure initially if I felt the same way about their new YF-19, but I got it, I've been building it up, and it's been a lot of fun.
 

The Alpha and the Amiga
(Sorry I guess this is in the wrong forum. Been a while since I been active on MWF)

Edited September 13 by tetsujin

[Big s]

Looks like it’s coming along. Have you been able to test the articulation yet?

[kajnrig]

Long time no see. Good luck on the kit; I've been itching to ship it out from HLJ for a month or so now, too. (As it happens, I bought a Char 2.0 on a whim and started snapping it together today to finally see what all the fuss was about, and while dealing with the overengineered piping I was reminded of your complaints about it. I get it now.  )

Interesting note about the joints. I've not had the same issue on my VF-1s, at least not to the same degree, but it'll be something to keep an eye out for.

[tetsujin]

51 minutes ago, Big s said:

Looks like it’s coming along. Have you been able to test the articulation yet?

It's not really a thing that I do generally, but I guess I have a few "notes":

So one thing I encountered on this build is a bit of "wobble" in the shoulder polycaps. So if you try to rotate the arm forward or backward round its shoulder peg, you get a little bit of travel with no friction, this is due to the shoulder polycap not really being secured inside the shoulder joint. It's just a little hexagon-shaped polycap inside a hexagon-shaped hollow between the two halves of the shoulder joint "cylinder". But there's a little bit of wiggle room there, so the arm can wiggle. I didn't identify this until I'd already glued the shoulder joints together, so I addressed it by drilling a hole into the area around that polycap, dropping some super glue in and then closing the hole up again.

There were a few joints that are looser than I'd like - the prime example being the ball joint that connects the knee joint to the hip (perhaps not coincidentally, the same joint I had to reinforce because of the stress fracture that was starting to form..)  If I suspended the robot in mid air and tried to swing its leg out to the side a bit (a lot of that kind of range comes from that knee-hip ball joint) - if I let go of the leg it would flop back toward the kit's centerline again, so I wanted to tighten the joint. I did that by adding layers of super glue to the ball. Working the joint around in its tightened state put more stress on it, which probably contributed to that fracture. It got to the point where the ball joint had a bit of wiggle due to the fracture, so it was clearly going to tear itself apart if left unresolved. I haven't done much with putting the kit on a stand for "aerial" poses like that, so I don't really know if there are other issues like that.

I guess one other thing that sort of bugs me is that the upper arm doesn't rotate, instead you get rotation in the middle of the elbow joint. Not a huge problem but it's a bit awkward.

Generally speaking one trend I'm seeing with Hasegawa's more recent robot kits (like Queadluun Rau and YF-19) compared to the older ones is things are less modular if you close seams. More "trapped assemblies". The VF-1 battroid could be broken down pretty easily for painting, on the YF-19 you can't go as far with that, not if you want to erase those seams. I thought about reworking the elbow joints so they wouldn't be trapped in the forearms, ultimately decided against it. There's similarly going to be a certain amount of the knee joint that gets trapped by the lower leg - I'm just gonna have to put my big boy pants on and mask it, I guess.

I don't remember all the details of how/why different bits of my first VF-1 battroid build broke down, but I remember the shoulder peg on that build broke, I had to drill through it to pin it back into place. Apart from that I had a broken wing pin (I actually resin-cast a wire-reinforced replacement) and the plastic containing the polycaps for the upper leg scissor-joint broke.

I had been hoping to get the kit to the primer stage this past weekend, and then have it ready for a show this coming weekend, but that train has sailed. I still haven't glued/puttied the whole of the torso and legs (other than the wings). The whole prospect of taking it through all the painting stages in 1 week was a bit iffy for me anyway, I was already afraid I'd wind up rushing it. Kinda stinks though, I'm tired of not having kits to show at model shows and such.

[electric indigo]

Nice to see you back from the dead; I'm really looking forward to see what you do with the kit.

[tetsujin]

16 hours ago, electric indigo said:

Nice to see you back from the dead; I'm really looking forward to see what you do with the kit.

Yeah you know it's good to be not dead. I'm working on making it a more regular thing