Entering the initial post on what I hope will be a nicely done version of the original Gelgoog from the original 1/144th Gundam lineup;
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| Image from Scalemates.com |
Most of the original Gundam kits have some construction issues, fit issues, and may be missing some details. To complain about these issues would be kind of dopey, as these kits were done at a time when technology wasn't all that great. Besides, these kits represent what would be the start of a huge model kit and toy empire by Bandai! A lot of these kits had some really cool things about them, too. For one, it wasn't uncommon for these kits to come in multiple colors, even though the Gelgoog here is simply salmon pink. The other thing was poseability, although most of the 1/144th kits were severely limited. It wasn't until the 1/100 kits where you started to see some really awesome steps in this category. Not bad for a first lineup of models based on a popular anime!
I'll get into the bad with this kit; The shoulder armor pieces are molded directly onto the chest pieces. A really odd choice as one assumes you'd want to be able to pose the arms in the same vein as the what you'd see in the anime. I started by sawing off the shoulder armor pieces, then simply glued the separated halves together. Later I would modify these to simply snap on to some tubing;
Another really odd thing is the "beak" on the head; It was molded on
as a sloped triangle, and makes for a way inaccurate representation of
the standard Gelgoog head. I started on this by filing down the "beak", then added styrene bits to it and would later sand these into shape, then add the iconic "holes" into the front of the added bits;
Not bad for a start! The process hasn't been smooth, but I am liking how it's coming along so far. The only other bit of the kit I can't stand, and will be making major changes to, are the elbows. The original Gelgoog kits all have criminally dumb elbow assemblies. More on that in the next post. Here are some more WiP pics showing the progress made on the head, shoulders, and chest;
In
part 2, a more through look into the head and the right arm.
~Sean "Zakuformer" Kneeland
