Activity

(first photo is at the end of the photos, based on how the forum organizes things, sorry for the inconvenience – the Imgur link above makes life easier)

What a set of travails this build had. Plamax did some weird molding and basically left some spots needing very serious puttying. There are gaps that I honestly don’t know if I could get out, and as such I’m leaving them in as panel lines. Still, though, it’s done, and I’m super proud and happy it got this far.

The paint is all Vallejo Model Color 094 Russian Uniform Green. The inner frame is all Mr. Metal Color iron. The degree of shininess each frame part has is just a matter of how much time they got buffed to shine by the Dremel.

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Right now everything is just gloss topcoated. Those vents in the knees are destined for some kind of nicing-up, at least once I figure out what they actually do. If they’re intakes it’d be one thing, exhausts another.

You can also see the iron paint doing a bunch of nifty things. The audience right/stage left hip joint cover is super duper reflective, while the joint itself is a little duller. The joints got standard PJ pant leg polishing to shine, the covers got super duper buffed with the Dremel cloth buffing wheel. The pipes on the reactor cover got similar buffing-wheel treatment.

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The base of the elbows going into the wrists gave me trouble of my own making. The left and right wrists are keyed to a certain peg-out, so you gotta be careful or end up like me and spend the morning razor-sawing them apart, rejoining with gap filling superglue (because at this point the gap won’t be covered by cement, there’s no sides touching to form a cement weld bead), filled, sanded, primed, sanded, primed again, sanded again, primed AGAIN, painted, topcoated, etc. Meanwhile the other shoulder parts had some paint come up because I didn’t adequately de-tack the Tamiya tape I was using. AGAIN with the priming and painting.

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The piston parts of the arm swap out to vary the length of the arms. The pistons initially got the buffing treatment with Mr. Metal Color, but the piston shafts themselves got handbrushed with Mr. Metal Color Chrome Silver, then buffed with the buffing wheel and/or Q-tips. The piston insulator parts got painted in regular old Vallejo Metal Color gloss black. I thought about copper but if these are pistons that’ll convey electricity for the Tesla Fist thing that Cherno Alpha does, we want them insulated, not conductive. Black rubber it is.

I may gloss-coat the fingers and fill in the joints with some other color, maybe just gloss black, but the fact that the inner parts of the finger joints look a little different seems to be OK for me. We’ll see what happens of the weathering process.

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Decals will probably happen tomorrow night, I’d like to give the last bits of Future a full overnight to cure before I start working with Mr. Mark Setter and Mr. Mark Softer. After that, another gloss coat for the decals, another overnight to cure, and then I can start the REALLY hard part: chipping and weathering. Gulp.