1985 Hyaku Shiki - Shoulders done

I finished assembling and sanding the shoulder and upper arms.

I did a bit of experimenting with the upper arms here, since it was my first time actually trying to completely wipe out all traces of the mold lines where the plastic joins together.  There were a few things that I hadn't really thought much about until I got to this step.

• Glue strips primer off.
• Filing and sanding takes the primer off.
• You have to paint the joints before you assemble them.

This meant that I had to re-primer a good sized area of the upper arms cause I was doing so much work to the edges, so I used a brush - didn't feel like taking out the airbrush and getting too deep into things today.

I also ended up brush-painting the insides of the shoulder joints, I figure that later on, the airbrush isn't going to be able to reach inside those areas.  You can see the gold paint I used for the shoulders on a bit of plastic bag in the picture.
 
At this point I'll wait till I get a chance to run my airbrush again.  Assembling the lower arms will cover up part of the upper arms at the joint, and I need to get it painted before it gets covered up.

Upsen.

Decanting spray cans into a bottle

After happening to see that some people decant spray paint into a bottle so they can airbrush using it, I figured I'd do that with a can of Tamiya primer.  I had already sprayed a little into a baby food jar and used that in my airbrush to great effect priming my first model.

The spray cans are sold locally $10 for a 180mL can, and the little bottles of primer are $6 for 60 mL.  I'll just decant a 3oz airbrush bottle of it.  Airbrush bottles have a special cap that contains a siphon feed for the brush and a vent hole to let air in to balance the pressure.  A nice little setup.  Easy right?

Not quite so easy.  Here's how NOT to do it:

The spray is very volatile, stinking to high heaven.  I made the poor choice of trying it in the bathroom with the bathroom fan on.  NOWHERE near effective enough.  The bathroom is still stinking like crazy after an hour of venting (you'll find out why soon enough)

Then, the primer comes out as you'd expect, a nice spray cloud of vapour, which doesn't like going easily into a bottle.  I just sprayed it against the inside of the bottle and covered the top with a bit of paper towel.  It was really, really COLD to hold.  I should have used a straw of some kind.

Even after you have covered the bottle and managed to decant some of the primer successfully, for some reason the primer really likes just flying out of the bottle! You can't just cap off the bottle of freshly decanted paint and be done with it. I tried to do that and watched a stream of primer jet out of the top of the bottle through the airbrushing siphon tube and go all over the bathroom sink.  #F^*&$#$!  It took some quick thinking to get at the primer with some thinner to clean it off, though that compounded the problem with the fumes, probably by several orders, since it was now drying and vapourizing off the sink.  Flushing it with water doesnt really help, they really dont mix, creating crappy chunks of primer and displacing the thinner which was actually doing the cleaning.

Of course, after that, I tried to cap off the bottle a second time, this time with the siphon tube cap on, and instead I get primer flowing out of the seams of the cap all over the bottle and the sink... AGAIN.  I finally noticed that the primer was letting off vapour quite strongly still at this point, and was still rather volatile as a liquid.  I carefully capped it a third time with the small vent hole at the top of the bottle uncovered, and it sat there happily shooting fumes out the vent hole.  I did a second cleanup, worsening the thinner fume situtation and getting somewhat dizzy, high, and nauseous.  I took the bottle of primer outside to let it vent... where it was raining.  Sigh.  Hopefully it'll be usable tomorrow or something, and not a giant lump of dried up primer stuck in a unusable bottle.

So anyways, I am going to try something else, maybe gesso like some people suggest on the net, which is like $10 for a huge bottle...  Though I wonder what I need to thin that with.

Upsen.

1985 Hyaku Shiki - Primer 1st Coat

I had a chance to finally get the primer airbrushed onto the kit - the results are pretty nice! I used Tamiya Spray Primer cause I had some lying around. I decanted some into a baby food jar I had around, and poured from there into my airbrush. It didn't clog the airbrush, even though I didn't thin the primer, I figured that since it was already a spray, it ought to do well enough being sprayed from the airbrush instead.

Cleaning was a little tougher - the primer didn't want to flush nicely out of the colour cup, but it might be due to the fact that I left the brush sitting there with primer in it for an hour or so, while I went to go feed the baby.  In the end I managed to get it clean enough though, with a bit of scrubbing using a pair of tweezers and paper towel soaked in acrylic thinner.

Next step will probably be some assembly, putty, and filing/sanding to remove the join lines between the pieces.  Airbrushing will have to wait a little bit longer.

Upsen.

1985 Hyaku Shiki - Stripping old paint off of a plastic model kit

Last post I was mentioning how I was trying to figure out how to remove the paint from my old Hyaku Shiki kit - I did some research on the net, and the top solutions seemed to be:

• Dettol, Isopropyll Alcohol, or Pine Sol - all of which are sold around.  Problem is, these seem to need some muscle work after soaking for a couple of days - takes too long, and I'm not sure how well the model will stand up to vigorous scrubbing
• Easy Off Oven Cleaner - Spray it on, scrub it off, but it wasn't clear about which type to use - the Aerosol can one or the manual pump one.  Sounded like it'd be more effective than the Dettol though.
• Brake Fluid - soak the model in brake fluid - apparently takes the paint right off, no effort, but is not easy to dispose of, and you have to be careful what plastics you put in it.  So I didn't risk it.
• Graffiti Remover, which can also be used on the model, sprayed on and as effective as the brake fluid. Also, these are billed as low odour and environmentally friendly.

So I tried the Easy Off which is easily obtainable:  After a couple days soaking in the aerosol sprayed version, (in a small plastic tub), I tried some scrubbing with a toothbrush and scraping with my thumbnail:

Subsequent soaking and scrubbing/scraping didn't really do much. I needed something stronger it seemed.

I managed to find a can of Graffi Remover from the local hardware store - I didn't know that this sort of thing was easily found, nice!  It was the Watch Dog brand Lift Away one that I picked up, and I gave it a good sprayover after testing it on a bit of the sprue on the side.  It took off EVERYTHING.  Wow this stuff was nice - I didn't even need to scrub that hard with the toothbrush, everything rubbed off like it was never attached.

I may have left in in there a little TOO long though - I was supposed to let it sit for a few minutes (fresh graffiti) so I figured I'd leave it in there a couple hours (20 year old paint) and I ended up leaving it for 24 hours till I next got a chance to clean it up.  Some of the color is stripped on the blue sprue sheet, but the plastic is undamaged, phew...

Really nice!  Ready for priming now!

Upsen.

1985 Hyaku Shiki - Z Gundam Plastic Model Kit

I got into something new recently - well something actually so old that I haven't really thought about it since I was a teenager - plastic model kits!

Back when I was doing these, they were sprue sheets of solid white, blue, or red etc, and required painting.  I remember those cursed little bottles of Tamiya paints - I loved them and hated them at the same time.  I loved that I could paint all these cool model kits of robots and anime characters that I could get, and I hated that brushing them on, they were all streaky and blotchy, nothing like the way the kits looked on the box.  I was fairly precise with a brush, but I lacked experience and technique, so I found these paints way too thick to go on the model kits nicely. 

I remember spending days painting the radar nacelle on a Zetaplus and getting mad at how hard it was to get the paint to behave. I didnt really know about masking off sections I didnt want paint to accidentally touch, so I did all of it freehand.  It was also hard to get all those black detail lines in precisely - I ended up using a black paint/water wash to wick the paint into the lines, but it took so long to do, a tiny bit at a time wiping away excess that got onto the other colors.  The results were still pretty good for my level of experience, but I was not really satisfied with the results.  Eventually I gave up painting them, just keeping the ones I had, sitting nicely in a display on a bookshelf all through my 20s - a bunch of Gundam kits: Zeta, a Mark II, a Zetaplus, and an Ex-S.  Also, a Macross Battroid Valkyrie and a 1/4th scale 80's Dirty Pair Kei and Yuri.

Anyways, this time it started off when I was at a toy store with my son Connor in the springtime, and we saw a Gundam model kit with 2 units in it, for the incredibly low price of $40, an incredible steal considering that typically this stuff costs $30 to $50 for a single one.  Here we'd get 2 of the big names in the Gundam series, a Gundam RX-78 original and a green MS-06 Zaku as an opponent, for a mere $25 each!  I decided I had to buy and assemble them.  I reasoned that I could let my son play with the robots after they were built.  They came in multi-coloured plastics and everything and didn't even need paint or glue!  OMG!  So since Connor was behaving pretty well at the time, I bought it for us so we could both get some fun out of these Gundams.

They took about 3 days to assemble, and Connor smashed them both up pretty nicely within a week.  Not too bad.  Lasted longer than I thought, actually.  They weren't too terribly smashed up though.  Mostly the joints were too weak to survive kids twisting them and smashing them together in a "fight".  I am still repairing them now and then for Connor using superglue.  (reminds me, I have to glue two feet back on the Gundam and an arm on the Zaku)

So looking at these models got me thinking about my own models again.  Sadly, I had thrown my collection out a while ago, but I still had a few un-built ones sitting around - notably a Hyaku Shiki that I'm pretty sure I picked up in the early 90s.  So I pulled out the kit to take a look at it:

I had already painted it at some point, but never assembled it.  Looking closely at the kit, I remember not liking that the gold paint was streaking, especially on the wings and ankles, and the detail on the chest plate was all wobbly.

Ugh...  I'll have to do this over again, properly this time. With primer, paint, decals, and a finishing coat.

So first things first - How do I strip off the old paint?!