Tag: imai

With the way the feet are out of the box, there isn’t a lot of lateral movement. The feet have these cylinders that plug into brackets and have end caps which keep them in place. No glue required, I guess. Well, the problem with that is that there isn’t much lateral movement with the feet. The end caps have locator tabs which correspond with the brackets, making the feet really straight. That’s not what I want.

I noticed that these cylinders fit excellently into the 5mm hole sockets of the square parts of the BJ-03 Pla-Sapo (“plastic support”) sets by Wave. Above you can see how I snipped off the bottom of the brackets and placed the square parts a bit lower so that these cylinders can allow more lateral movement. Those end caps are no longer required!

When the legs halves are put together, I noticed that there was an 11 mm gap between the brackets. The square parts are 10mm, so I used Tamiya .5mm plastic sheet between the brackets in order to create a snug 11mm width.

Oh but wait… the square shapes were preventing the feet from swinging side to side, so I cut off the corners. I used Wave 2mm quarter circle plastic sticks to act as braces. I also hand-painted the parts gray. so that they won’t be so noticeable.

It’s crude, but it works. I also had to cut off the top corner of the front square because apparently the legs are a bit tapered towards the front, I guess. I’m not sure.

So now both feet are complete. I used Tamiya 4mm square plastic rod to brace the other foot. From here, all I have to do is put glue in the right area and sandwich this work in between the two leg halves and be done. Now I can resume painting.

I mentioned in my first update that I was going to use ball joints for the arms. I realized that this would be a bad idea because those are arm pegs and putting ball joints on the tips would make the arms look too long. Instead, what I did was use my Tamiya saw blade to cut the arms at just below the shoulders. I then ran the extra thin cement onto the joints several times to loosen up the dried glue and then I was able to pop them apart with my knife. I used my contour tool to figure out that these shoulder parts will fit 9mm discs inside which I cut out from Tamiya pla plate. This will prevent epoxy putty from oozing into the articulated joint, I hope. The black polycaps are from some Bandai kit. I’ll need to use epoxy glue to secure them into place inside the shoulder parts. The Wave 4mm plastic rod you see fits rather nicely into the elbow joints and into the black polycaps.

After attaching the polycaps to the discs with epoxy glue, I then wrapped epoxy putty around the polycaps inside of the shoulder pieces to secure them into place. On the right you’ll see the plastic rod and on the left you’ll see the arm segments joined together. My Glaug now has a kung-fu grip!

The Glaug has these extending claws on its “toes,” but they are not opened claws. The example kit built for the instruction book just has the interior painted black to simulate the claws, but I wanted to open these parts up. I began by using my .5mm drill bit in my pinvise to drill out a series of smaller holes along the inside edge of where I wanted the parts to be emptied out, then used a 1mm bit for the bigger part in the middle. I then used my God Hand bit blades to punch out the inside area. From there, I just used my fine file to get inside and smooth it out.

I also had to address the fact that there are no bottoms to the feet sections! They’re just hollow. I traced out the feet sections onto pla plate, cut them out, glued them onto the feet, and then trimmed, filed, and then sanded down excess. I won’t bother adding any textured detail to the underside of the feet, but at least they are no longer hollow.

It was a quiet weekend at home, and on Sunday while I was following the events of yet another attempted presidential assassination by the “tolerant left,” I finally got around to resuming work on my old 1:100 Glaug kit I started working on last summer at the in-laws’ place while on vacation. I sort of lost track of this build for several months. I’m pretty good at starting new kits and losing track of them.

I’m inserting Wave’s ball joints to add better articulation for the shoulders and the hips. While this kit does have plastic-on-plastic swivel joints, Adding ball joints should improve mobility and allow the legs to be splayed for more natural poses. I’ve sanded down the dome-shaped protrusions and intend to replace them with Wave H-Eyes lenses. I’ve also taken a mold of the mono-eye. I plan to cut out that plastic, attach the mold, and backfill it from the inside with clear UV resin. I did this with the old Bandai/Imai Q-Rau kit.

I thought that I’d buy some more of these Wave ball joint sets, but when I looked online I saw that several of them are sold out! I can still get the BJ-05 set, and I ordered a couple from Yodobashi Camera. But I couldn’t find the BJ-04 and some other sets anywhere!

I took this old Imai/Bandai Macross Glaug kit to work on while staying at the in-laws’ place for a 4-day summer holiday weekend. I figured that I’d get familiar with these older kits before building the new Hasegawa ones. But, I am a bit surprised. There are no bottom parts for the feet of this old Glaug kit! I can’t believe they made the kit like this. Seems a bit half-assed. Now I feel compelled to cut some Tamiya Pla-Plate to make my own feet bottoms. I’m also going to modify this with proper clear lens pieces as well as ball joints where I can.

This old Imai Glaug kit is from the ’80s. Bandai bought the Macross molds from Imai long ago and re-issued them under their name. Not all of them though apparently, since Bandai never once repopped the Armored Valkyrie kit I completed this year, or the Zentraedi recon ship. They repop the Zentraedi battle pod and Destroid kits every once in a while, and this one I have was released for the 25th anniversary of Macross. I paid only 1,020 yen for it about 12 years ago.