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Update on my old Bandai/Imai Macross Glaug kit

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!

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The old, legacy Glaug model kit from Macross by Imai

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.

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Nautilus submarine model kit by Bandai

Recently I signed up for a Mercari account. It’s an online fleamarket. Often you can find stuff cheaper there than on YAJ, and a greater variety of smaller items. Lots of neat Sega stuff and whatnot. I’ve sometimes asked my wife to get stuff for me through her account and I’d pay for the items at the convenience store, but I decided to create my own account.

Although I bought the newer 1:1000 scale Nautilus model by Kotobukiya, I wanted to build the old 1:700 scale Bandai kit and give it another go. It is OOP and goes for a bit on YAJ, but I found it cheaply on Mercari (about half of what it goes for on YAJ). I built this when I still lived in America, and it was the first fully-airbrushed kit I ever built. This time, I want to drill lots of holes and use clear UV resin to try to light it. This Bandai kit is from the ’90s, back before they made all of their models snap kits. While this Bandai kit does not have as great of detail as the smaller Kotobukiya Nautilus, since it is not a snap fit model , I believe it has more hollow sections. I think I can drill out the window portals and replace them with Wave H-Eyes lenses, as well as casting the captain’s quarters on top in clear resin to light it up. That would be neat.

I made a page for my old build on my model gallery I stopped updating about 10 years ago here. It comes with a small 1:20 scale Nadia figure, and it was the first figure I ever painted.