The first part of my adventure started with the duplication of my initial fuel tank. I made a two part RTV mold in order to make some resin copies. I've been casting for a while and have casted some pretty complex objects before, but this little tank proved to be quite a little pain in the rear. First of all, I two halves of the mold got stuck together on the sides. This sometimes happens to me and I can usually pull them apart with little damage. This time the two halves stuck together so bad that I had to cut into the mold about a cm around the outside before I got to the part where the mold release had kept the two parts separate. In the end, I salvaged the mold so, no harm done.
The next hurtle came when I poured my first cast of the tank. I don't know if it was because I was up to late or what, but the first cast was horribly deformed. I have never had a cast that was so lumpy and pitted as this first tank. The picture below right to left: the original, the junk cast, and an example of a good cast.
The next day, I cast the four tanks with no real problem. It is not my best casting work, but I am pretty satisfied with the results. I am excited to see how they look when they are all painted and installed on the kit.
I also had some time to start to work on the shoulders. I didn't want to have the big shoulder pads, so it was important to do something to make the Kampfer look complete. I remembered seeing Toymaker do something on the Kampfer that he did a while ago, so I hit up his site at http://toymakerinc.blogspot.com/. I pretty much used the same technique that he did. I'm not sure what type of putty that he used, but I tried Aves out for the first time. So far I like the putty and so far the shoulders look pretty good. Now all I need to do is smooth them out and add some details.
The best fun that I had this week was making the main thruster. I stayed up late one night and worked it while I watched the final season of BSG. I started out with one of the thruster from the Bandai AGX-04 Gerbera Tetra kit. I really like the shape of these thrusters, but they are so boring. After playing around with some spare parts, I came up with a great way to spice it up. I used a road wheel from a Tamiya tank and one of the Kampfer spikes to make some internal parts. In addition, I had a stroke of good fortune when I found a part to make the wall appear thicker. This part is the outer edge of a Wave thruster that I turned around backwards. It worked great and after some glue and sand paper I was super happy with the result.
Lastly, I have been toying with the idea of using the lower half of a Zaku leg for the thruster housing. I figure that it would be a good idea since the thruster was intended to be a one-shot deal, the Zeon engineers would try to use something that was already on hand. I like the idea, but I will have to flesh it out more before I make a decision.
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