DocRob

Thank you, just a finished build in the unfinished line of unfinished GB´s. Cheers Rob

Sounds interesting Paul, your suggestions and the Martian Ship project. It is only my second venture into LED lighting with kits. The first was the Nautilus submarine from Pegasus, which I equipped with a VoodooFX lighting kit some years ago. The Kosmos LED kit for the Unicorn is readily prepared, luckily, which is helpful with a kit as complex as this. Cheers Rob

That looks super cool Carl. I always found, when I cover the cf-decals with clear semi matte, they even look more realistic. The gloss looks great immediately, but matting down lifts it to another level and unifies the single decals better. Cheers Rob

Fantastic, detailing looks spot on. Cheers Rob

He´s so cute, Carl. Painting is another thing, I won´t do it with the Unicorn, there are so many moving parts, where I don´t know, if the paint will be in the way or fell victim to abrasion while articulating. I will build the Unicorn without glue, there are so many moving parts, I´m not sure, I can identify all from the manual and if something happens with the LED´s, I need to de-assemble. Until now, I can´t think that there are many parts to fell apart with the tight fit of everything. Cheers Rob

I think that´s not the case here Carl. The manual tells you which sprues you need for the next step, but other ways, I have to relay onto my sharp eyes to get rid of used up sprues. Cheers Rob

Next was the installation of the LED system from Kosmos. After looking closely into both manuals, it looked to me, that the Kosmos LED set is made very similar than the original Bandai one. That meant, I could follow the Unicorns instructions for these steps. The LED´s for torso, head, legs and arms are already connected, so testing is easy. I installed the main hub on top of the cockpit and fiddled the appropriate wires into the wire routing channels, the torso backside looked like this when finished: Next, all got covered up: Here are pics from the front of the finished torso with all panels closed (Unicorn mode) and all panels opened (Destroy mode): After finishing the torso, it took me more than 10 minutes to only pick the sprues for the next section, which are the legs: Cheers Rob

Thank you Carl, it´s indeed a completely different breed than a MFH kit. I powered myself through the BT52 build for some bad weather weeks and needed a bit of a change, therefore the Unicorn kit, which I longed to build since a while. I hear you about the fit and you are absolutely right. It pays to read the tiny diagrams in the manual very thoroughly, as it is not always easy to determine the orientation of parts (guess how I knew ) I have no separator tool and use a blade and sometimes a screwdriver to pry the parts apart. I saw the variants of the Unicorn, but liked the original design better. Cheers Rob

"...and now for something completely different" like the Monty Pythons would have put it. This will be my first venture into the world of Gundam and I have to admit, I have near to no idea about the background and the anime, they were shown in. I was fascinated about the huge Gundam machines and their engineering as a kit and decided, I want to build one. I chose the Unicorn, because of it´s cool looks, the availability of a pre designed LED kit from Kosmos and the two face character of the Unicorn, plain white, with all hatches and ports closed and showing the glowing red psycho frame with everything opened up. There is a lot of terminology involved with these kits. Perfect Grade means, it´s the highest grade of detailing in the Bandai range and the scale is 1/60. Highest grade of detailing means also an absurd part count manufactured in different colors and materials, mainly ABS and some vinyl like stuff. The so called Psycho Frame is a red transparent layer under the white armor, which distributes the lights emitted from the LED´s. The kits are fully articulated, which obviously adds to the complexity of the build. There is no glue needed, and the parts are designed to intersect in many ways, which can be finger bleeding tedious, especially with correcting errors. The manuals are only Japanese and it is recommended to use a translator with camera function, to get the grips. The kit: The Kosmos LED set: ...and that´s how the Unicorn is supposed to look: Cheers Rob

Well, I started my first Gundam kit, the perfect grade Unicorn (1/60 scale). I thought it would be tons of parts, but easy goin, but it is not that simple and you have to adopt from classical plastic modelling to assemble delicate intersecting parts in multiple layers without glue. It doesn´t help, that either the Unicorns manual or the one for the Kosmos LED kit isn´t in English. Sure a translator helps, but it´s a bit inconvenient. Anyhow, I managed to build up the torso, making and correcting a few errors. The torso includes the pilots cockpit and is build up until the LED unit comes into play. As you can see, there are some body panels movable, they are opened on the left side. I also used some panel liner. ...and it was light, at least for testing: Cheers Rob

Looks very good. Cheers Rob

Like PW, I would recommend Alclad chrome, with my experiences it is the most realistic looking chrome. It´s very fragile though and needs proper priming. You said, you strip the chrome off the plastic first, that is definitely the way to go. After that, prime with gloss black, Tamiya LP-1 gloss black thinned with leveling thinner is best. Both black primers for metallics from AK or Alclad are terrible and never dry properly. The best results you achieve, while layering very thin layers of Alclad chrome onto the primer and build up until the blackness completely vanishes. You shouldn´t clear coat afterwards or mask over, as it will ruin the finish. For parts like exhausts, there is AK´s super chrome maybe another option. Other than Alclad or AK´s Extreme Metallics, you need to flood it onto the part. The chrome looks extremely good, but it is also very fragile and I have used it only sometimes now and don´t have enough experience for a clear recommendation. AK Extreme Metallics are great to work with and more durable than Alclad, but their chrome and polished aluminum have less shine than Alclad. Cheers Rob

I thought about this one too, Paul. I would be interested, how useful it is. How fast is the change of bits and things like this. I like the low revolution modus, as my Proxxon is to fast for many things. There are hundreds of holes to be drilled in metal or resin with every MFH build and I mainly hand drill, which is time consuming and sometimes finger cramping, but better to control. This thing could be helpful. Cheers Rob

Nice one, I may paint another one later, when I have a feeling for abrasion due to articulation, but will do panel lining as well and paint some details with the Unicorn. Cheers Rob

Thanks Carl, but no real magic this time, I plan to build the Unicorn straight from the box, only with the added lighting set. No paint no glue and I even read somewhere, that cleanup is minimal, because the sprue connectors are hidden and don´t need a lot of attention. Cheers Rob