1/100 scale Eleshis

I'm going to take a slightly different approach to this worklog and add some detailed comments about what I did/ write this more as a how-to and less of a "here, look at the pictures, figure it out yourself" thing since this is a resin kit and a very different beast than your usual plastic, snap together kits. So, hopefully it'll be a little informative/helpful than my simple photologs. Let's begin, shall we?

December 26, 2007

First thing you want to do with a resin kit is give all the parts a nice bath in some really soapy water. If you're familiar with resin casting, you have to coat the inside of the mold with release agent so that way it does not stick to the resin once it's cured. Residue from the release agent can cause problems when you're gluing the kit together and can affect how well your paintjob adheres to the parts later on. So it's important to scrub everything now so none of those problems rear their ugly heads. Plain old dishsoap will work here. I just got a plastic tub/Tupperware container, filled it up with warm water (Doesn't need to be very hot, resin will actually become bendable if you put it in very hot water), threw some soap in and the parts too. After letting them soak for a few minutes, I took an old toothbrush and scrubbed everything down. I kept the parts on the sprues and just cut the sprues down so they'll fit inside the tub. Washing them in a container will prevent any loose parts from going down the drain. Once everything is clean, I rinsed everything well and hand-dried the parts and gave them a few hours to air dry on their own. The next step will be touch-up work!

December 30, 2007

It's been a couple days, and I suddenly found myself with a couple plastic snap-together models I needed to finish before I could really sit down and give Eleshis my undivided attention (Kotobukiya Blade Liger and Empire Command Wolf LR to be exact. Be on the look out for pictures and reviews of those in the models section in the next few days!) So these parts are definitely more than completely dry at this point. You can see that I cut up the sprues into smaller sections to fit into that plastic tub while I was washing the mold release residue off of them. At this point, I did a "head count" (Made sure I still have all the parts I started off with and nothing got misplaced). Checking to make sure you have all the parts should have also been the very first thing you did after you opened up the box. If you're a bit scatterbrained like me, you'll want to do sporadic part counts, especially once you start removing parts from the sprues. There's nothing worse than getting half through a kit, only to find you're missing a very important part. Anyways, I'm going to start taking parts off the sprues now and removing flash. I will also separate the parts into a "parts that need touch up work" pile and a "parts that don't need touch up" pile. What constitutes a need for a touch up you ask? Pinholes, pockmarks on the outside-facing surface of the part and basically, any surface imperfections that will affect my paint job get fixed. With resin kits, "touch up" can be as easy as applying a coat of Tamiya basic grey putty and sanding the surface lightly to really smooth it out, but sometimes if resin didn't quite make it into a part of the mold (Often happens on small, very detailed pieces or very thin parts), you may have to break out the epoxy putty and do major refilling/resculpting of the part. I've been looking over these parts for a few days though, and fortunately, this is looking to be a very light touch up process. So over the next few days, I'll be taking care of that. Then we can move on to construction finally.

January 13, 2008

It's been a while since I last updated this worklog, but I have been working diligently at Eleshis over the past 2 weeks. I didn't do all this fix-up work in one day, so this entry is going to cover several days' worth of work. Going back to the subject of touch up work, here's a little example of what I meant by filling in surface defects. This is a shoulder armor piece, and you can see a small groove near the circular panel line. This is a result of the resin not completely filling in the mold, but is fortunately very easy to fix...



I just took a small piece of Milliput Fine Grain epoxy putty and pressed it into the groove. Then I got my fingers wet and smoothed it out, and went over the area with a wet single edged razor blade to feather out the edges. The more you can blend out the putty with either your fingers or the razor blade, the less filing work you'll have to do to blend the cured putty into the surrounding area.



This just wouldn't be a model kit if I didn't break something on it :B. I had a little accident with one of Eleshis' hip joints, so he had to get an emergency hip replacement. Again, not a difficult thing to do; I just took one of the poly joints that came with the model and drilled a small hole in it to insert a wire. I then drilled two holes in the hip itself; a large hole to accomodate the joint, and a smaller hole within the larger one to insert the other end of the wire into. I lightly coated the wire and inside of the larger hole with epoxy glue and fit the joint into the hip. Ta-da, instant hip joint that is also securely attached!



I skipped a lot of the (boring) touch-up work; all this model really needed after major fixes and a primer coat was a light sanding to get rid of any mold lines that I missed. So after that, I jumped right to paint! This isn't *quite* the right shade of blue, but it's close enough for me. This model has a couple different colors, often on a single piece. You know what that means; handpainting. You can always try masking off the part and airbrushing the different colors on, but I seem to have bad luck with masking tape and already-painted parts. The paint almost always pulls up with the tape when I remove it, so despite how much I hate handpainting, I decided to go with that option instead. Pictures of that eventually, I suppose.

February 2, 2008

Well, this model has been in the 98% done phase for a good week now, but there's a problem; I lost the blade that's supposed to go on its shield `____`. So it looks like I'm not quite finished with Eleshis. So I guess I'll be working on that in between surfacing Neptune.