Gundam Modeling Tutorial - Construction

The basic steps for construction are as follows:

  1. Love: Hold the Gunpla kit. Develop some love between you and the kit. Get motivated.

  2. Reading: Read the menu once or twice to get a feel of what are needed to be built.

  3. Color Scheme: If you are doing custom color for your kit, pick up the colors that you are going to use. You might need it since some parts need to be painted during construction.

  4. Get Organized: Clean up the work bench (table) and prepare empty containers for parts.

  5. Building: Test fit the parts and start building. Cut from tree, knift the seam, sand down unwanted materials, glue if necessary. Repeat for each part.

  6. Painting: Some of the parts you need to paint during construction. So, prepare to do that.

 

Loop through 1 to 6 until you are done.

I usually don't follow the order in the menu since now it takes me much longer to build a kit with kids at home. I usually build the legs first, so they can stand on the shelf while other parts are coming along.

 

Anyway, here is a sample construction sequence.

First, pick up the colors.

Open the box to check out the parts.

Prepare empty containers for holding the parts while you are building. I mark them L for left and R for right. By the way, these are all from dollar store. So, one dollar a piece.

Sort them by left and right as you are building.

Cut out the parts.

Sand them if necessary. For sanding, start with small number of sand paper and move up the numbers for smoother sanding.

For example, I will cut the part out first.

Then, sand it down to make sure it is smooth by the touch of your finger tip.

For area that you need to have some extra material to sand with. (Or you make a mistake of cutting off too much). You can first cover it with instant glue or surface primer before you sand again.

If you are gluing something, you can use quick grip to hold them in place.

Some of the parts are "defective" as they come out from the plastic tree. Like this one, you have to sand them down.

After you sand down a part, you can use baby wipes to clean it up.

The wipes will leave some "water", just wait for a while for it to dry before you continue.

As I construct, I usually prepare the parts for painting as well. There are three methods that I usually use. The Mr Hobby Grip.

There is a platic grid that come with it but I never use it. I usually just hold the individual grip like this.

Another common method I used to prepare the parts for painting is BBQ sticks :)

Here, ready for BBQ or painting.

If a hole is too big to stick the BBQ stick directly, you can first wrap it up with normal stick type just like this.

Otherwise, you can stick the part directly.

If there is nothing to hold the part to the stick, you can use hot glue gun to create a sticky point.

Oh, I have a tool cart that actually looks like this. You can move the parts around if necessary.

The third method I used to prepare my parts for painting is clip set like these. I believe this set is also from Mr Hobby.

They are kind of expensive, so I only have one set.

To sum up, the contruction phase goes something like this:

You can only do a batch so big since you either run out of space or realize later on you can only repeat a similar task for so long .... :)