Phishie Blog

I believe I complained before about the Mobile Sumo’s panel lines. I spent the evening doing some basic seam line sanding, and either rescribing sanded away lines, or purposely sanding them away to rescribe them because the originals DON’T MATCH. You’ll see it go up to a line of flash, and be a millimeter or two to the side before it continues on the other side. No wonder modeling was so big back in the day. You really had to put a lot of work into these kits to make them look good. I can’t complain too much I guess, it gives me something to do until I get an airbrush. I’m not done with them yet, but figured I’d make a post to complain about them 🙂

I went ahead and stickered up Keroro so he’s a little more entertaining to have watch me build. Then I finished up snapping my Sumo together and test fitted it. Glued a few of the pieces together on the sumo. And broke a few more spokes off of pieces by accident. Wow are those things fragile. Now for a lot of cleanup work to try and remove the seam lines and fix up badly matching pieces.

So my coworker B.C. was nice enough to give me a pair of air brushes he found on ebay for $5. Yes, $5. Neither one of us had our hopes up that high. Honestly I think his woman just wanted them out of the closet. It was especially fun when I found a post about them on the Internet that says their lifespan is usually measured in days. That was an optimistic assumption I believe. Anyway, I got some paint, and air can, thinner, etc, and hooked it up. Gamera and I were having fun with Skype (if you can call two guys watching each other build gundams “fun”) and he suggested I put the air can in hot water. Apparently this helps air flow. Apparently too much as the hose escaped it’s threads and wizzed around my head and legs until I managed to shut off the air. Using a trusty clamp, i solved that. I was however unprepared for the sheer inadequacy of this air brush to do it’s job. Gravity feed from the top is so much nicer as the bottom feed uses more paint, requires me to make more paint, and barely works at all in this case. The airflow was totally all over the place, and I couldn’t increase it or risk losing an eye from the hose. I managed to kinda whiten up about 6 pieces before I just gave up. I didn’t bother cleaning the brush since I’m going to keep the satisfaction of throwing it away so it can’t cause anyone elses hopes to be dashed against the rocks of crappyness. I’m going to save the other one to give to someone I don’t like and feel like discouraging. I had a bunch of pieces on skewers ready to go, heh, how silly of me. I have to wait a week of drying for the few pieces I did, against all odds, get paint onto. Maybe I can somehow get myself a real airbrush before then. The coating was horrible so maybe I’ll just strip them and try over.

So the pieces that had the primer peeling off I threw in the simple green after sanding them down to clean off any oil from my skin. I learned today that Simple Green will EAT the primer. Was pretty cool. I wasn’t expecting that but useful to know. The pieces are fine so it doesn’t matter, I was going to reprime them anyway. Left them out to dry and hopefully I can spray them tomorrow.

So I was chatting to GameraBaenre about my priming and such when I put some masking tape on a piece and then pulled it off. And was like….hrm…that part looks darker now. The primer came off! At first we thought perhaps it was just these two small pieces, because I had handled them a lot so maybe the oil from my fingers had gotten on them. Most of the pieces I had soaked in Simple Green degreaser for just that reason.

Turns out it’s all of the black pieces that didn’t require any sanding. Apparently the black pieces are really really smooth, so the primer didn’t have anything to stick to. Luckily this was pretty much just the waist, feet, and chest piece. The wings I had done some sanding work on so those were fine. So I had to remove all the primer that wasn’t on well by sticking tape on the piece and ripping it off repeatedly until things stopped falling off. Sigh.

Now I just have to sand those, and then re-prime them.