1:144 RX-77D Guncannon "Mass Production Type" (this one -does- fly in space...)

[tetsujin]

Since I can't presently move forward with my Armored Core build (waiting on a shipment of paint) I've decided to spend some time working on another project.

I was a bit inspired by the model work in the recently reissued "How to Build Gundam" books, in which they did a lot of builds in which they turned the lousy kits of the early 1980s into some very nice builds - in some cases just a few light touches of the hacksaw were needed to cleanse the old kits of their "I LIKE PIE" vibe, and get them on the road to recovery.

So I decided to get to work on a kit that's been bugging me since its release: the HGUC Mass-Production Guncannon from Gundam 0080. It's a reasonably good kit overall but it suffers from some distortion of the design that leaves a couple areas looking cheap, and a couple other areas looking unbalanced in terms of design...

WIP page

What I've done so far is replace the hands with Kotobukiya parts, hack the legs to give them a nicer taper (it's one of several leg and foot mods I want to do) and hacked the chest block to make it a bit squatter.

Other areas I really want to tackle are the cannons (the cannons retract - the sliding section of the cannon barrel is way too thin relative to the outer part) and the shoulders (the shoulder armor is nicely bulky, but the shoulder joints themselves are a bit too small in there). And at some point the kit will be getting all-new feet: I figure the biggest problem making the kit's big legs look bad is the fact that they don't have big feet to match.

 

[tetsujin]

Work continues on the MP Guncannon. I've started the modification of the feet and lower legs (I decided to modify the kit feet rather than scratching fresh ones) - I think that'll be a lot simpler. I'll still have plenty of work to do rebuilding all the foot sole detail I'm losing in the process of bulking up the foot...

I replaced the entire wrist joint in order to get the hand properly recessed into the arm - and to make the hand not look like it's dangling off the forearm on a tiny little stick... I used a Yellow Submarine ball joint, attaching the socket part of the joint directly to the hand part, so that when you look at the wrist you see the back side of the ball joint rather than the open side of the socket - this gives the joint a much more coherent look, I think...

MP Guncannon, 2009-09-22 update

 

[Blitzspear]

Looking good, i like those new hands and your right the feet look to err narrow and a bit dainty compered to the lower leg.

Blitz