One Day Build: Star Blazers Mini No. 10

Last time I tried to do the one-day build (here's a link to the contest at SSM forum), I made like the hare in Aesop's fable and goofed off when I should have been modeling. Also, I don't know whether the hare had a wife and a daughter who wanted him to come to the pool with them.

Anyway, it was a bust from the one-day standpoint, but the model came out looking okay. Eventually.

Here's the victim for my current attempt: Bandai Star Blazers Mini No. 10, a Comet Empire missile ship. This sucker is just bristling with weaponry. I guess the Comet Empire is into massive overkill.


This time I've got it planned better and I only need to be done by 1:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Saturday, July 28, 2011, or in about 13 hours. And I've already got it completely assembled, primered with Tamiya grey sanding primer, puttied, sanded, puttied, sanded, etc.There was some flash, which surprised me--I don't recall ever seeing any flash on a Bandai kit, even ones this old.

I'm keeping modifications to a bare minimum. I hollowed out a couple of what appear to be gun barrels (2 parts no. 12), using a carbide bit in my Dremel tool, and scraped the guns on the 12 parts no. 6 (double-mount gun turrets) with an x-acto knife  to give the gun barrels a more cylindrical shape, where they had been flat-bottomed. Using AutoCAD, I designed decals for those compound eye scanner things on the front of the ship and printed them out on my Alps printer, and they came out looking good on the first try. Yay!

Tomorrow, I'll paint this ship, add the decals, weather it a bit, and write another post.