WIP--1/100 MG Sazabi

The English speaking Gundam internet (a series of tubes, as I understand) modeling community has had a few evolutions. In the late 90's through ~2002 the Usenet group rec.arts.anime.models was one of the best places to talk Gundam models. Now largely obsolete due to slicker web forums like FichtenFoo, Hobbyfanatics or CoM, it still has a trove of reviews and modeling tips.

One of the more interesting reviews, in its 8 printed page glory, was that of James E. Doyle on the Sazabi back in Sep 2000. Probably the most thorough build review of the most expensive MG to that date, it still has echoes across this World Wide Web thingy. The review can be found here, and highlights the pros, cons and gross frustrations of building the kit. In short, it is a lament on how close Bandai came to getting it right (the sculpt is pretty OK), but also of how much they missed the mark in wholly fixable ways (uncovered polycaps in places, shallow molded details, etc.). While this kit is the first MG I will complete, I have worked on several, and I agree with J.E.D.’s assessment overall. In a lot of ways, this kit is a half step between a true MG and a decent HG kit (not HGUC—most HGUCs I’ve seen are better relatively speaking—there is only so much you can do with most 1/144 kits). J.E.D. ended his continually souring relationship with this kit in March of 2007, and I am now the owner of the very kit immortalized in the War and Peace sized review.

So, here is my take on the kit, and what I have down to fix it. I set a 3 week goal for completing the beast. I was smoking crack—at least another three weeks were needed. I was greatly helped by J.E.D., who, even though only snap fitted the kit, did a fine job cleaning up the majority of sprue attachments and minimizing sprue scars.

The Anime—Char’s Counterattack

Typical of Zeon “glass jaw” school of mobile suits, and vaguely reminiscent of another hot rod, the Sazabi is overpowered and under armored. Paint a Kampher red, and it is the Neanderthal for the Sazabi’s Homo Sapiens. Blazing speed, crappy beam sabers, and enough armor to deflect ripe bananas but not much else, this suit seems to thrive on dropping the hammer and packing a punch. Some comments have been made as to the inadequacy of Char’s shield in the kit as looking too flimsy. I’ll go one better—in the anime, it is flimsy, taking exactly one glancing shot from the ν Gundam before instantly vaporizing. When Amuro busts out the can of whoopass mano a mano on Char, the Sazabi is coming apart like a nervous bride who’s caterer didn’t show up. Face it, the Sazabi and Char were badly outclassed by Amuro and the ν. BUT, and it is a big but, (like Vida Guerra’s), there absolutely wasn’t anything or anyone else that could touch the big red beast.

The kit

As mentioned, the overall sculpt is OK to my eye, especially since I’m shooting for anime accurate, not line art perfect. In general, I have disassembled the kit into constituent parts, sometimes a few times, to build in mods or fix things. There were a few detail issues I wanted to address, though:

Major mods:
1. Fix the ankles/legs/hip joints for posing
2. Make the shoulder armor more "curvy"
3. Adjust the chest sculpt a bit
4. Add a mid forearm rotation joint so the big guy can hold his gun up and down for once
OR
4.5 Move the gun hand polycap away from the forearm arm so it is more centered
5. Monoeye lighting
6. Monoeye clear shield
7. BIG one, importance wise--make detailed blanks to cover up the interior of the shoulder armor where there is nothing but an UGLY seam.
8. Replace any surviving actuator cylinders with metal

Potential/minor mods:
1. Replace the arm actuator cylinders with anime accurate conductive cable housings (yellow, like the waist belt)
2. Make the hands with bead knuckles, like in HJ
3. MAYBE make a better shoulder joint

4. Add head camera/sensor thing, making chest vents, swapping out a few verniers

5. Detail the beam rifle and extend the barrel a bit

The Mods—Ankle

The first mod I made to the Sazabi was the ankle joint. Though I intend to display the kit on a stand for the “in flight” look, the ankles are pretty limited and any decent standing pose (other than at attention) is hard to impossible to pull off. The biggest impediment is the lower most leg frame piece, where the bottoms of the actuator cylinders are housed. The fake ankle hinge is so wide it bangs into the foot. So, I either had to chop up the foot or the bottom piece. The bottom piece got the axe, mostly because the foot is OK looking, and as an engineer the bottom piece’s lack of sense offended me. I cut out the minus mold hinges and attached them where they made sense on the foot. The rest of the bottom piece was butchered—the entire bottom part housing the actuator cylinders was cut off, along with the front face. The fronts were rebuilt with a gap to fit the new actuators, and overall the part was narrowed to hug the ankle peg part better. The upper housing and the actuator cylinders were replaced with metal tubing, and the actuators were lengthened considerably so they could mount off the ball peg piece by the ball joint. I then shaved down the backside of the ball joint piece to swing around the now fixed minus mold pieces. The finished mod looks a lot better, and adds about 20° of side tilt to the ankle.

Hips don’t lie

Another joint of contention is the hip. Hip splay can determine the range of dramatic action pose you can get, and there are a number of ways to achieve it. Keeping in mind I planned to display the Sazabi in flight over a mirror, I couldn’t afford anything too gimmicky. Whatever course I chose had to look good from all visible angles. Keeping in mind my experience from modifying the TallGeese hips, and the extra room the much larger kit offered, I settled on a double ball joint mod, much like this. I was unable to use practically any of the original ball joint block due to the replacement joints I used, which left the joint looking pretty ugly if it were ever seen. The middle image below shows the double joint cups, joined by SGT, and retaining clips to hold the cups in place. When using SGT to anchor down ball joint cups you have to be very careful not to “freeze” the cup. If you use too much SGT along the side, the cup will become rigid, and you will not be able to get enough flex to insert the ball. Don’t ask me how I know this. I spent a fair amount of time building a fairing to cover the mod done to the hip. Copious amounts of styrene, SGT, and a part from another kit went into rebuilding this area. The finished product hides the joint, and the increase in hip mobility is stunning. While giving the hips a tad more front to back splay (really not a weak point), this more importantly adds the ability to raise or lower the hip sockets independently. Though the Sazabi will never kneel like the TallGeese, it can still get a lot more motion and look good doing it. Since the Sazabi had the lower three vertebrae fused (stupid injury from its younger days trying to impress girls—blew out its back and developed sciatica) and therefore has ABSOLUTELY NO waist twist at all, any sort of running or striking pose results in the torso being tilted from the leg height difference. Raising or dropping the hip sockets independently should help considerably with this—we’ll see in the final product. The bottom set of pictures show the splay angle was at least doubled, which should be interesting.

Forearm--Scratch build

I completely replaced the interior forearm pieces. In general, they are way oversized compared to the anime. Even accounting for rubber robot syndrome, they are too long but more importantly, the forearms are considerably thicker than they should be. The Sazabi would never be able to hold the beam rifle with those Popeye things in the way. All in all, it gives the kit a mountain gorilla arm profile, which is just wrong. The basic plan was to slim down the forearm to match the anime better, give the wrist more of a built in curve, and move the wrist ball joint more to the center of the wrist disk. A side benefit is getting rid of the wrist beam saber polycap mount, which is awkward and exposed. By doing this, I figured there would be enough room for the beam rifle stock to fit inside of the forearm, instead of on top. The red armor pieces were cut down in length and reshaped to slim them down. The new internal forearm was built within the armor profile using scrap parts. I planned a twist joint to the forearm at the elbow, but this was not practical with the armor.

Work to do: Finish assembly, remount wrist polycap and wrist “disk”.

The Forearm--casting

After reworking the parts, the next step was to cast resin copies. I had 2 reasons for doing this. First, I didn’t have the time/energy/parts to scratchbuild two sets. Second, the parts I made the forearm out of were quite flimsy, and I needed something solid and strong for the arm. The RTV molds for the outer armor shell were based on the technique I perfected for the HyGogg, and were much simpler to execute. Just like the HyGogg, using a children’s medicine dispenser was key to forcing the resin into all the corners of the mold and resulted in a prefect cast every time. Unfortunately, I made the injection side wall of the mold a tad too thin, which resulted in some leakage while injected the resin. I mostly fixed that problem by tightly clamping the mold between two flat plates, and injecting through the vent hole. Injecting “backwards” worked, but resulted in more voids/mold issues. The internal forearm was a unique challenge as it was the first hollow tube I ever tried to cast as one piece. I was able to make this work by filling half the tube with clay when making the mold, so there was a seam line inside the hollow forearm where it wouldn’t matter. This method worked very well, producing the strong, single piece forearm I needed. I wasn’t shy about vents for this mold—it is a lot easier to trim those off the finished piece that to deal with a void.

Elbow/Upper Arm

Narrowing the forearm also impacted the elbow joint on the upper arm. The upper arm has an odd double pivot elbow joint with more actuator cylinders. In addition to providing absolutely no useful function, they are poorly detailed plastic. Similar to the ankle, these were replaced using metal tubes to the kit hinge piece. To fit the new forearm, I had to narrow the elbow by about 2mm. Fortunately, the “bicep” area matched the narrower elbow, and I didn’t need to do any slimming. In order to better match the arm proportions in the anime, I ended up thickening the biceps by wrapping the armor pieces in thin sheet styrene. Thin forearms + thick biceps = better match to anime proportions.

Shoulder

Moving on to the shoulder joint itself, there is little I see to do here for mobility’s sake. Aside from the ridiculous 2-handed beam saber windmilling attack Char pulls out on Amuro during the last bit of their fight (I assume there is a “windmill” button in the cockpit of all mobile suits in case the pilot forgets basic melee weapon combat skills), there is little more to ask of the joint. I did replace the current ball joint with much stiffer aftermarket acrylic parts (gotta keep that in mind for the GP-02…). For detail, there are two small conductive cables (like around the waist) that should run up the shoulder from the elbow, which were assembled from SS sized Max pipes. The gaping blank chest side of the joint is another matter… As for sculpt, one change I made to the kit shoulder was rounding out the outer shoulder armor in the front view. In the anime, those pieces are almost round, not angular like on the kit.

Work to do: Rebuild the detail rails on the outside edge, which were removed or covered by sanding.

Chest/Torso

The side plates on the chest are probably the worst detailed attempts imagined for an MG kit—a blank wall of plastic with some fairly inaccurate shallow details around the edge. I cut out the blank and the bottom edge, and replaced the bottom edge with scratchbuilt details. Cutting out the blank also exposed the chest/shoulder joint internals a bit, which gives a pretty nice look—at least something is there.

Work to do: I carved out the vent slots on the chest front; I need to cover with an appropriate screen

Head LED

The head is a standard single mooneye, which moves in only one plane—only one axis to deal with. I removed the kit mooneye and did some major excavating of the cockpit around Wee Char’s leg stumps (recall Wee Char has no legs), after soldering, bending to fit and insulating the LED/wires together, I used a drink stirrer straw to enclose (with SGT) the wire bundle. I used another section of straw, split down the side to fit over the LED straw, and more SGT to make the pivot for the LED. As for power, I can drop a single 3V coin cell into a hole I made in the torso, or run wires down a leg to an external adapter.

Weapons

One minor mod here—I extended the barrel about 1 cm, and replaced the detail on the front top of the barrel with an aluminum tube. I also used a Kotobukiya detail part to replace a really badly molded part on the back of the rifle.

Painting

For paint my idea was leaning towards the darker red, like madder red, with perhaps some iridescent worked in--subtle, but there. The interior frame part will all be metalized and dark, the joints lighter metallics to match the anime.