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Master Grade Zaku 2 2.0 to Zaku 1 Gundam The Origin Resin Conversion Kit
The MG Zaku 1 is a fairly old kit that came out in 1999. I usually don’t care too much about the age of a kit as long as I like the look of it but, while I like the look of the Zaku, the MG Zaku 1 does not look too great and the pose-ability looks to be quite lacking. So, I never picked it up. I had been looking to try out resin kits but was often turned off by the price until i came across this zaku 2 2.0 to zaku 1 resin conversion kit and it was only about $30. I bit the bullet and ordered the kit. This is my first foray into resin conversion kits and I’ll walk through my experience and what I thought about it.
I started building the kit. The legs are the biggest headache of the entire kit. The legs on this resin kit have a very poor fit to the point that I thought that I didn’t have the right base kit. The leg armor simply wouldn’t fit around the base of the legs. I tried cutting and sanding and sanding and cutting. I couldn’t get the armor to fit on the legs, but I needed a place to glue the armor to. The solution I came up with actually ended up working. I ended up having to cut the lower half of the calves off of the inner frame to make the leg armor fit around the leg frame. This way, I still had a spot to glue the legs but the inner frame was no longer interfering with the leg armor. This could present a problem if you look up into the leg, but the feet are large enough to block out too many prying eyes.
The next issue I ran into I hadn’t even realized at first-- The skirt armor was looking a little… off… I realized that my kit had come with duplicate side skirt armor and the skirt would need some modification to make it look correct. I fiddled with sanding and cutting one of the skirt armor to match the details of the other if it were flipped, but when I test fit the new armor I was still having issues with how the armor sat on the kit and how well it moved. So I scrapped using the included side skirts and front skirts and used the original skirt armor and I think it looks totally acceptable.
The next issue to resolve was the fitment of the backpack. It just didn’t fit into the torso at all. I decided not to bother with it at all and just modified the existing backpack to work with a zaku 1.
The last issue I had with this kit was that some of the panel lines were looking a bit soft and I wasn’t too confident that the panel liner would fill them very well. I really didn’t want to rescribe them as I don’t have much experience with scribing and I felt that I could do more harm than good and so i primed the kit in gray and was ready to start painting-- until I saw someone post their version on the gunpla subreddit of the same exact kit I was working on. The lines looked too clean and I knew I couldn’t leave the lines on my kit all soft like that. So I got out my panel line scriber and started prescribing those panel lines.
Now… Finally I was happy that this conversion was going to look okay and I was ready to move onto painting. I primed all of the pieces once again. I originally had wanted to follow the design of the included photograph with the blue and green colors but I didn’t have any colors that closely matched those and didn’t want to bother with mixing up custom colors at this point. I took a test piece of plastic and tried out some colors until I was happy with a few that went together and got to painting, decaling, and finally clear coating. One final note, The decals that came with the conversion kit are not very high quality so I used only a few of them and some caution marking decals and zeon decals that I already had.
This is the final product and I honestly couldn’t be happier. I was just fighting to finish this kit in the beginning and now I feel like I need to add a body kit to all of my model kits.
When I first started on the conversion I was quite impressed with the details of the armor but that quickly turned to disappointment with all of the parts fitting issues I was having. I don’t know if part fitment issues are common with resin conversion kits but while it was the most disappointing, it was also the most rewarding part of the process. Working though some of those issues with a little bit of creative problem solving helped to make this one of my favorite builds. I don’t know if I will build resin kits frequently but I am already looking to do another one
mg zaku 2 - [ Ссылка ]
Vallejo paint - [ Ссылка ]
Tamiya panel line accents - [ Ссылка ]
Naptha - [ Ссылка ]
iwata airbrush - [ Ссылка ]
airbrush compressor - [ Ссылка ]
airbrush spray booth - [ Ссылка ]
panel line scriber - [ Ссылка ]
extra thin cement - [ Ссылка ]
loctite gel super glue - [ Ссылка ]
