Why yes, it has been a long time since I built a kit. And, based on the quality of my technical work here, it shows.
I envisioned this right when I saw the MG Narrative ver. Ka announcement and began scrutinizing all the marketing photos looking to make sure everything was doable. I got the MG Narrative from HLJ, which arrived so quickly it was probably a part of the first shipment of Narrative kits to make it to the United States. Quickly built, started modifying, then stuffed in parts bins for many weeks while working on other things and partaking in this year's PMW. Naturally I had a spare MG Unicorn laying around. I mean, who doesn't? For the Sinanju Stein I grabbed some 'junk' kits from Yahoo Japan. A regular Sinanju Stein, and a Sinanju Stein Narrative ver, 'cause why not.
Adapting the Stein's backpack to fit on Narrative was pretty easy, just some snip snip, glue glue, and pla-plate to add additional bracing. Same was used for the ankle armor. For the leg armor (if the shin is the front of the leg, and the calf the rear of the leg, what do you call the side?) I used an ultrasonic cutter to basically cut a rectangle through the armor and inner frame to slot in the connective piece of thruster bit. On top of that I grabbed some 3d printed detailing pieces off eBay and glued them on here and there, with some cut down to size for the shoulder armor vents and to fill in the gaps behind the leg thrusters. First lesson learned from this build was that resin printed items take to Tamiya thin cement just okay. Not as good as proper plastic on plastic. They're also fairly brittle which makes cutting them enjoyable, but easily broken if manhandled. I also experimented with reusing the upper arm armor from the Uncorn, but couldn't quite get them to fit over top over the Narrative's parts which are actually larger in size.
The second lesson I learned was that Gaia paints are awesome, but apparently lacquer paints are a bit brittle. There's a few areas that chipped which I really don't appreciate. With Tamiya acrylics I could just touch that up with a small brush, but apparently brushing on lacquer is a bad idea. For the kit I used Gaia's Natural White for most of the kit, as well as Steel White for some accent areas. Both are extremely sexy colours. I also decided to take things back to the original Unicorn ver. Ka by using basic grays for the frame, light with dark accents. No Gun Metal here. Used a little bit of Titanium Gold and silver here and there for additional accenting.
Third lesson I learned is that maybe Model Master Acryl Top Coat isn't the best after sitting around for 5 years. Yeah, totally going to blame the fogging on the blue parts on that. Yeah, no way that's skill issue. /s
Fourth lesson was that guilding (gold leaf, but with foil and not actual gold) is a horrible no good idea. I got some for use on this kit early on while flip flopping around on what to use for the pscyhoframe. I wanted to do something original so basic metallic was out. Shaded would contrast too much with the simplicity of the rest of the white design. So I figured out why not mirrored foil red with that random texture you get from guilding? Well it turns out that guilding basically results in a cluster fuck of red foil flakes everywhere like glitter of various sizes. As I was going through the guilding process I kept producing more extraneous flakes as there's a lot of nooks and crannies on the psychoframe that need to be filled in. It's not a uniform flat surface which is what guilding is typically used on. I then started imagine having to chase little red dots the rest of my life so I threw all the pieces in a quarantine jar and started over. I ended up using some Mr Crystal Color - Ruby Red I had laying around instead. It came out more "wine" than "ruby" but the understated look is hard to beat.
Fifth lesson was that getting the coloured parts from the Stein's thrusters is pretty much impossible without ruining some part of the piece. I tried drilling, I tried sharp knives, I even tried gluing spare sprues to the pieces. The builders behind both of the Steins I got even neglected to sand down the nubs before putting the parts together so that even after painting the look was so damn unsightly. I ended up buying some metal thrusters off of eBay, going with as close as a size as I could manage from a US based shipper. I typically hate the look of raw metal thrusters, it's so gauche, but my only other option would have been to buy an unbuilt Stein just for the thrusters (which was considered). I also considered cannibalizing the thrusters from my old Stein build but the metallic blue on them clashed too much. I painted the inner bits of the thruster with Tamiya clear red then used a gold IC socket for additional pizzazz.
Enjoy a few photos in a very static pose. As it turns out the head doesn't have that much room to move around and after all the shit I went through I wasn't about to run the risk of scratching anything else on this kit.
