Strike Freedom

After four months of paint, tears, and more paint… my black Perfect Grade Strike Freedom is complete. For those of us with ADHD I’m going to kick things off by posting all the pictures. From a technical prospective they’re rather ‘blah’ due to the small size of my studio and the humongous span of this kit’s wings, among other reasons. You can read more about that, along with very little detail about the build, after all the pretty pictures.

The Pictures

So at long last the body of my PG Strike Freedom is complete…

Can you spot the issues? The silvering on some of the decals is painfully evident in this shot. I can also spot at least three areas of unfortunate paint transfer via parts rubbing. The clear pieces on the wings, which normally would have had a sticker applied to them, got a coat of clear red followed by some dull coat for frosting. Probably the only aspect of the kit that turned out better than expected. Though it does clash with the rest of the design. Sadness. read more

It’s been awhile since I updated with my progress on this guy…

She’s certainly been giving me some heart burn for a while. What’s been killing me mostly are the decals and the dull top coat.

My issue with the decals, as you can probably tell from the photos, if you look closely enough, is silvering. Despite all of the pieces reviving a proper gloss coat before hand, along with the proper dosage of Micro Set & Micro Sol, many of the decals have silvered. Worse is that it’s very random and inconsistent, meaning I haven’t a clue what’s going on. I think it may be related to my rather unorthodox choice of body paint which I reveal when I’m all said and done. read more

The kit is slowly moving along. Following the issues chronicled in my last update a lot of pieces have now been repainted and received new decals. Now I await some 60 degree days to give them a good top coat.

I do have some some other pieces finished though. Unfortunately there’s some silvering/air bubble issues on the shoulder armor. Oh well. Not much I can really do about it without delaying the whole project yet again to order more decals.

It’s been a while since I updated the progress on this kit.

I ran into issues last week during an unexpected temperature drop. I didn’t notice that the temperature had dropped ten degrees from the previous day to the high 40’s. That difference in temperature was just enough to ruin the dull coat on a dozen or more pieces that I had spend the previous weekend applying decals on.

An example below. The blotchy piece on the left was coated in the colder weather, the piece on the right the day before.

Behold, the long awaited decals!

It took just shy of a month for these two decal sheets from Samuel Decal to finally make it over from Hong Kong. How amazing modern civilization has become that a letter can now safely travel half way around the world only to be folded in half by a representative of the United States Government. Fucking hell. At least the damage isn’t too bad and mostly across decals that are in abundance elsewhere on the sheets.

I’m a little disappointed by the sheets though. Upon closer inspection it’s apparent that there’s maybe four different designs repeated ad nauseum. There was a lot greater variety across Samuel’s Red/Blue frame prints. I also noticed that he used gibberish for some of the text, but didn’t bother to do anything about it when he started printing 1/60 scale sheets. The large caution triangles read “Caution gkhihksdgfk abfjkasf asfhiasf” which loosely translates to “Caution: Plot Armor.” read more

I’ve finally found the time to put in some work on my SF. I painted most of the frame a proper shade of gold. I left the old arms on there to demonstrate the difference in color.

Sadly though, before I could work on the arms or other pieces, I ran out of gold paint. I did start on the rest of the kit although it turns out I’m missing a shit load of sticky tack. (For keeping the pieces on picks during painting) That or there are just so many pieces to this bloody kit. read more