After finishing the Core Fighter, I continued to stay small, working on the Gundam’s weapons before getting to the mobile suit itself. I began with the Beam Rifle, which has a nice two tone look in this kit:
There’s not much to say here. There aren’t any nasty marks on the plastic, and I got some nice panel lining on the grey sections of the piece. I also managed to get the red sticker around the barrel of the rifle to line up nicely.
Next up was the shield. There’s one noticeable flaw on this one - the yellow cross on the front of the shield is uneven at the bottom. I blame this on overeager sanding. It isn’t hugely glaring, but I’m still disappointed with myself:
On the bright side, I’m happy with how the stickering worked out. The shield has many stickers which go on its left and right sides, and I think I got them to line up quite well.
The Hyper Bazooka rounds out our assortment of armements. If the shield was all about sticker alignment, the bazooka was an exercise in proper panel lining. This thing has a lot of panels, and its small size means that accidental smudging was all too easy. I had one fit with the eraser that was so bad I had to call in reinforcements (otherwise known as a Qtip). I can’t complain about the finished product though:
Taken as a whole, the unevenness of the cross was my only major gaffe, which means I did a better overall job with these weapons than I did with the Zaku’s. I had a lot trouble applying the stickers on those, and I left one side of the Heat Hawk with what I can only describe as “battle damage”. I’m really happy with my work so far, but all of this has been a warmup for the real thing. Time to build the Gundam itself.