Gunpla Build - Real Grade Wing Gundam (Part 3)

In our last episode we learned a lot about the peculiarities of this particular Real Grade. Now we press on to see if the upper body is any different.

Chest

The chest is unique in its assembly, in that comes together like a sandwich:

The two outer pieces connect via hinges, but it doesn’t feel like they’re meant to move around.

Once again, there aren’t a whole lot of decals or panel lines on the chest. In fact, I ended up making up my own panel lines, just to give it some extra texture:

You may notice some damage on the inside of the chest vents. I hung them on toothpicks when I sprayed them down with clear coat, and I guess the spray paint caused the plastic to melt and fuse around the wood. I ended up going back and cleaning them up after taking that photo.

Here are a few more fun facts about the chest:

• There is a shiny green decal right behind the shiny green gem. This is so that you don’t see any of the plastic of the inner frame through the gem.
• The gem doesn’t fit very deeply into the chest, but it does appear to be holding steady.
• Both the inside chest vents and the shoulder guns are molded into the inner frame, which makes them real easy to paint:

As soon as I attached the chest to the lower body, I spotted a visual flaw. Basically, the hips are much wider than the waist:

I’ve seen this before in other models, particularly those that transform. My guess is that it is easier to add a pivot joint on a wide, flat base. In any case, it may look awkward now, but it should look better once we add the arms.

Looking at the body so far, I am struck by just how little red it uses:

Granted, we’re missing the wings and the shield, but my point is that the main body itself is really dominated by just three colors. In that way, it reminds me a lot of the Gundam Alex. That makes me see Wing Gundam in a very different - and more positive - light.

Arms and Shoulders

Right off the bat, the instructions have you mixing the inner frame with the outer armor:

I ended up having to work backwards, prepping all the armor first, and then going back and dealing with the frame. This sounds easy, but it jumbled my brain, and I ended up doing most of it out of order. Suffice to say I had a lot of cleaning up to do.

Part of that cleanup involved painting the four arm claws with gold paint. I somehow messed them up _really bad: they were goopy, and had panel lining ink smeared everywhere, and I’m entirely sure how it all happened.

Anyway, I was really hoping to not have to bust out the gold paint. I’ve come to realize that chest vents are really the only thing that looks good in gold. Any other yellow parts should stay yellow. This is because gold turns out to be a fairly neutral color. If you use it in place of yellow, you lose whatever contrast (or compliment) that yellow was intended to provide.

In this particular case, the only saving grace is that the claws are small and localized.

Let’s take a step backward and look at the rest of the assembly:

Once again, we have to apply shiny metallic decals to the inner frame, which we will (eventually) see through cutouts in the armor.

Here we see that the claws can extend outward:

I’m guessing this is for the transformation, because I’ve never seen Wing Gundam ever do anything else with these claws.

My only other remark about the assembly is that there are a ton of inner frame pieces, but you can’t really tell when looking at the finished product. There isn’t anything super special or super detailed about the frame, nor do the arms have any extra articulation. It’s weird.

Now let’s finish putting it all together:

This is the first section of the body that feels like it uses a Real Grade’s-worth of decals:

In fact, between the decals and the part separation, the arms and shoulders may be the most “Real Grade”-y body part so far.

I really must remark again upon the fact that, without the wings and the shield, there is almost no red on the body of the Wing Gundam¹. It’s overall color palette is far more cool (as in the opposite of “warm”) than I ever realized.

Conclusion

Normally I can chronicle a Gunpla build in three posts, but I’m going to do this one in four. I already know the wings are going to take a lot of work, enough to justify a fourth post. So let’s stop here, and we’ll finish it up next time.