Phase Ignition!

"Quod Scripsi, Scripsi."

Saturday, December 31, 2005

Back! with a whimper

yeah...i know i've been missing for sometime now. Not really beacuse of busy Mikey... but more of no internet connection. As most of my friends know, i access the net from the office. Well, we just moved office to bukit bintang (yay! near ALL the toy shops!) and apparently, Telekoms take 10 days to reconnect our previous Streamyx connection.

But they did give us an option of applying for a new broadband line and according to them, connection will be done faster. What a wonderful marketing plan!! well, wait till my buddies in Telekom hear about this!

Anyways..the days have been spent on preparing for Christmas, doing up our tree (yay!), entertaining friends and family. Made my signature chilli again but this time i wasn't so satisfied with the results. Apart from that it has been unpacking and getting adjusted to the new office etc etc..

The internet is still out in the office, i'm doing this from starbucks (as usual). No updates on the Desert Zaku Project yet. Last thing i did was to prime and future the head assembly. Its sitting there on my shoe cabinet, gathering dust (oh crap! more work to do when i get it started again!)

Got 2 nice books from wifey for christmas... if you know anything about my reading speed, i'm about to finish the second book in 2 days. But meanwhile I have something to read, snagged "Rogue Warrior" by Richard Marcinko. This guy is the founder of US Navy Seal Team 6.. the so called "non existant team" Anyways, for a list of what i'm currently reading, take a gander at me sidebar.

So, till i get another chance to update this blog, have a happy and safe new year. Have fun and i'll smell ya later!

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Adsense

ah yes.. the lure of money .. i signed up for adsense couple of days back.. so do me a favour, click on them ads on the top of the post so i can get some cash for the garbage i put out daily... alternatively, you can put one on your blog too and get me to click it! at the moment i'm only willing to do this for all the blogs listed under "my buddies" ... anyone else, please email me..

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Haloscan

yep.. got meself one of those comment systems.. but i lost all my comments prior to this! (not like there were many anyways. Guess good 'ol crash is gonna get a shock when he gets back from penang! :p

commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Monday, December 12, 2005

Sale time again

YES! the year end sales are back! feel like sneaking to sogo (jap shopping complex near my workplace) to look at some more Gundam kits. That 1/144 HGUC Hazel RX121-1 TR-1 looks REALLY nice!Look at this baby!



*sigh* its about RM 70+ (around USD 20). This is part of the series of figures that have been burning the boards at Child of Mecha and other Gundam building boards. Its part of the "Advance of Zeta" Spin off from Zeta Gundam and has really nice looking mecha from that series. Hobby link Japan has this to say about this kit ( look at the picture lah):

""Very nice high grade injection plastic model of the Gundam TR-1, "Hazel Custom", from "Advance of Z(eta)". Molded in colour and featuring snap-fit assembly for ease of building, it comes with foil stickers and clear "Gundam Stickers" for detail (markings for the "Titans Test Team"). A special 35-page "Advance of Z Guide Book", with a black-and-white manga story inside, is also included (all text is in Japanese).""

with a manga book even! i've seen very nice custom decals for this kit and other related ones. Most of them center around the Titans Test Team (go see the anime for more on the Titans. Nope, haven't seen the anime yet, still trying to finish Wing and SEED Destiny) Even Dengenki Magazine has gotten into the act and has done some nice resin Models (i haven't touched resin kits yet..as it is, i'm having trouble with plastic styrene ones!) here's a few pics of the decals form the Advance Hazel + Dengenki Hobby kits :



and one more (thanks to muji from the Child of Mecha Boards for the pictures!)



nice aren't they? too bad they're stickers! yep, not decals, stickers... i hate stickers on my mecha! All this being said, while i'll never have a chance to afford the resin kits, i will have the cash for the Bandai Styrene one but... its 1/144 scaled.. small... not really something i prefer but lets see how it goes when i'm standing right in front of the kit.. hopefully i don't get overwhelmed by my buying impulse! GAH!.. maybe i might change my mind and get that SEED 1/100 Strike kit instead.. been wanting to do one posed with just the "Armor Schneider" combat knives... hmmm... later.. i have more meetings to attend

Desert Zaku Update : 12 December 2005

hmm...unfortunately, i've been too busy/tired to take pictures of what happened lately with the project (remember the disaster?) well, not too much a disaster but here's what happened:

I sprayed the forearm assemblies with the german grey lacquer (thanks a lot Tamiya!) and let that dry for about 2 days. Then i attempted to glue them with my spanking new Thin Cement courtesy again, from Tamiya (you would think they should give me something for plugging them throughout this blog...fat chance! only 5-6 ppl ever read this blog anyways.. :p) then, the unthinkable happened... the paint came right off with the cement brush!

I was horrified! at the spur of the moment, my fire-fighting instinct kicked in and i started gluing the shoulder assemblies without painting them. But i stopped and had a long hard think about the whole thing. I finally decided to do this:

1. Continue painting and then cementing part that can't be pre-built and painted. The only thing different is, i'm adding a thin layer of Future (God bless the man who invented it!) ... i've done that with the other forearm assembly but it still needs another day for curing before I cement it so stay tuned for results of those experiments..

2. For parts that can be pre-bulit, well, as long it doesn't require masking, i'll leave those to dry, sand them and then paint them later.

I'm not going to rush the whole process, funny thing happened the other day, while i was in the state of shock about what happened with the gule lifting the paint, wifey who was seated next to me looked over and remarked, "so what are you doing now with that?"

I replied by detailing the whole process of priming, cementing, sanding, assemblying and laying on the final colour. Then I described the last bits of detailing. She asked how long all this will take. I said I would probably finish by march or april. She had only 1 thing to say: "Wah.. you got so much of time on your hands ah?"

'Nuff said...

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Dunderhead moment

grr..blogger is slow today...

Anyways, yes, after 2 days of training and travelling to Cyberjaya, i happily drove to the office only to discover... I didn't bring the power supply for my Notebook!!! my battery died long ago and i ain't shelling out RM 500 for a new one so i drove all the way back to serdang and back to office.. total time wasted on the road: 1.5 hours.

Not to mention the 8 bucks i had to pay for parking... and i have dinner at my parents place today... *moan* looks like the beginnings of a very bad day...

what's that i hear you ask? oh ...whats happening to the desert zaku project? small disaster but i want to take some pictures to show the boo boo..tomorrow, if i still have the strength to photograph them tonight....laterzz

Monday, December 05, 2005

Time Out

Yep... no updates for the next few days.. i'm in a branding training. In Cyberjaya. Updating this from a public terminal in the MSC headquarters.. damn.. IE is so lame.. Stay tuned tho, cos in 2 days there'll be more updates..looks like the desert zaku project has run into its first run of problems *cue impending doom & disaster music*

bye

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Desert Zaku: Dec 1 In-Prog - mini update

ok, got the extra thin cement! RM 22.90(about 7 usd), no discount! grr..

Desert Zaku Update: December 1

ok...got down to skewering and a bit of paintin last night. so far i got both forearm assemblies done. But since i'm am absolutely inexperienced with the can o' spraypaint, i think i overdid some parts a little bit. as a result, some parts now have a tiny bead of extra paint on them.. hmm..let me see if i can sand out those parts and retouch them. Anyways, here's a picture



Heh, the german grey went on so nicely. Since i'm off to the bank at lunch, i guess i can stop by the model shop for some cement. hope they have some extra thin tamiya cement..that will save so much of time & effort! I've left the parts to dry off for at least 48 hours before i start on the next batch... must say, painting is fun! The REAL fun will start when i start putting on the dark yellow...I'll worry about that when that time comes...

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

More cool blogs!

hehe... thanks a lot crash for sending me those 2 blogs. The first is called "Eye on everything".. that belongs to an enigmatic young feller known only to me as eyeris.. reporter and wordsmith extrodinaire! ..met him some time ago during one of those late night TransMY (malaysian transformers fan group) tea session.. lovely blog, love your writing pal! to see his blog, go this way: eyeris.blogspot.com

Second one is called Hantu Bola: Petaling Street Hooligans. Soccer based blog on the English Premier league. Ok.. don't quite care about EPL anymore... looks like eyeris is involved in this one as well..so if ya like the EPL go here: hantubola.blogspot.com

ps. those of you who don't speak the malay language, hantu=ghost; bola=ball

'Nuff said

Personally, I like Bayern Munich & Borussia Dortmund

*sigh*. poor wifey..

just got into the office after a looong planning meeting earlier today. We didn't quite finish it so it continues later till 7 or 8... my poor wifey can't have din dins with me today.. awww.. she sounded so sad.. and on top of that she'll still sick..

Sorry baby... i'll be back later..

Galaxy Force Ep 45

yeah.. i know its been out for some time now. But while looking at our honeymoon (why do i keep typing it as hineymoon? hmmm *confused*) pictures, i got the wife to watch the entire ep on me laptop.(no, she wasn't sitting on my laptop...she jus watched it ON my laptop) Her response? those kids are sooooo cute!!

Ahem.. yes, Bud was very cute there wasn't he? that bit about "instructing" Flame Convoy on leadership was hilarious!! Nice to see Lori (lori apa? lori balak ke?) acting all serious later on. And my wife just ADORES minicons... phew! thank God my Armada collection is small and are now quite hard to find. if not, die man....Sad to say, my Transformers collection has slowed down for the last few months, the only thing i bought was Hasbro CybertronSideways (yecch! i hate that name, the Japanese name, Noisemaze sounds way much cooler.)

Been saving up for little things that would complete my Modelling toolkit. Still havent bought the Dark Yellow for my Zaku Project.....guess that has to wait till i'm done priming the parts and doing the seam filling...

next topic..or i won't stop rambling!

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Desert Zaku: In-prog 28th Nov

Just got back from the honeymoon (it wus sweeet!) , well, remember the parts in the baggie pics i promised? they're here.
















I guess that putting them in bags makes things easier for me as i'm prone to losing something or rather. I also wrote lil' notes on the bags themselves so that i won't forget to do something (eg: fixing that hole i sanded into the zaku head) here's another picture:

















The next stage begins soon, thats skewering them up and start painting the German Grey. I bought a couple of brushes to start work with but looks like they're missing! :( well, i'm in my new house now and i guess i hafta get to my mom's house to gather up the rest of my modelling stuff. Hope the brushes are there...

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Desert Zaku:Updates

Well, its SO hard to find a decent line art version of the Zaku I'm building! anyways, found a scanned MG kit instruction online and doctored it with GIMP. This is the final result:





















now all that remains is a little re-colouring. BUT, i'm off for the Indian wedding and honeymoon and will be back in 2 weeks so i guess that and the rest of the project has to wait. The parts are still in their respective baggies (yes..photos coming soon!) and I still haven't done anything so more when I get back!

Monday, November 14, 2005

Desert Zaku: Mecha Gießerei

Where to begin? Oh.. yeah, i got into this Gundam model building thing as soon as i had watched about 20+ episodes of SEED Destiny (i know, not a great place to dive into the Gundam Universe) My modelling experience was very limited to helping a friend build his Tamiya BMW 635 CSI for a contest when i was 17 (i'm 31 now). Well, time went on and this year, i fell in love with the Gundam Astray Red Frame that i built in a few hours, unpainted, uncemented and unsanded(gasp!). Then came the Blue Frame and the LunaMaria Custom Zaku Warrior. ..still no paint, no glue, still unsanded. So i'm like a sooooper Newbie when it comes to modelling.

Then I came across a Char's custom Zaku. Its was HUGE! [lookie here!] its advertised as a 1/60 scale kit but it towered at nearly 12-13 inches in height. Obviously a very old bandai kit, this one has NO pegs like the snap-ons i had made earlier. Armed with a tube of superglue i glued the monster together and well, i had enough sense NOT to glue all of it together cos there's a little bulb you can put into its mono-eye. (still need to hollow out the tubing in the mono-eye, so you can guess what happened to that THAT project.) Then i started looking at some modelling sites and i arrived to Fitchenfoo's site.

One look at his F2 "desert" Zaku and i fell in love with it instantly. See, i had been interested in the WW2 German army since childhood and had admired the various tanks, half-tracks etc for many years. Of particular interest was the DAK Afrika Korps. So instantly some thing clicked in my mind and the concept of a Zaku serving in the Zeon version of Afrika Korps was born. Heck, i even coined the army name (warning: not so original name creation coming up..) ZeonAfrika Korps. I then combined the two logos of Zeon and the original Afrika Korps to come out with this logo:


















More reading followed, this time Fitchen's MG model tutorial, The Complete Future Article by Matt Swan and wisely, i signed up for the Child of Mecha message board. In between, i looked at a few colour schemes on DAK tanks (there were not many) but this was the general idea i got at the end. German Tanks shipped to Afrika (Africa i mean..) were mainly painted German Grey (i'm not giving the exact colour name cos i can't remember) and that they were European Theater colour-schemed tanks. In Africa, troops were supplied with paints later in the war. Prior to getting these paints, they used mud or simply lifted a couple of cans from their Italian Allies. But the general idea was this, sand yellow with grey peeping thru. Looked up the corresponding Tamiya colours and it was XF60 - Dark Yellow.

Fine. I came across a 1/100 scale of the monster i built previously (still no pegs, no snap ons on this one) and gleefully bought that for RM 30 (about 8USD). Raided my local ACE Hardware and found the Future. While all this was goin on, i was preparing to get married. YES! so, in-between wedding prep, i was cutting and sanding!.. The thing about this is, I managed to make a hole in the zaku head as i sanded it too much while listening to my wife talking to her make up artist.. err... lesson learnt there... guess i gotta putty up that part..i put every sub-assembly (head, shoulders, forearms etc) into individual plastic bags that i labelled with instructions. (pictures coming soon)

I also got a can of German Grey Lacquer from Tamiya that i now plan to use as the "primer" "underneath colour. So as it stands right now, I'm readying my bamboo skewers and foam base for painting. Guess i gotta go get that bottle of Dark Yellow and some really good brushes (nope, i dont own an airbrush...guess i gotta do it the hard way.). Thats it for now, hopefully i can get back home (gosh,...its 8:25 pm...i'm still in the office!) and take a few pics of the parts in the bags before i take 'em out to paint. Laterz!

The Beginning

Well, here's where I begin, You'll find out more about me in the profiles section. if its empty now its because I haven't dragged my lazy ass to fix it up yet. I tried blogging in many places but neh.. i decided to stick to this one now. Let it be a genesis (as far as blogs are concerned this will be genesis ver 32!)

I decided to start this with a Gundam Project that i'm working on right now. Progress and details will be forthcoming as I find the time to update the blog. So kick back, grab a cold one and enjoy!