MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

[Funaka]

I'm still spending a lot of time working on the house, but I actually found some time to work on this project I've been tinkering with as a side project for over a year. It's now getting my main focus. I'm going for a light to medium amount of mods to try to modernize the kit, but not change its overall appearance.

Here's the concept art with the decals I've designed:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Progress started with covering up the awful exposed polycap in the knee:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Then I went to work cutting off the ugly non-functional dummy pistons from the front ankle (paste the link to see it on Dalong: http://dalong.net/review/mg/m24/p/m24_n09.jpg) and hollowing out the lower legs to fit a poycap:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Then I will use the pistons from my old MG Mk. II ver. 1.0:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

You can also see where I'm going with ver. Ka style feet. There's a lot of clean-up to do, but the hard work is done. I'm also lengthening the thighs to make the legs a bit longer. The thighs are ridiculously short on this kit.

The other things I plan to do are change the elbow joints and probably add some torso mobility mods. After that I'll put it together and look at doing some aesthetic mods and detailing.

[FichtenFoo]

You know... with the red placement on the arms I get an Alex vibe. Might be interesting to add retractable gatlings there or get a cheap snapped Alex on eBay and mot it's arms to work.

[Funaka]

Foo- I've actually got an Alex in the scrap heap. That's crossed my mind more than once. Might fix my arm problem... (see below)

Alright, a bit more progress on the legs. I think I'm done with them, at least in this first round of structural mods. Once the structural mods are cleaned up, I'll look into more little cosmetic fixes all around.

Anyway, here's what I did to the thighs in order to make the legs longer. Stock, this kit has long shins and very short thighs, so I put 3 .020 plastic sheets in. I did them piece by piece (front armor, rear armor, internals) so I could still take all the pieces apart for painting.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

So here is the overall leg:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

You can see (from bottom to top)

Ka-style feet (now fully puttied)
Pistons connecting the feet to the ankles
Plastic over the exposed polycap inside the knee
Lengthened thigh

Here's the GM with its new legs:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

I want to put another ball joint in the torso, fix the head a bit (it sits low and is too wide and flat on the bottom, I'm still putting my finger on it, but see this pic: http://dalong.net/review/mg/m24/p/m24_n26.jpg), and do something with the arms. The arms are just made of too many pieces, which makes them look stubby, like the GM's thighs did ( http://dalong.net/review/mg/m24/p/m24_m0016.jpg).

[Funaka]

Last week I went to work on the torso. First, I sawed apart the internals:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Then I cut the bottom of the armor of the chest to allow some room to move (in this pic it's half way done so you can compare how much I cut out):

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Then I installed a ball and socket joint:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

It doesn't give me a huge range of motion, but this is my first time doing this and I'm being a little conservative. Plus, the cockpit hatch rubs on the chest armor between the vents and reduces the mobility.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

[Funaka]

Here's this week's work. I noticed in some of the pictures above that the head looked a lot better and I realized that it was because the collar was removed and it made the neck look longer. Since I also wanted the neck to be more flexible, I decided to go to work on the neck.

I cut the ball joint off the neck and put a Koto hinge joint below it. Test fitting showed that that made the neck way too long, so I had to cut out the top of the neck and lower it to make a recessed platform for the hinge to sit on:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

This allows the ball joint to pivot forward and back:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Which lets the head look down:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

And up. I really wanted it to be able to do this for the flying pose:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

The next thing I wasn't happy with was the ankle mobility. This is the "before" picture and this was the best leg spread I could get before the work I did on the ankles:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

I thought of making the ankle longer, so the foot wouldn't rub on the leg and restrict its mobility, but I didn't want to make the legs any longer. So, I shaved down the parts that were rubbing instead.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

A - I cut the semi-curcular recess in the leg larger and sanded it with some sandpaper wrapped around a plastic tube so that it wouldn't rub the gray minus mold that holds the ankle armor.

B - I filed an angle on the ring that goes around the ankle ball joint. I had already filed the back, but I also filed the inside to give it mobility in that direction as well.

C - I filed some off the top of the added-on piston-holder I had added to the front of the ankle.

Now the GM can make this pose and be flat-footed:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

That's pretty much the limit, but for such an old kit I'm happy with it. Any more mobility would risk making the ankle look funny and also require modding the hips as well.

I looked on Dalong to see how old this kit is. It came out in 1999, more than 10 years ago, and if you don't count all the recolors and variants it was only the ninth design to go MG. If you lump the kits by family, like the RX-78-2, -3 and original GM as one design, and all of the Zakus as one deisgn, etc... then you have 1. Gundam 2. Zaku 3. Zeta 4. Gelgoog 5. GP01 6. GP02 7. Mk II 8. Dom 9. NT-1 I'm counting the GM Custom as part of the Gundam NT-1 family of kits, since so much of it is similar. Dang, this kit is primitive!

[Ezechiel]

Great improvements, and damn that kit needs them!
The flying pose looks really cool.

[Funaka]

I’ve been working away on the GM Custom (and my lawn...), but I just haven’t made time to post about it. The last real challenge is the arms. There were two things I didn’t like about the arms. They seemed a little short, and the elbow joints were a poor design.

Fichtenfoo suggested putting the NT-1 arms on this GM and I had thought the same thing. I originally dismissed the gatling-gun arms as excessively gimmicky for a GM. But I also wanted to make the forearm longer. While the NT-1 forearms aren’t actually any longer, they look longer since the blue hatch over the gatling guns makes the forearm  look longer since it extends back over the elbow.

I did a couple mods to make painting these parts easier including opening the slots that the gatling gun parts slide on so that they can slide completely apart and be put back together after painting. I also cut the tabs on the guns themselves so they can be popped off for painting.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Then got to the elbows. The range of motion is actually good, but I had doubts about their strength in the long run and the way they are built would mean a couple of rounds of paint/putty/mask/paint since the pieces are built around each other in layers.

The question was what to do with them. The easiest thing would be to replace them with the elbows from another kit. The best elbow I had “laying around” was from the MG Ground Gundam. I didn’t want to take these elbows since the Ground Gundam and its variants are actually pretty nice kits. I could take that kit (that I had built Dalong-style in my pre-airbrush days) and rebuilt it and airbrushed it into a nice model.

Before I went with the Ground Gundam elbows I looked at modifying the elbows from the ver.1.0 Mk. II. It didn’t bother me to cannibalize the Mk. II or the NT-1 since they’re both about 10 years old so their joints are shot. They both took a dive in the last earthquake we had and I never put them back up on the shelf.

Unfortunately the Mk. II elbows wouldn’t work. I then made an attempt at scratch-building some elbows before I gave the idea up as just insane and more trouble than it was worth.

So I went with the nuclear option, which was to take the elbows from the Ground Gundam.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

To make it work I cut out the elbows from the rest of the arm and added plaplate to shim the lower part of the elbow into the forearm.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

I would have used the upper arm from the Ground Gundam, but it was too skinny so I gutted the upper arm f the GM Custom so it could take the Ground Gundam elbow and then added plaplate spacers on the inner sides so that the elbow wouldn’t float in the middle of the arm.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Here’s the end product, but it’s stuck on with sticky-tack so it looks a bit wonky.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

In the time since I’ve disassembled the model and glued, puttied and almost finished sanding it. So looks like I’ll be firing up the airbrush soon, even if just to prime the model.

[Asmodeous]

Loving your work.  You've given me a lot to go with while I tinker with my MG Quel.  Had some of the same ideas but haven't really put forth a tremendous effort to improving and implementing them.  Can't wait for paint to see how it looks.

[blackito]

Those mods you made on this kit are really great. I have the same kit and no matter how I look at waist and chest mods I get too confused. Hopefully by doing the same thing you did here with my kit I'll get a feel for it. 
Keep up the awesome work man !

[Funaka]

It's been more than two weeks since a post but I've been working on the shield and gun, as well as filling seams.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Full detail can be found on my blog:

http://gamerabaenre.com/funaka/?p=404

I thought I'd just put a link and let you guys click your way there. We'll see what people think.

[FichtenFoo]

I like how it's coming along. Nice hay bale too. LOL!

[Kane82]

This looks great - I'm working on a MG Alex custom right now too and your neck pivot just gave me a great new idea to implement.  Thank you!!

[Funaka]

I've been working but not posting, so here's the latest. I finished detailing the gun:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

And have built a bayonet to go underneath it, I forgot to take a picture when it was closer to done:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Since I was including the gatling gun arms from the NT-1, I had an idea to change one into a beam saber, so I cut off the tab for the gun and placed a ring to be a receptacle for the beam saber:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

And cut down a beam saber to fit inside:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Since then I've just been detailing the model up. I've been scribing some panel lines and cutting out lame plastic detail to replace it with better stuff.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

[Kane82]

Very nice!  I like the idea of the beam sabers - very GM Sniper Custom-esque. 

[Funaka]

Blah blah blah... more mods... I'll sum it up quickly:

1. I installed a polycap in the groin for in-flight posing.
2. I finished replacing all all but the 2 main boosters on the backpack.
3. I cut out the vent slots in the backpack and put some mesh behind them.
4. I puttied a bunch more stuff including some fun ejector pin marks....

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

5. And finally (since I'm so OVER modding for this kit)... I primed and started round 2 of sand and putty. 2 whole months til AX but I'm starting to feel the pressure of time ticking...

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

[Bazookafied]

The wire mesh over the backpack vents is a NICE touch!  Details on the weapon look slick too.

[Zircor]

Loving the mods so far.  Gives me some great ideas for my Powered GM and Spartan 

[Funaka]

Thanks, guys! Work progresses...

After priming, I put some Mr. Surfacer 500 over the bondo, which was too grainy. I sanded that down and re-primed and then added a few more dabs of touch-up Mr. Surfacer,

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Ditto for the thighs I had extended. There were several rounds of putty/sand/prime with each round yielding about half "done" parts and half that needed more putty.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

I cheated on this tricky bit of seam by adding some half-round plastic rod so we still get nice detail but the seam is all covered up.

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

The gun...    I was in denial about how crooked my extended barrel was . Once it was all painted the same color there was no denying it. So, I sawed it off and shimmed it straight and filed it back to a straight line...

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Which explains why it was one of these last few pieces to be finished:

MG GM Custom - Ruby Guard

Now the parts are finally ready to paint!!! There won't be much masking, so hopefully it will go fast.   

[DrDazzle]

Really liking that beam sabre idea. I don't think, in all the works i've seen, anyone do that specifically. BTW, do you have any shots on how you did the thighs? After this huge hiatus i've been on i'm trying to come back to models and I have this old Quel sitting here that has my attention, and the thighs definitely need work.

[Funaka]

Really liking that beam sabre idea. I don't think, in all the works i've seen, anyone do that specifically. BTW, do you have any shots on how you did the thighs? After this huge hiatus i've been on i'm trying to come back to models and I have this old Quel sitting here that has my attention, and the thighs definitely need work.

I cut each of the three pieces separately (front armor, rear armor and internal skeleton). I then glued three sheets of styrene to each one of the armor pieces I kind of glued them together in stages and kept test-fitting the parts by putting the armor pieces on the skeleton as I went on they would stay straight in the end and the thighs wouldn't be twisted or crooked and the armor pieces would still fit on the skeleton's tabs when done.

If you don't have a masking phobia (like me) you can glue it all together first, saw it apart and then shim the whole thing at once with plastic. I wanted to still be able to take the armor off and paint it separately.