Alrighty, finally got this little bugger finished! But first... the process!
Before I get into the build, let me apologize for the HUGE post dump here… seven posts of pics is a little heavy, heh. But I trust that it’ll all be worth it for those following this build. Hopefully!
Anyway, before I could do any more building, as mentioned previously, I needed to fix the toe that had fallen off. This was pretty simple, but I find a LOT of people are afraid to make repairs to models because they're worried about ruining the finish. Trust me, it's far easier to repair a finish than it is to build the thing wholecloth again, and it's not as difficult as you might think, even if it's a mechanical part it can be a pretty easy thing to accomplish. So what I did was, I used a fresh eXacto blade to carefully slice into the part just under the skin around the toe and removed the outer structural part, then I simply pushed the toe back on the axle, then put the paper washer over it. I then put a substantial blob of superglue gel on the washer to make sure it won't break any time soon. Finally, I spread glue around the side part I'd cut out earlier and then pushed it in until it was flush. It turned out looking very good and the finish was still nice enough without retouching that I honestly forgot I hadn't retouched it until just now, heh!
After that little adventure, I turned my attention back to the main build. The next part was to build up the torso and cockpit combo. This 'mech is so compact that pretty much everything that's considered "head", "torso", and "arm" are all in this one boxy little assembly. So to begin with, I began folding up the waist. After gluing in some chipboard backing, I marked out the center of the part and then cut holes for the paper drinking straw I was going to use for the axle. Before gluing it up, I measured the length the straw needed to be cut to and then cut it to size, then I glued it in place using a bunch of PVA glue in order to get a nice strong part. Then I folded up the box and set it aside.
Then I started on the back end of the 'mech where all the heat sinks were located. The thing I noticed about this part was that while the greeblies were all pretty visible on my computer screen, the inkjet printout was blurry and the darker colors of this area blended together. So, using the textures that I could plainly see on the computer, I drew the panels and opened areas with a pencil and then cut out the heat sink vents. Then I cut chipboard backing for this area, cutting out areas for the heat sinks and surrounding equipment a little bigger so that the skin would overlap the hole, much like I did with the thighs. Then I proceeded to construct the heat sinks. I cut a strip of paper that was as wide as the chipboard was thick and then chopped that into lengths that were as long as the window in the outside part was wide to make louvers for the heat exchangers. I then started edge-gluing them to a piece of cardstock backing that I had marked with the dimensions of the holes for the heat sinks. After the louvers were glued in place, I started to make the circular greeblies. I began by cutting a strip of 90 lb cardstock into four parts of equal length, then I sanded one end of them. This end I glued with PVA to a piece of model kit sprue. When the resulting tubes were dry, I slid them off the sprue and set them aside. Then I took a Q-tip with a paper shaft and rounded the end with sandpaper. I then cut off the end and repeated the process until I had four small domes. I took the short tubes and domes and then glued them to the cardstock backing piece with the louvers, then I painted it black with rust highlights and glued it in place. From there, I packed the rest of the assembly with chipboard and glued it all together, and after gluing on the additional greelbles on the bottom of the piece, I set it aside.
