Macross MAC II Monster Build Along

Kjev

Active Member
About the time the paint was drying on the Prowler's wheels, my oldest reminded me that I promised him we'd start his MAC II. JP was nice enough to send me his recolored version in tan, along with integrating a shark's teeth and eyes instead of the cutesie ones on the original. (It's the eyelashes people. Those eyes just aren't ferocious enough!)

Unlike my other threads, I'm going to attempt to do this one as we go along, rather than the "Ta-DA!" at the end. I've never seen a thread for one of these before, so maybe this will help the next enterprising mecha junkie.

And NO. I simply cannot just BUILD a model. MUST TWEAK EVERYTHING! Stay tuned...

We figured out the easiest way to do this as a father-son project is if I assemble the parts, and he then puts those together. So after he went to bed last night, I spent some time assembling parts.

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It took an email or two to understand how they go together. The instructions are in Japanese. The diagrams aren't too detailed, and since I can speak a little Japanese (a few martial arts terms and enough to order all-you-can-eat sushi), I'm functionally illiterate. But if I understand it right...

  • The ends of the tan shaft go together.
  • The notched cube thingie and the half-cylinder thingie go together, leaving a square hole in the middle.
  • The other rounded end thingies ("thingie" is apparently a technical term) go on the shaft next, and then the upper legs.

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You can see where I added a few layers of cereal box to the inside of the upper legs. I've noticed on all my mecha models that the hips seem to get the most stress. And since this is probably going to be the centerpiece of my son's miniature/Lego/Star Wars Guy army...well, I don't believe there's such a thing as overkill.

I have it on very sound advice, however, that the shaft should NOT be attached to ANYTHING until after the legs are complete. Sounds good to me.

If anyone has any advice, we're willing to listen.
 

Kjev

Active Member
SO here's what we've accomplished in the last couple of days. It seemed like I cut out parts for hours, glued them into blocks, and he glued them together in about 5 minutes.

All the inner leg parts and hips:

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And all the inner legs glued together. The hip shafts are pushed into place at the moment, but not glued, so we can adjust the feet when they're done and make sure they are flat on the ground. Also, the shafts are so well set, that if this was just a display piece, I wouldn't bother to glue them at all. That way the legs removable if need be.

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The diagrams in the instructions took a little puzzling out at this point, and in the pictures I'm using for references the legs are almost always blocked from view by the arms, so here's a side shot of the legs, minus the big stompy shoes:

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And here's my handy-dandy non-patented magnetic anti-warp system in action. I've actually considered getting a metal plate to keep at my desk for this. I've tried simply sticking the parts to the front of the refrigerator with magnets while they dried, and found out the our refrigerator is non-magnetic. Yup, no kid's pictures, shopping lists, cute quotes, or anything. It's just not right!

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Now, it's on to some feet!

(Credit where credit is due, it was Legal01 who did the recoloring and told me not to glue the hip shafts--Thanks!)
 

Kjev

Active Member
Tonight we put shoes on the wee beastie. I'm not sure if you'd call them feet, or not, but clown shoes seems to work. Compared to other mechs I've built, I think this one has to rank near the top as far as leg strength and stability. But we'll see when we start adding body parts...

This is the clown shoes seen from the inside, with the ankle greeblies next to them. (Incidentally, these greeblies are what I broke off my own leg before Thanksgiving, which helped me get back into paper modeling :)) You can see where I put cardboard inserts in to help strengthen the toes. Getting the shapes cut was an experience. I ended up resorting to a misprinted copy and using it as a pattern.

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Front view of the clown shoes.

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Side view:

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The boy and I finally managed to get some time to put the parts together.

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Afterwards, he wanted to take some pictures. First up, the cannon fodder view:

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It didn't come out real clear, due to Dad "helping," but this is an above view of the hips. We took this one so you can see how the hip shafts go together.

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And a view of the bottom of the toes, so you can see somewhat how they should go together.

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Rear view. Trying to show how the legs go into the clown shoes.

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Closeup side view (the boy wanted to be thorough. :))

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Side view of the whole leg

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Rear view:

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Left side view

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Now it's back to more midnight cut and paste!

I do have one question for Legal01:

Looking at the inside of the hips, I can't figure out if I'm missing something. It doesn't seem like the white with the part numbers should show, but I have no idea what should go there. Unless for some reason the hip shafts are too long.

Did we do that section right?
 

Kjev

Active Member
After screwing up the hips, I had another set of parts printed to do the cones on the inside of the hips.Unfortunately, I did not get the usual guy who does my printing at Kinko's. I got some gum-chewing coed who was more interested in talking to that totally hunky guy who came in after me, and in the process, the BIQ (Bimbo In Question), printed them (and the next model) the wrong size. I asked her about the size, and she assured me it was the same (She was in a bit of a rush, because she was involved in a deep conversation about something with her man-candy, like how his frat party selfies turned out or something).

Nope. Too small, and I didn't realize it until later when I got home. Definitely going to avoid her in the future.

At any rate, here's the new sheet for the inside cones: the circles were my own addition, just for added strength, and they were actually a little large.

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For now, close enough.

We finally got the legs complete. The rear armor pieces were a bit confusing at first, but we managed to figure it out.

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And then I started cutting assembling, and beefing up the torso. I know the manual calls for the arms to be done next, but I didn't want them knocking around while we did the torso. To be honest, the torso turned out to be a lot more complex than it first looked. I'm not sure if it was broken into so many sections to fit on the paper, increase strength, or what, but there's a lot to it. Most of the parts are more or less angular shapes, so they're easy to cut out and put cardboard inserts in, there's just a lot of them. And they fit together oddly as well.

This is just me, but I prefer my pieces to be solid shapes when assembled, without open sides. To me, they're just stronger that way. But again, that's just me.

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Here's what they look like more or less together:

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And here's a closeup of the shark's teeth. I'm really tickled with how they came out. Great job on adding them, Legal01! Just look at those pearly whites!

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The best part was when my son, right before he went to bed, said, "Daddy, please don't put it all together without me."

I cheered inside. I really wanted him to get involved, to learn to create, use his imagination, and learn things like how to work from plans and designs, and it's working!
 

Kjev

Active Member
We got some more added to the torso, finishing out the cockpit, rear sections, and a few add-ons.

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A few points on lining things up that I learned:

  1. When putting the top pieces of the torso together, line up the TOP edges, not the bottom. We ended up with about a 1/8" drop between the center torso piece (O-1 and G-3) and the nose section.
  2. For the rear pieces, line the sloping edges up flush. Hopefully this picture helps:

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We also started putting the arms together. For the sake of keeping things simple, we decided not finish the arms until we had the legs and torso complete, just so they wouldn't be knocking around while we finished the rest.

If I understood the diagrams right, and interpreted my reference pictures right (thank you again, Dolza1971, for the great closeups of the shoulders!), they go together thusly:

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AND, the notches on each side are NOT the same size. I think the wider ones go on the bottom. I didn't like the white paper showing on the inside, and I wanted these to be stronger, so I cut out the same pieces from the misprints and glued them inside. Not the best fix, but it'll work.

Sorry this last pic is a little blurry, but you get the idea.

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Usually, I'll stay up after the kids go to bed and cut out and reinforce parts. My son came up to me yesterday, and proudly announced he he had attached the shoulders on his own.

He did a darn good job too! He's also pretty stoked that one of his school assignments is to build a model.
 

Kjev

Active Member
Now that I'm back to the day job, it takes a lot longer to get anything done! But we were able to get the main guns built and glued into place.

All the parts:

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The main challenge was getting the barrels to roll smoothly, since their orientation on the paper is across the grain (but they wouldn't fit any other way that I could see)

I ended up rolling them around the handle of my X-acto knife. I glued down about half an inch at a time, and it seemed to work pretty well. I assembled the base of the barrels first, and use them as a guide. I'd roll the barrel into a cylinder, then slide it in. The base squished it to the right size, and the X-acto handle gave me something to press against to push the edges together.

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Afterwards, we glued a cylinder of black construction paper inside to make them stronger, and to make the inside of the barrels look black.

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We also stuffed the bases with glue-soaked toilet paper to make them sturdier. It takes awhile to dry, when it's done, it really makes things sturdy. This was my method for hanging them up out of the way to dry. The clamps are cheapos from Harbor Freight, held to the lamp's arm with magnets.

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The boy decided he wanted them aiming slightly different directions, like the beast was tracking multiple targets.

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Since they're pretty big, we decided to compare them and see what caliber they were.

.30-06, apparently. :)

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The guns of...somewhere.

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AND THEN...

Once they were in place, we felt it was time to attach the torso to the legs. We're going for strength, here, so we used 6 pins made from an 1/8" dowel. They're long enough to go from the bottom of the hips through the main torso.

Of course, we almost got carried away.

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The Pins:

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And all planted and ready for the torso:

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And a pictures of the wee beastie altogether:

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I accidentally deleted the picture, but the barrels are over a foot long, and about half an inch in diameter. And that's in spite of the fact that this was shrunk slightly going from A4 to 8.5x11 paper. (I have thoughts of building my own, and printing it on 11x17, just for kicks).

And suddenly, all we have left are a few greeblies and the arms. Hopefully I can get part of them assembled this weekend.

And now, a few words from "The Boy":

I really like my mech. I would of change a few thing on it. So far so good.We just have the arm's to do.The arm's have 4 gauss rifles ,2 lasers cannon.We are going to have a huge battle; but I get to learn how to play real battletech.

I am really greatfull for every on that look at the pictures.


to people

from Irontail


bye


:)Proud Dad:)

[Editor's note: Irontail is his nickname on our paintball team, The Doombunnies. He's a founding member, and at age 9, is a well-known veteran of two tournaments (I'm just known as his dad). I thought this was a great time for him to get some practice in using a computer, since it's something he'll need to know in life.]
 

Kjev

Active Member
THIS THREAD IS NOT DEAD!!!

We've just had a round of some sort of springtime guck go through our house. As soon as we're not oozing like swamp zombies, we'll get the arms done.
 

zathros

*****SENIOR ADMINISTRATOR*****
Staff member
Administrator
Moderator
It's too bad you didn't cut off those tabs. The white lines really kill the model, that's because the surfaces can't mate, they're not on the same plane. It's Pretty good, but if you have used strips instead, you wouldn't see the white lines all over the place, it would have taken the model to a higher level of excellence. .
 
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