Time for my promised update, I have been working on this valkyre for more than a week, and I've been somewhat disapointed by it, It looks great so far, but the fit for some pieces is not what you should expect from bandai, so far, there's problems in every body part. I'll start with the very first piece you build, the nose cone, I´ve builded the VF-25s armored messiah, and the VF-27, both of them had perfect fits on the nose cones, so perfect that I didnt felt the need of gluing them together, but, with this one, the diferences between the two parts were tiny, but very noticible, wich is a big problem on the nose cone, I have learned (thanks to the YF-21 hasegawa kit) if you dont have this part near perfect the hole model will look unbalanced, especialy in jet mode, so I decided to aply some cement to fuse both parts and sand it to make it look even, it worked, not perfectly, but it worked, you can still see a very faded seamline and scratches from the sanding in there, but it´s barely visible, onces it´s clear coated the scratches wont be vissible.
The white part in the crotch armor, is a sticker, wich by the way fits perfectly, I wish I could say the same for the rest of the stikers and waterslide decals.
This is the cockpit, my work it's not perfect but I'm very pleased with the results, I think I'm geting better at this!
Rear view.
Cockpit with little Alto
Here you can see the hole front of the Jet (almost) the clear purple part was a pain to paint, I tried to mix tamya clear red and clear blue to make a clear purple, but, for some reason that doesn't work, when you mix those, it creates a non clear brownish thing. I tried alot of thigs, but I ended up mixing some tamya puple with alot of clear, something like 10 to 1, and ended up with a clearish purple, not as bright or clear as I would like but I think it looks good.
Next, nother sensitive part of any transformable Valkyre build: The Head.
Started by painting all the parts that needed to be painted on the runners, for the antenas I cuted the frame of the runer so it didnt got in my way, I tried to mask this thing, but I coudn't do it, the masking tape didn't stayed on place, so I painted it withiout masking the pieces, and it turned out great.
The head, panel lined, only a few stickers missing
Rear view
The arms, where do I start? between my mistakes and the lack of a good fit on the forearms they have been a pain, As I said before, I've builded before the VF 25s armoured, wich uses the exact same arms, on that model the fit between parts is not perfect but it's acceptable, on this one, the white part that holds the extra armour is poorly made, it feels almost like it's part from another model, didn't bandai uses the same molds on all the VF25's? I thought so, but after this, I seriously doubt it, also you will have to rescribe the rectangular lines on that one, they are poorly scribed and if you try to do the panel lines, the paint won't hold in there. so I just rescribed those and lived with the poor fit, I didn't glue them together because if I do that, the sanding will be so heavy that most of the panel lines on the forearm will disapear, and I didn't want that, I dont have the time, tools or the skills to do it.
If that wasn't enough, I decided to paint some detail on the extra armour pieces, and missed miserably.
As you can see I masked where I was planing on paint some details, I thought it was ok, It looked ok, but everything that could go wrong, went wrong.
when I removed the masking tape the horror filled my eyes, some of the paint chipped when I removed the tape,
Also the paint went under the tape because of my poor masking job, I had to remove the paint and do it all over again...
After finishing the arms, the legs come next, I decided to try to do some new stuff, so I aded a few scratches on the feet, later (after the clear coat) I'll do some drybrushing to hopefully add some scratches on the foot
the turbine intake have this gray piece, on it, the panel lines are very poorly scribed, so I had to re-do those with my knife, here you can see the diference, on your right the piece without the re-scribing, on your left the panel lines are redone.
This is all for now, Im somewhat disapointed with this kit, it looks great so far, but I never expected to have so many problems, and this is just the beginning
