The box for this thing was big­ger than the one for my Saz­abi model, and the kit has 29 run­ners of parts plus the included stand. And that stand is nec­es­sary, since this model is so unbal­anced it can’t stand on its own feet with­out either a) mad skills at bal­anc­ing it, or b) adding weight inside the model. You actu­ally have to build the kit onto the stand!

I started the model a few days back, but didn’t think of doing Work in Progress posts until today, so you don’t get to see the waist sit­ting on the stand with noth­ing else attached. Instead, you get to see the waist and legs on the stand, which is where I was when I started today, along with part of the torso, and the core fighter.

GIGANTIC LEGS!

The legs weren’t too dif­fi­cult to build — the only part that was dif­fer­ent from the stan­dard mas­ter grade kit inter­nally is the fact that there are more screws in the legs to sup­port the weight and keep the joints from becom­ing too flex­i­ble. The pieces that hold the Incoms (the lit­tle red nubs near the knees) where a bit of a pain to get installed cor­rectly though, as you have to bend the joints far­ther than depicted in the instruc­tions to get them to actu­ally snap in.

That lit­tle green part has no sticker, so I grabbed my green paint marker.

This part was easy to build, but the slid­ing piece in the upper torso proved to be a has­sle in the later por­tion of the torso build as it had a ten­dency to pop out of its track. There was also the dry-apply decal, and I’ll forgo the usual rant I have on apply­ing these things to curved sur­faces. Per­haps I’ll buy some scotch tape after work on Wednes­day, I’ve heard that it can make the process eas­ier by free­ing up a hand. This is the tail sta­bi­lizer that — as usual — in the great tra­di­tion of trans­form­ing Gun­dams forms the nose of the flight mode of the mech. Whether or not I choose to dis­play this model in G-Cruiser mode once com­pleted remains to be seen, since trans­form­ing it involves tak­ing the thing apart.

Accursed large tip on black paint marker!

One of my favorite parts of any kit is the ele­ments that are not actu­ally part of the model. Weapons, shields, the lit­tle car that comes with the Char Cus­tom Gel­goog model for some rea­son, and of course, Core Fight­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, the fan ele­ments on the top of this par­tic­u­lar kit’s core fighter were molded as part of the over­all top of the model, and I made a few small goofs with my black paint marker. Oh well, that’s what the white paint marker is for later on. While the model does come with a sec­ond core fighter unit can­not be dis­played in this man­ner, this core fighter can trans­form into the core block and thus be inserted int the model instead. But I think its cooler to dis­play it sep­a­rately, espe­cially since the included base has a sec­ond dis­play arm intended for such a purpose.

Com­pleted upper torso. Rather sim­ple actually.

Aside from the pre­vi­ously men­tioned prob­lems with the slid­ing ele­ment of the torso that the head mounts onto, the upper torso build was rather sim­ple — as is usu­ally the case. The head was a rather easy build as well, but get­ting those ver­ti­cal yel­low anten­nae to stay in place while attach­ing the red piece in front of them as a bit of a pain. Between the yel­low ver­ti­cal anten­nae is the Ex-S’s third Incom unit, which unlike the other two (which just fly out and reflect beam shots around), flies off and can fire a beam gun three times. Its not really that vis­i­ble in this shot, so I’ll get some bet­ter shots of it when the model is completed.

Hey, don’t quit with­out giv­ing me arms!

I for­got to take pho­tos of the back­pack while I was build­ing it, but there wasn’t much to see there. Just some rather large indi­vid­ual pieces that get held together with poly­caps and attached to the back of the model with screw-reinforced joints. Unlike the ZZ Gun­dam, which comes from the same era of Uni­ver­sal Cen­tury as the Ex-S, those white things on the thruster back­pack are not gigan­tic beam sabers. Instead, they are beam can­nons. Also, at this point I real­ized exactly what pre­vents the model from stand­ing on its own — its the gigan­tic thruster back­pack, which is about twice as deep as the rest of the model. I haven’t read Gun­dam Sen­tinel (I don’t even know if its been trans­lated into Eng­lish), but accord­ing to MAHQ’s page on this mon­stros­ity, the back­pack con­tains “nuclear ther­mal rocket engines,” a la NERVA and TIMBER WIND, which were both crazy ideas by the NASA and the US Gov­ern­ment for nuclear pow­ered rock­ets. While in the­ory this rocket would work, I don’t think I would want to be fly­ing around with between two t0 four fis­sion reac­tors strapped to my back — even if I was inside a Gundam.

Well, thats where I left off for the day. Tomor­row I plan on build­ing the arms for this model and there’s a few more pieces of the torso as well. Here’s a few more shots of where I left off.

Gives a good idea of the bulk of the thruster unit

Just another angle