The suit is finally living up to its namesake – Wing has wings! But of course, this build isn’t done giving us issues – the wings may be up, but they don’t like being down. In retrospect now, it’s a really good thing we decided to get a head start on this year’s suit – we’ve had to rebuild more parts and navigate around more roadblocks during production than ever before.
Don’t be fooled – he’s wearing the armor, but it’s held together by tape right now – none of it is actually strapped and ready for paint yet. We still have quite a few kinks to work out. Wing has turned out to be the most difficult Gundam to work with in terms of its outrageous proportions – you’d think after we’d built more sophisticated suits like Quanta that this would be a walk in the park, but unfortunately that isn’t quite the case.
Only the second time we’re getting together for the build, but we’ve already got most of the actual body hashed out. This is nearly zero to Gundam in four days. I like to think we’ve become more efficient at mobile suit design and production since we’ve been doing this for five years now.
Summer’s rolling in, which of course means Anime Expo is too. It feels like we barely got a break from building cosplay armor since we had a little commission project this last winter, but the regularly scheduled show still rolls on as we get to our next Gundam armor – this time from the After Colony era.
We considered doing Wing (the T.V. Version of course, sorry Katoki) even last year when we built the Quanta. Ultimately we decided to do 00 because it was the ten-year anniversary (that was totally glossed over at the actual Expo, mind you), so this year we decided to cash in on the nostalgia and street cred Wing would bring for those of us who grew up watching the first mainstream North American Gundam series on Toonami.
Diecasts and Jada aren’t really my thing – I’ve worked with them before, when I was just getting into model cars, but I realized they didn’t really fit in with the rest of my plastic collection because of their scale. They’re marketed as 1/24, but in reality are slightly larger, probably closer to 1/20. I like a lot of the designs they put out, especially for cars that I can’t get as plastic kits from Japan (like the new Toyota FT-1), but being a stickler for consistency in my collection means I won’t allow myself to work with them.
I’m also not really big on older retro cars – a quick glance at my current model lineup right now is enough to confirm that I don’t really tread on cars older than the early 90’s. So that makes this Jada diecast Datsun 510 an outlier – the epitome of something I would never normally pick up. But there’s a contest being run, and these diecasts aren’t expensive, so I thought it would at the very least be a learning experience for working with pre-built metal cars instead of the usual plastic.
