Paint and Shotgun Shells

Well, I feel silly. Forgot the TOZ-34 and TP-82 use 12.5x70 mm shotgun rounds. I ended up building a 12 gauge TOZ-34. For future reference, here's a handy chart of shotgun ammunition sizes for making future casings.

I need to find myself some 2.08mm diameter rods to convert to 1:6 scale 12.5x70 mm rounds. Closest thing is the straw to a compressed air can, which is slightly oversized by 10 thousandths. Gundam runners are now only applicable for 12 gauge.

On that note, I finished painting the TOZ-34. Built twelve 12 gauge shotgun shells to go with my re-chambered shotgun. Was debating rebuilding the Pancor from a while back. If I do, I now have shells for it. At least that uses 12 gauge.

Nothing particularly new here, except that the paint doesn't entirely suck this time. Can't figure out how to do an orange wood color. Stained wood it shall be! Forgot to account for the shell rim thickness, so I had to modify the dimensions a little to get the locking motion to properly engage. The rims were causing some interference between the barrel end and the stock.

I properly painted the shells this time and added some depth to the gold paint application to account for the metal casing that Dragon conveniently leaves just to the rim. Now I'm dead set on not buying 1:6 shotgun shells since now I have to deal with bore sizes.


Other Developments

There's a couple items in development right now. I should organize the completed, pending and queued projects in a post so there's actually some organization to this mess of a blog. One of the items I'm attempting is another flower out of Magic: the Gathering cards. The rose turned out well. I figured it's time to try another type of flower. Bad idea.

Here is my test build of a lotus. Didn't turn out too well. Needs some work. Learned that this one has more issues with color coordination than the rose, since the rose has one side of the cards dominate, giving the color a more pronounced effect. With the lotus, the card back and fronts compete to the point where it looks like a dying mass of brown. Didn't help that I used a lot of land cards to get me some neutral red color, which failed.

If you're wondering "Why a lotus?", you haven't been playing Magic. I figured that I should attempt to build one of the iconic artifacts from the game, and something that also doesn't look out of place by itself. Flowers, I can easily pitch away to people. Chairs and golems don't work that well. I also received a generous donation of lots chaff that included 19x Vampire's Bites that I thought would look OK if all mashed together into one lotus.

Anyways...

 In testing out the lotus build, I did end up with some interesting effects. Here's the outer layer of petals that ended up rather neat, using Portal 1 mountains.

It's certain that I'm never going to use land cards for anything aside from structural components ever again. You can't get a good color palette from the lands as you do from  non-land pre-Mirrodin/8th edition card frames. Brown's also a very unflattering color for a flower.

J.Norad Reviews: Furuta 1:6 scale G11 Rifle

I've been fairly satisfied with the quality of models ZACCA has issued in the blind boxed 1:6 scale gun models. Today, I bring you the opposite side of the spectrum: Furuta's Metal Gun Mania: Assault Rifle Series' secret chase model, the Gewehr 11. It's not the prettiest gun out there, nor is it something that a collector would go, "My collection is missing a G11". It's also a very lackluster secret chase model compared to what ZACCA offered in their series (the M60E1, the FIM-92, the XM-177 with M203, and the M32 MGL, all of which were superior to the listed offerings on the boxes). Why? First, let's take a look at the model.

The item comes with a small collector's card with a photo of the real gun, so you know exactly how bad your model looks in comparison. Luckily, the G11 is all black. There's not even any paint applications for the safety/selector switch. The "S" is black, and not even painted. There's actually no paint at all on this model, an issue that I'll bring up later.

The Good (Lord this model blows)
 
The only way I can describe seeing this model come out of the packaging is "poor". Actually, "lackluster" and "subpar" work too. It feels like I paid $3 to receive a model kit put together by an apathetic child with no access to tools. Or hands. Or vision.

This model suffers from numerous problems, other than the blatant problem of being the most uninteresting model of the set. I've circled the problematic areas on the upper region of the model. The biggest problem is that the model was molded in two halves, and there must have been production problems in the molding process. There are several instances where excess plastic remained and needed to be trimmed. There were a few small spots where glue beaded on the surface near the mold halves. There's a large spot where a blind man let glue run all over the model.

The Bottom Half

You didn't think that the upper side was all that was wrong with the model, did you? Furuta is an equal opportunity half-asser!

Something went wrong with the mold design in the grip, or the plastic deformed significantly during the molding process. There was a 1mm wide gap between both mold halves in the grip bottom. There's also some glue residue and plastic too, but that's overshadowed by the assembly problem. Luckily, I deduced by the poor quality of the overall product that the glue itself must have been lackluster. And I was right.

 After twisting the frame around, I sheared off what little glue was used and separated the gun's front half from the body (by accident), and tried to separate the two halves. That didn't work. I found that the grip gap wasn't due to lack of glue. There seemed to be some interference between the two halves that prevented them from fitting together. I shaved some material off between the gap, which was easy due to how far I could separate the two halves. I tried to glue it back together, but I don't think it mattered whether I'd glue it back or not. A lot of the frame was damaged by me prying it apart with a watch screwdriver.

This is the best I got in reassembling the G11. I can't fix the regions I shaved off the glue and plastic. All I ended up doing was closing the gap between the handle.

The paint

Now...about that paint (or lack thereof). I obtained the full set of Furuta Metal Gun Mania models (all 14), and none of the magazines had the bullets in the magazines painted. There was a bit of extra plastic from the magazine's parting line from the molding process that I had to trim. This was true for half the magazines. The G11 comes with three magazines which required some trimming.

None of these magazines had paint when I obtained them. They looked terrible. I used Testor's gold and copper paint to paint the bullets. Even with my crappy paint skill, I managed to increase the appearance by a large margin with the painted bullets.


Product Summary

Furuta reinforces the idea of "you get what you pay for". I paid about $2-3 a gun, shipped. I don't think that is a price worth paying at all for any of the models when you have alternative options. Only the secret chase models are exclusive to Furuta, and they're both mediocre and need rework to look decent. Whatever you do, PASS on the opportunity to obtain any Furuta 1:6 scale guns. Save your money and buy a better made model, unless you're a glutton for re-working on someone else's mistakes.

I may review the remaining Furuta models all at once, since they're generally all mediocre and not worth a post for each gun. They're almost not even worth a post. The G11 takes exception for how bad it was compared to all the others.

Now, for the miscellaneous statistics!

Price Paid: $2-3 shipped (average cost)
Price worth: I'd rather build it myself with sculpey, drywall and a large wooden cooking spoon.
Defective pieces: 2
Pieces that snapped off during disassembly: 1
Ratio of glue to plastic used to assemble this model: 1/5,000
Ratio of glue used to assemble the model to glue that spilled around the outside of the model: 1/1
Collectibility: 2/10 (who the hell wants a G11?)
Build Quality: 1/10 (I swear their molding machine is damaged)
Reasons to buy this model: 0
Overall Ranking: Above Soldiers of the World, but below Ultimate Soldier