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Just to say, I've shown a bunch of people your stuff and everyone's been very impressed, some equally mortified. The sonic hammerhead gets them every time.

Great to see you back in action Boss.

Oh I see, you went with the Unite Sword. I've got that same option kit. I have it built as a big sword like yours, minus the knives on the back. Then I took the various leftover pieces and built a big halberd for the Wing Zero Gundam. That took some cutting and gluing of course.

I did, and completely without noticing it was already on page 32 ^^. Might be a good think though, the scale might have made me reluctant. I definitely plan on using the second big blade on an incoming model, integrated to an halberd or standalone, kind of like a tekko.

Not sure what these knives are for, maybe in order to use the back of the blade against an enemy mech and get better chances of piercing a critical component ?
But anyway, usable or not I like them, so they go on the sword.

 bossfearless wrote:
Other projects have caught my eye, and I have a few kits on order. None of it is directly related to 40k, but it will all be touched by my years of wargaming hobbies. Kotobukiya puts out these model kits called Frame Arms. I'll give you a minute to Google it.

All Googled up? Awesome.

What sets these kits apart, as a whole range, is that the entire series is intended to be interchangeable. Every part will fit with every other model, and all the parts fit around a universal Frame Arms skeleton, which is pretty cool looking in itself, and features an amazing degree of articulation. I have 3 different kits coming, and I want to build something badass. Currently wondering if these kits are interchangeable with the parts from their Armored Core line, because if so I am definitely going to get some kind of sweet heavyweight AC kit to bastardize.

Dammit man! The last thing I need right now is more shiny toys demanding that I buy them!

Nice to see you back and building! Looking forward to the results.

 KernelTerror wrote:
I did, and completely without noticing it was already on page 32 ^^. Might be a good think though, the scale might have made me reluctant. I definitely plan on using the second big blade on an incoming model, integrated to an halberd or standalone, kind of like a tekko.

Not sure what these knives are for, maybe in order to use the back of the blade against an enemy mech and get better chances of piercing a critical component ?
But anyway, usable or not I like them, so they go on the sword.

I think the knives are there because Anime Logic, that's why. If it was a cartoon they would fly off on their own and chop off everyone's faces.

You know, I've heard that "Chop of faces" line all over the place, but I don't think I've ever actually seen it done (in animation or effects or whatever). Especially with a knife.

Watch the movie Equilibrium. A face gets chopped off in that one. Also in Feast a face gets ripped off, but it's not the same

USA vacation is behind me and it went much, much better than last year. Still no 40k, but my spirit is far from crushed like before. I think I got this.

On a hobby note, one of my Frame Arms kits is coming home in my suitcase, the Kobold. It's a neat kit, though I feel it needs some heavy weapons to really shine. If anyone is familiar with Armored Core, this robot might get the Karasawa cannon. Now if only there was a Moonlight Saber kit out there...

This post is being typed up with in-flight wifi. Pretty cool.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Okay so unlimited booze and in flight Internet might be a bad combo. I may or may not have ordered one of the badass armored core kits while over the Atlantic.

I repossessed the axe I made for Wing Zero and rigged it up for Melvin instead. Wing was compensated with a fancy buster sword for now, but I really wanted this kind of halberdier look to balance out the enormous cannon on the other arm.



He lives again! Even more absurd than before!

One big murderous family:




So that's a thing now. Melvin rebuilt is a big step on the way to actually enjoying the hobby again. Just to have it out of the way is a relief. So now that that's done, I cracked open the first of my Frame Arms kits to fiddle with it a bit. I was half relieved and half disappointed to see that the basic FA skeleton comes pre-assembled. It saves me from fiddling with a million tiny joints, sure, but that's part of the challenge!


Despite being prebuilt, some of the joints weren't all the way together and I had to tighten them up to get it to articulate properly. Once I did get it fixed, the articulation was really impressive. This thing balances on its own in a lot of different positions.

That armature has excellent balance.

So I only now realised Melvin is the size of the REX, not just a Broadside.

Holy feth, Melvin's dench. Like, dude. Love it, as always Boss.

Hell, that murderous family is a really nice sight ! And that frame arm is clearly going to be a nice addition. Do you plan to make it more tau like, or are you going for an anime mech look ? (not that there is such a big difference ^^)

Melvin is ...


Could you turn Melvin into 're-castable', 're-posable' model, if you wanted to? Like, find a good posture, make a mold out of it... Do another one, cast it, etc.etc.
And then just build from there, adding war-gear, armor plates and so on..?

Hnnngh. That REX model; wherre did you get it? D:

@kepora: REX came from Kotobukiya and costs about $80. There's a much larger version that has lights and is made of metal (I believe), but that costs $500.

@Stardrop: Thanks for the high praise. Melvin is a really, really complicated build born of lots and lots and lots of different kits. It would be difficult to replicate, but I suppose if it were broken down into enough pieces it could be re-cast. Only problem is the gatling gun, that's got moving parts and such.

@KernelTerror: Well, I've never entirely been sold on the anime mech aesthetic that you see most of the time, especially in the case of Gundams. For the most part, the designs have stayed pretty static since the 80's besides the occasional "freak Gundam" that usually just represents a mid-tier boss battle in whatever series. The Frame Arms kits have a wildly varied aesthetic. Seriously, go to Amazon and look through all the kits available. There are some really cool concepts (there's this one guy whose legs have another set of arms built in and they unfold from the front like a freaky mantis thing). And then on top of that, each kit contains instructions for using the parts to build multiple versions of the model using the same bits, and some of these are very different from one another. The kit I've got now is the Kobold, which has a sort of apelike aesthetic in its default build that is not far removed from 40k. I think that what I'm going to go for with the Frame Arms is somewhere between Imperial and Tau, sort of like one-off prototypes cooked up by the multi-racial research collective at the heart of my sprawling, nonsensical headcanon.

Speaking of my headcanon, I got the first few pieces from Raging Heroes kickstarter, so eventually the Rynnish 41st infantry (see: Powerlifting and Plasma, which I really should write some more on) will make an appearance. And I also have a few space marines laying about here and there, so I really should get around to building some of those, maybe even finally build the Lord Commander after who knows how many years wondering if I can pull it off.

Arms coming out of the legs ? Sounds brilliant I'll need to look that one up. You know, it is probably a good thing that I am not in a plane with unlimited wifi and booze right now ^^ !

http://www.amazon.com/EXF-10-Graifen-scale-Plastic-Kotobukiya/dp/B004UDHL64/ref=sr_1_24?ie=UTF8&qid=1438614338&sr=8-24&keywords=frame+arms

That's the one I'm talking about. I think it's got four extra arms hidden in its various limbs? It's very cool looking.

Yup, there they are, crazy design, I will keep that around...

"Are those extra arms in your legs, or are you just happy to see me?"

So did anyone else see the teaser pic for the Forgeworld superheavy Tau walker? Damn thing is Warhound Titan sized most likely. Not sure I really like the look of it though. I'll have to see it for myself, probably build my own bizarre counts-as at some point. Of course, this is assuming I ever actually play another game of 40k, ever. This desert freaking sucks like that.

Frankly, compared to some of your stuff, that thing in under-gunned.

Alrighty! I finally go the chance to crack into the Frame Arms kit, and so far it's proven very, very interesting. There's a design philosophy in the building of the kits that takes the basic skeleton, separates it, and then starts rearranging all the pieces and joints to alter the posture and proportions before you even start putting on the outer layers. For example, the first step in assembling the Kobold was to pull off all the arms and legs, part of the chest, and the head. A few of those parts won't even be used in the build, so you wind up with chunks of skeleton laying around for your future mad science needs. Step two is attaching the robot's dick.



Has anyone else noticed that most anime robots tend to have some kind of penis-protrusion? I get it, it's a codpiece, it's sort of a thing that happens in a lot of artistic and fashion styles, but sometimes it's a bit excessive. As I recall, Zone of the Enders featured absolutely enormous robo-dongs, which was actually where the pilot sat, inside this huge metal dildo. There is so much symbolism there it's not even funny. Okay, so, aside from the penis, take a look at the pelvis on this skeleton. See how many different points of attachment there are? It's ready-made for you to change the legs to something that suits you. Don't like humanoid robots? Go reverse-joint or quad-legged if you prefer. The holes are there, just waiting for you to stick things in them. Rawr.

So then, following the instructions I attached the chest and a couple more pieces, and I noticed something really cool about the way they designed this thing.



For one second, forget that I am holding the robot by its giant red penis, and look at the hole in the bottom of the chest. With these components attached, the whole thing hinghes downward at what used to be its waist and attaches like so:



Now the whole aesthetic of the torso is changed. The Kobold kit is intended to create kind of a hunched-over, brutish looking robot that would look very at-home in 40k (making it a $30 option for a Knight stand-in). The next bit I got to was the head, and again there's some creative options available. First you have kind of an Appleseed head:



But all you have to do is turn it around backwards and you have a boxier head that looks like something the Tau would build:



I think I'm going to turn those antennae around and roll with an in-betweener. Of course, the yellow bits of the visor still show on the back of the head, but you're eventually gonna put paint over the whole model anyway. So, you know, you can paint over the giant red robot cock.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I have like three more Frame Arms kits coming in the next month or so, one of which is just a spare skeleton (they sell them on their own so you can just build up from nothing). So over the next few weeks I expect to be fully entertained in my off-hours.

Also, as a side project, I'm closing on a pair of rental properties in Philadelphia really soon. Let it never be said that I remain idle for long.

Nice detailed photo shoot, not the type of kit I am used to see around here, to this is valuable information, thanks.

Not sure where I read it, but I seem to recall these come with sprues of different colors so they can also be usedwith no or very minimal painting. So why have the codpiece part of a red sprue ? Anyway, bonus points for talks of robot dongs.

That will be interesting to see what happens to these three next kits, you should soon have enough firepower to instantly shoot that forgeworld megawalker back where it came from (Wait...You already do ^^ !).

The sprue are different colors, so each kit winds up with a color scheme, though it doesn't look as good as a quality paint job. There are also different materials on different sprues. The pieces inside of each joint tend to be a softer rubber material that gives the joint a bit of flexibility.

Speaking of which, I've discovered that some joint sections stick together well on their own, but some parts will definitely need glue. Probably gonna need to stick some tack in the hip joints so they have more tension.

That kit looks like a lot of fun to play with. Can you magnetize it?

 Nevelon wrote:
That kit looks like a lot of fun to play with. Can you magnetize it?

That's the beauty of these kits. Magnets are mostly not needed. The pieces all fit together on pegs and ball/socket joints, and with only a few exceptions they have just the right amount of tension to make them poseable and interchangeable. More likely I would want to build some "modules" of my own that would let me pop new custom bits on and off of the frame.

As for lights, since that's where this should logically go to, I think lights are possible. But you have to get your build to a rather complete stage before you consider lighting, because you want to know where to feed the wires and such through.

This is so good... I need more.

 LeCacty wrote:
This is so good... I need more.

Ask and ye shall receive.

I got the Kobold built the rest of the way today. Sort of. There are a few issues with the kit that are going to require me to strip it back down and glue parts of the skeleton together, so this is only temporary:





Now, as I said, there are some problems. First, the kit loses all that beautiful balance that the armature originally had, because the foot gets swapped out to a much less stable shape. I had to remedy that to keep the thing upright and allow me to pose it. So I went back to the original foot piece and I figured that what made it so damn stable was the rear-forking "toes" that braced against the ground from lots of angles. I then cut the foot at the halfway point, pulled the heel off the Kobold foot, and then grafted the two together using some putty as a gap filler.



The difference looks small, but it changes the whole balance of the model. Next I went and scored the hip joint pegs with my hobby knife and crammed some tack into the hip sockets. The extra tension resulted in the hips being able to take the weight of the torso, where before the whole thing would just sag.

The last problem is guns. Or lack thereof. Yes, the kit is currently built with giant arm cannons. The problem is, those are the only weapons included in this kit. They're cool, but it also has mounts on its backpack-section for two additional weapons. Also, if I pull the gun barrels off the wrists and pop the hands into place instead, those gun barrels have absolutely no gun to go with them, just disembodied barrels, leaving the suit totally unarmed (pun intended). Of course, being the ordnance lover that I am, I happen to have a few appropriately sized bits laying around that I could put in the suit's hands, but then those gun barrels seem to go to waste. I may end up converting mounts for them out of some old Gundam parts so that they can be shoulder mounted and I can put something absurd like the Karasawa cannon in its hands.

I've done anumber of very small alterations to various joints, shaving a few millimeters here and there, gluing something that should be free-swinging for stability purposes, etc. But I think that now I can really start going a bit crazy once I start breaking it down again.

The reason for the seeming incompleteness is because there's a second kit that goes with it. Once you combine the bits, you get a much nicer and fuller looking mech.

They also make the Frame Architect as a buildable "Modeler's Edition."