Update 11/09/2009: Finally found some alligator clips, so made a part two of this tutorial using the alligator clips.

Decided to make my own painting clips like the ones being sold to model builders by the hobby industry. Ideally I would have wanted to use the standard alligator clips but I wasn’t able to find any of that type. What I found in my local hardware store that was small enough to grip even the minutest part were miniature battery clips. They cost about $1.10 for a 4 pack.

Finished assembling the Rick Dias that I was building a few days ago. After we got some good weather around my parts, decided to take some still shots of the completed project. I decided to skip the decaling step and just leave it as is, without its AEUG markings.

Here’s a lucky find, a plastic primer paint from TOA paint of Thailand. Its supposed to be Acrylic Lacquer based and works ideally for ABS, PVC and PP plastic types. It’s cheap too at only $2.30 per 400 cc can. The plastic primer was originally created for preparing the surface of the plastic parts of motorcycles so that the final paint can stick easily onto the surface.

While waiting for paint to dry during my assembly of the Rick Dias MG, I was looking at the color guides for the different scales of the Gundam Exia at Hobby Search. This was in preparation of the Gundam Exia I purchased from HW Japan that I’m hoping will arrive in a couple of weeks.

Update: 01/24/2010: HLJ announced a tie up with Yamato Toys which allows them to sell exclusive items such as this. This is selling for 5800 yen at HLJ.

Just posted yesterday at the Yamato Toys site, an unpainted version of the iconic VF-1S from the original Macross tv series in 1/60 toy scale. Its scheduled to be available by December of 2009 and will have a sticker price of 8295 yen (after tax).

Continuing where I left off. In a perfect modelling world, paint is not supposed to come off from a model kit when it lightly scratches off another part from the model. I’m not used to modelling paint coming off my models like it did with the Master Grade Rick Dias that I am working on right now. Then again, my previous model kits never had any moving parts in them that rubbed against each other, because as a young lad I mostly built planes and ships.

Update 11/19/2009:Spoke too soon. Turns out that there is a problem with Hobby Search and Paypal, so they had to cancel all orders that were to be paid via paypal. Of course, since I was in one of the banned countries that Hobby Search will only allow to pay via paypal, shopping is officially stopped for me till their troubles are fixed.

Hobby Search Japan announced that they will soon be accepting payments via Paypal. Because of which also they will also stop selling stuff not suitable to minors starting November 4, 2009. No doubt as a result of the addition of the Paypal service in their site, since Paypal is very strict as to the type of things their merchants can sell using their payment gateway.

I would recommend using Paypal as the means to pay for one’s purchases online. That’s because you don’t have to leave your credit card details with the merchant whenever you transact using Paypal.

In the continuing saga of the Rick Dias build, I decided to tear down what I had accomplished already for the sake of repainting the head and torso to match the color scheme of the Rick Dias in the TV series, Zeta Gundam. The color guide for the Rick Dias says that the chest and head parts are a shade of red brown and black, the series however has it more of a shade of black.