When I bought the old 1/144 G Gundam kits that came out in 1994 I knew that they have been terribly aged, more so with the articulation so I have been pondering about how to do it the best possible way to give them justice, I mean these are “Mobile Fighters” in a sense that they should be performing martial arts moves, however these kits when straight built the articulation is nowhere near worthy to having “Mobile Fighter” as their category name. So planning it ahead I have ordered a considerable number of optional joint parts from HLJ, and also obtained 0.5mm pla plates for when scratch build is necessary, also keep safe some spare joint polycaps.
And then I have stumbled upon this youtube channel named jem77custom, it has a series of videos where some very old, non-polycap model kits went to total transformation to have the most flexible joint modifications. See some highly articulated Zakus, Goufs, and RX-78-1 Prototype Gundam on the following playlist.
I paused a lot on these videos to see exactly how the joints works as the modeller did shown each of the modified parts and how articulated they were. And boy how he did butchered that kit at first though, but that is the risk you have to take when modifying hard to find retro gunpla kits, however if you succeed the reward is greater than you ever think so, it’s pretty much customizing the model kit to make it your own like no one has before.
That video inspired me a lot on my own venture of modifying my old kits’ joints system, so thanks goes to the guy who uploaded that video, as finding joint modification tutorials through web search is really hard.
