Bandai 1/144 Scale MS-06F-HB Zaku II Heavy Beam Custom

As I have mentioned in other reviews, the Gundam franchise is a venerable part of the landscape of Japanese sci-fi, and anime in particular. Over the years, there have been many different universes created in order to have new Gundam stories introduced; stories that have nothing to do with the original Universal Century (UC) continuities. However, the love of UC Gundam stories is widespread, and every now and then a new side story will be created that fits within the UC timeline.

MS Gundam: 8th Mobile Suit Team is one such side story. It is the tale of a particular Federation MS unit in Southeast Asia during the closing stages of the One Year War. As far as Gundam animes go, it's one of the best, at least artistically. The mecha are gritty and realistic, and the weapons they sport are very nice as well.

The 8th MS series was successful enough that Bandai produced a number of kits from it. These include the GM, Gundam, Gouf Custom and Zaku II, among others. All of these kits are available in 1/144, and are labeled as High Grade, or HG. This usually means that there is more detail, better fit and more cool accessories than you'd normally find in a kit of that size.

The kit up for review this time is the MS-06 Zaku II, the ubiquitous 'bad guy' grunt suit used by the Zeon forces. However, Zakus are very boring on their own, being two tone green and all. They make for excellent conversions, though, and that's what I've done with this kit. I decided to do something a little different, and convert the Zaku to a heavy weapons, anti-shipping (space shipping, that is) type of MS.

The end result was my own personal MSV, or Mobile Suit Variation. More on that as we go along.

The Kit:

Let me start by saying that when it says HG on the box, I expect HG in the box. I want more panel lines, better fit, cooler weapons and more funky little details. This used to be the case, and certainly is for the 1/100 kits Bandai offers. However, the HG on this kit is truly a misnomer. There's nothing HG about this kit, and I have a lot of non-HG kits that are BETTER than this one.

The kit comes moulded in several colours: light green, dark green, and dark blue/black. There are two rubber racks; one for the polycaps themselves, and one for the hoses that festoon the typical Zaku series of MS. There's also a sheet of decals, which are the self-adhesive foil type. These are quite sparse, however, and don't include markings. The insignia and other decals are of the GOD AWFUL clear plastic type. These are always a disaster and should never be used unless you're a masochist!

Detail on the Zaku II isn't bad, but it's hardly HG level. There are a few little panel lines and vents, but not what I'd expected. The moulding itself is very crisp and well done, and there's no flash anywhere. The weapons fit is fairly extensive, including the standard Zaku Machine Gun, the 8th MS-type magazine fed Zaku Bazooka and a Heat Hawk. There are several different hands that can be chosen, depending on the weapons selected. I'll admit, the weapons themselves look pretty cool.

Fit on the kit, after doing some test fitting, was found to be lacking. Given the age of this kit (1998), the fit is atrocious. Even worse, there was horrible build around on the leg joints and the upper arm swivels! It reminded me of one of the old Valkyrie kits from the mid-1980s! I should not be reminded of that when building an HG, let me tell you. There were also heavy production seams on all the hoses, and there was no 'glass' for the Zaku's signature mono eye. This was shocking to me, since even my Zaku FZ from Gundam 0080 had this feature, and that is a much older kit!

In a word, I found this kit disappointing, from an expectation point of view. If it were 20 years ago, this kit would have seemed like a dream. Unfortunately, time marches on, and I expect that the improvements of the mid-1990s would still be with us. They appear, however, to have dissipated into the ether, somehow. Regardless, I had a lot of bits in my Gundam spares box I wanted to use, so I figured I'd be able to make something out of this guy.

Building the Kit:

The Zaku II is a very basic kit to build, if you're doing it as it is on the box. The hardest parts are the upper arm swivels and the knees. As
mentioned earlier, there's horrible build around on the upper arms. To counter this, I rebuilt them completely from the inside, so that I could make use of the extra polycaps given in the kit. First, I cut off the offending pivot collar on the middle of the arm. I then cut one of the knee-joint-type double ended polycaps in half, so I had two single ring-type ones. I positioned these in the bottom of the upper arm. I then drilled a hole in the middle arm, and cut some spare sprue to fit in there. This sprue (and the hole it fit into) were sanded to be the same diameter as the hole in the polycap ring in the upper arm.

The goal was to create a post-in-hole affair, so I could attach the middle arms once they were painted. With the new attachment post fitted, I glued the middle arm together. I also glued the upper arms, and once they were dry, tested my design. It worked perfectly. Seeing as I have a ton of spare polycaps, this is what I'll be doing whenever I encounter this problem on an old kit. It's a great workaround, and I encourage everyone to give it a shot.

The knees were also a problem, since the 'actuator' part forms around a polycap, and is in turn sandwiched by the upper leg. Since, on my machine, the upper leg was to be white, and the actuator Gunship Grey, I had to separate them. This was done by sanding off the fitting pins in the upper leg, and creating a framework into which the actuator could fit, once everything was done. The framework was created using spare sprue.

There wasn't much else to modify on the rest of the kit, although the head posed one final problem. To make the insertion of the mono-eye decal easier, I cut part of the inner bracing on the head away, so that there was a 'clear spot' into which I could stick my tweezers when it came time.

No other major workarounds were dictated by the structure of the kit itself. It was only my customizing that resulted in a lot of other weird stuff being done to this kit.

Conversion to Heavy Beam Standard:

It should come as no surprise to most reading this that I like big guns. One thing that I like about the 8th MS anime is the adaptation of the standard GM to the GM Sniper model, complete with, you guessed it, a big gun! I wanted to so something similar for the Zaku. I originally thought of doing a flamethrower model, but decided for a space-based anti-shipping mech instead.

The inspiration came from my spares box. My brother and I have a lot of pieces left over from the Gundams we build, and these can often be a good source of inspiration. Now, every good anti-shipping mech needs a big gun. Usually, that's not something I have lying around as spare, since I used all the big guns I can get. However, my brother's Neo Gundam did not end up using its big cannon, so I at least had a starting point.

Looking at the gun, I figured there'd be no way a gun like that could actually work with an internal power source, so I needed some external feeds. These came in the form of rubber hoses from one of Bandai's Evangelion kits. Interestingly, the hoses even fit in the holes in the back of the Neo's cannon! It was just too much of a coincidence to be ignored, so I decided to use them.

Of course, the hoses have to go somewhere, or connect to something. A normal Zaku wouldn't have the generating power to run a cannon like this and still keep functioning. What was needed was an energy pack, or a portable generator, or a propellant tank. I reasoned that it could be a chemical laser, and was rewarded by finding the missile pods from my Hygog. I also had the backpack for the Hygog, and I found out that the containers fit over the small fuel tanks on the backpack very well. With a little work, I thought I could make something fairly convincing out of this jumble of disconnected parts.

I decided not to install the Zaku's normal backpack, and instead to blank off the space where it would originally go. I modified the Hygog pods to fit over the tanks on the Hygog backpack (thank you Dremel!), but found there was a little too much play. I fixed this with some balsa wood shims, legacies of my old Guillows days. By doing it this way, I got some flexibility in the mounting of the canisters, and this allowed me to install them right at the end. The combined form of the backpack and cylinders was quite large, and what with it and the gun, I decided when building the Zaku to fill its feet with lead shot. It worked like a dream! He's as stable as all get out.

The gun and backpack were painted as a set. The gun is done in Virsago Black with a mixed up light olive drab for highlights. This colour was mixed about seven years ago for my Den'an Zon, and I have no idea what's in it, except it's all Badger and first generation Testors Model Master acrylic. The laser chemical tanks were painted in the same olive, with the inner rocket engine propellant tanks done in Testors 7 ml steel with a black wash. The engines themselves are Testors MM Jet Exhaust, with Badger Reefer Orange insides.

Some modification to the Neo's gun was in order for the Zaku HB. One major change was the top-mounted sight: it was missing! I used the top of a 1/100 HG Shenlong Gundam's Beam Glaive as the sighting pod, sanded down to fit the contours of the gun. In it, I put a piece of clear pink plastic, to give it the appearance of a sensor window. I also used the clear pink to make a sensor window for the lower sight. The sight was originally recessed, but was so badly out of alignment, that I couldn't stand it! There was a 'step' in the sensor window! I cut and filed the plastic down, and then Futured it. I used a piece of shiny-backed foil decal to add 'reflectivity' to the window, and then pressed it in place.

Once the weapons system was laid out in my mind, the thought occurred to me that there would probably be more heating due to the power required for the gun/targeting systems. Thus, a radiator was required. Looking at the Zaku's anatomy, I was struck by the large flat plate that makes up its shield. PERFECT! However, the shield is too long to fit on the arm that holds the cannon, so I reversed the normal placement of the long shield and spiked shoulder pauldron. Normally, the Zaku's spikes are on its left, with the shield on the right. This makes for a neat change, but a subtle one as well.

To make the shield suitable for a radiator, some work was required. Firstly, the shield is a hollow U-section, and this needed to be filled, so as to be 'solid.' The bottom 2/3 of the shield were filled with Milliput, and sanded smooth. This provides some thickness for the cooling coils and other radiative gadgetry within the shield. In addition, two extra vents were painted Jet Exhaust and stuck on the 'thick' spot, so as to allow excess heat to escape. To transfer coolant to the radiator, two pieces of heavy green twine were used, and were connected to the inside of the shield and an inner part of the back pack using some spare pieces from an old Votoms Scopedog. An added bonus of the cooling shield was that it added weight to the non-gun side of the Zaku, balancing it out.

Painting the Zaku II HB

While the weapon itself is rather darkly coloured, I wanted the Zaku itself to be a very bright affair. I was inspired partly by the tradition of Zeon aces using outlandish colour schemes and by the crazy paints on the Zaku Warriors in Gundam Seed Destiny. I don't have any yellow models at all, so I decided to go with that. After finding a line drawing of a Zaku online, I tried various colour combinations in MS Paint. I eventually settled on the scheme you now see gracing the Zaku.

The white and yellow were primed using Rustoleum white primer. The white is my Tamiya Gundam White, which has minute amounts of blue and purple in XF-2 Flat White. The Yellow is Badger Reefer Yellow, which has been modified over the years to be more canary yellow than it started out as. The orange is Badger South Pacific Daylight Orange, and the black is Virsago Black.

The kit is coated in multiple coats of Future floor polish to give it a nice shine. I was originally going to flat coat the weapons, but decided against it at the last minute. When I saw how nice the setup looked all glossed, I couldn't bring myself to dull any of it.

Conclusions:

The 8th MS Zaku II kit is probably one of the best 1/144 kits of the classic MS-06 Zaku II you can get, although I would hope the HG-UC kit would be a bit better. It has adequate poseability (the Zaku's design limits it severely), and comes with a good set of weapons, although the moulding on them is only of average quality.

The kit can be built up to look quite good, but is not HG caliber, in my opinion. There's a lot of filling and sanding on this thing, and the detail isn't what I'd expect. Still, it's a good base for customizing, and will leave you a few more parts for your spares box when you're done, so that's good. When considered as an out of box kit, on a scale of "Noooo!" to "Yahoo!", where "Noooo!" is worst and "Yahoo!" is best, this kit is a solid "Meh." But, as a platform for customization, it provides a nice canvas for the kitbasher in all of us!