Tenshi Hinanai 1/8 Sakura Zensen

Although the ones who collect PVCs are constantly enraged by the release of a few kits per year which are *really* outstanding and kit only (no PVC version), it makes a kit builder proud to own those. This one is such a kit, a very light and still dynamic pose and also a very impressive one despite the scale (because of the sword and the extraordinary base).

My third kit (okay, technically the fourth) and I feel I still have lots to learn. She’s a very fragile one, when assembled and it is one of those things I still have no idea how to do it better: how to glue on those crystals or small ribbons you can’t pin and make it STABLE. My painting has improved with a more bold approach to highlights and shadows (I used the awesome prototype pictures of Sakura Zensen as reference), an attempt to manipulating different gloss levels for different parts (with which I’m very pleased) and my first time being confronted with clear parts.

I got new tools this time around too (so still not there to having everything for building kits). new wire, a clear plexiglas base that won’t distract from the figure (you can’t see it because of the “clouds” but it’s pretty) and beautiful colored inks which work wonderful on clears. Thus, I am still furiously writing on the article for a full garage kit building tutorial but it lacks pictures and well, I’m not done yet. Time to tackle another kit! I bet there are still many mistakes to make and to avoid.

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Custom Figure-Displays, Part I: Rakka Picture Frame

There are days where you just have to do some handicraft to finish the day in a nice way – so was today (and yesterday, but yesterday nothing worked, so fu yesterday, today worked out nice!). What we did is a – specifically our first – custom figure display. Its a kind of picture frame for a Rakka which lies cozily on a feather-bed.

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Alto II – DIY HiFi getting more serious!

After i managed to write up the guide/documentation for the cheapo-tenöre yesterday i today want to post more of DIY speaker sweetness – a “Alto II (Variation)” – again a self-developed speaker by a HiFi-Forum member. It is – as you can see – a large floorstander with two Visaton chassis and the second speaker i ever built.

This is – by the way – not going to be a guide, as there are people who can do this far better than me with those more advanced speakers. Time comes, maybe sometime i’ll develop nice speakers myself 🙂 At least thats the plan. But for a picture-documentation – please read on!

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“HiFi” on the cheaps, DIY Speakers for few euros…

As a friend and myself built me a pair of quite nice – not to say wowzie – speakers for music production and DJing a few years ago i was now eager to try myself. To get the basic idea of craftsmenship and woodworking i started not by developing the speakers myself – as it was done by my friend for me back then – but go for a well known design by a guy from the german Hifi-Forum: The TenÖre Transmissionline Broadband-speaker. The name comes from german dialect/puns and roughly means “10-euro thingy”. A perfect object to train the techniques needed for more complicated work…

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Mahjongg madness, DIY Mahjongg table

Okay, so what do we have here? As you may know from previous posts or the tag-cloud we are quite into the game of Mahjongg, playing Riichi rules. What we’ve been missing all the time was a fantastic automatic mahjongg table. Of course it is much too expensive and huge – on top of that those beasts of machanics engeneering need frequend service – which isn’t available in Europe (it seems like this one was a rumor and is not true for the ones linked above…). So we set out to build one Ourselves (of course no automatic one as we are no team of engeneers with a fully equipped work shop). Read on for details and building instructions.

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