Also, as we (and probably many many others) like to use plain glass shelfs (as they're easy to mount and look good) to display figures there is the very common problem of dust and dirty laying down on the figures. The other thing we propose here is a nice method to build sturdy yet good looking glass cover you can simply place on the shelf over the figures (a box with two open sides: backside and bottom).

For building and setup instructions for those two cool concepts, please look inside .

First things first, so what we'll cover here is a method of building custom glass display cabinets of precut glass (we're still using the method from http://blog.kanojo.de/2010/10/04/custom-modelkit-display-part-2/ - just that we switched to a hardmetal-wheeled glass cutter which is a huge improvement!).

We do this using regular silicone as used for sealing off edges in bathroom/kitchen. You can probably get it in any DIY/Hardware store near you for just a few Euros (2.50Eur seems a common price in germany). The cheapest clear you can get will suffice . Aside of glass and silicone a little crepe-tape and a razorblade and/or cutter (for scrubbing off excess silicone) as well as a silicone pouring gun and a silicone peel (optional) are the only materials/tools needed.

Lay out the glass as you would like it to be glued together. Mask off the edges with the tape as shown (leave ~0.3-0.6cm space to each side)

Detail of the masked glass

Detail of the masked glass

This is the layout of our masked glass pieces. Make sure they will fit in this order .

A nice trick for protecting both your workspace and your parts from the silicone is to use plastic bags which have been cut open beforehand - silicone will not stick to them.

Tools used to pour and peel the silicone.

We'll use the "edgies" part of the silicone peel tool for this - we don't want too much of that stuff sticking in our corners and edges.

Another nice little trick is to cut a little angle into the nozzle of the silicone - this will act as a guide along the edges of the glass when pouring the silicone

Now very slowly pour nice rolls of silicone on all the edges. Remember to loosen the spring of the pouring gun just a half cm before the end of the glass so you won't pour any excess silicone....

Then after placing a roll of silicone on all the edges put up the glass, best using two persons. Hold for just a few seconds and make sure that there is a little gap between all the glass parts. a gap <1mm will work, but with no gap it won't get as sturdy as it could...

Another sample of how the edges and corner can look like when drying

Another sample of how a (more or less) nicely poured roll of silicone will look....

As you can see here you will get ugly blobs of silicone here and there. This is why you want to pull your silicone peeling tools slowly and carefully along all edges. Be sure not to remove the silicone completely - a small roll of silicone should remain in the edges!

This is what the outsides will look like - this is where you want to use a razorblade or cutter to carefully remove excess silicone.

Now would be the time to let your silicone dry. Normally it takes up to 15-30minutes for a initial outer Skin. Every conseccutive 3mm take 24h to dry - so as we normally use rolls < 3mm let's just wait a long night...

Also compared to the previous attempts to glue glass to glass this is extremely sturdy. Even the long 1.15 meters case can be held on one corner using only one hand without any signs of weakages!

But now for the lighting.... For this we used cheapo LED-Strips from the german electro-crap supplier "pollin" - they can be found here:

http://tinyurl.com/63ogqja

International readers may want to check dealextreme.com for "led-strip"s, examples could include:

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/12v-led-strip-11-led-33cm-white-5254

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/12v-led-strip-30-led-50cm-white-5256

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/12v-75-led-white-light-strip-50cm-11303

which all sound reasonable. All those have in common that you can (just a "probably" and given a tad of skill for the dealextreme ones!)  cut them, even if stated otherwise and that you may want to peel them out of their crappy housing. The Strips themselves want to be supplied with a standard 12V voltage, so use any switch-mode powersupply you can get your hands on. Don't buy too cheap - we tried, we regret it!

Our first tests with those nice led-strips were kinda successfully, so now for the mouting

After determining the positions of the strips place small short rolls of silicone in the edges

And press the strips into the silicone. You may want to hold them "in" for a few minutes depending on how deformed the strips were (some are quite deformed!). Also note that this is a great use for your razorblade and cutter to remove the excess silicone once it's dry

The cable is made of painted (so it's isolated) wire which we twisted so it'll look nicer. Here it's still mounted using clear tape for testing, later we'll mount it using small blobs of silicone.

For nicer looks the backside of the strip is beeing covered with white e-tape.

which you need to press on thightly - also note the nice "twisted pair" cable

Cut off the excess tape

and fasten using silicone as shown above.

These are the small mounting blobs for the cable. Still need to cut off some excess....

One late addition was using 10x10mm aluminum L-Profiles to nicely conceil both the backscatter of the LEDs and the led-strips themselves. Looks even better!

Yay, it's finished. You still see the strips and the irregular light they sometimes scatter back into the room - looks like just some tape wasn't enough :/.

but the translucency of the silicone-glued glass and light inside is just great!

Look, even Marissa is blinded by all the light and randomly starts to masterspark-shoot-people!

Nice effect .

And, as promised - we used the same LED-strips to light our DETOLF - the whole construction is kinda simple, a 12V SMPSU, some twisted pair painted wire (as before) and three strips per side...

Full shot of the lit DETOLF

Both reflectons on the backside plate and the inner lighting looks great on the figures!

the mounting was really easy - solder the 12V PSU to the led strip and fasten to using cable straps

upper cable strap.

this way even blackrock shooter lights up in a whole new dimension!

we used 3*48cm of strips on each side, luckily they were easy to solder so now it's one large strip

Anyways, we've (as in Eefi and NebuK ) tried our first garage kit, Mina, from the Densha Otoko opening:

Mina, our first modelkit, finished

As we've run into many problems, gear and methode wise, we thought we'd publish a small "buildlog" or "modelkit diary". Mind you, this is by no means a guide or tutorial as we've only tried to find our way into the Resin Kit World . Still if you're preparing to do your first kit this post may give you some kind of idea what you're diving into.

So, we're about to start. As those modelkits are casted from resin, which is basically 2 Components Epoxy on steroids, they have quite some casting leftovers, nipples, rough edges and the like. So you have to get rid of those, fill some gaps or holes, and give everything a nice polish so the color sticks well.

What you'll need is bascically this:

- a set of *small*, fine files, for the rough work on the model

- a cutter/scalpel for cutting of big leftover nipples - also handy for cutting tape for masking

- a set of K600, K800 and K1500 sanding paper

- some plastic glue / superglue

- a putty (note, do *not* use the putty shown here, it sucks. Appearantly tamiya green putty is nice, Mr. putty also gets recommended quite often)

- acrylic water-thinnable colors - also don't use the revell aqua shown here, better go for vallejo or - if a gamesworkshop is around the corner - citadell seems cool too. Only get the basic colors as we're gonna mix everything as needed ... cheaper that way

- not shown here, some brushes. Do yourself a favor and use good ones, it's way more fun that way.

- a small pliers as used for electronics

Materials Needed

AAAAAnd this is what mina looks like when unpacked. Quite a mess you may think at first.

Mina in pieces...

The you look in detail, and whaaat? This is rediculous, so much to do and fix.

Casting leftover on arm

Some more casting leftovers

Ears again

Check those looong edges

Everywhere! Leftovers, nipples, casting residue, everywhere!

Okay, let's calm down, we're gonna start by example. Take that ear for example, I've cut that nipple with the scalpel and filed the rest down roughly with the round-ish flat file.

IMPORTANT NOTE: ONLY FILE AND GRIND UNDER WATER OR USING A *GOOD* PARTICLE FILTER MASK. CLEAN WORKSPACE *THOROUGHLY* AFTER FINISH. SMALL RESIN PARTICLES STAY IN YOUR LUNGS AND ARE KNOWN FOR CAUSING CANCER. DO NOT RISK YOUR HEALTH FOR A MODELKIT!

Anyways, after filing the ear looks like this:

After rough filing

Of course, if you out paint on that it'll look horrible. So lets go for the K600 sanding paper, grind with a circular movement all the way back and forth over this area:

Aaaand, woohoo, looks nice. Again, the tools used to achieve this:

This is used for refining the casting nipples

So, next example, the left arm - looks horrible!

The arm was quite bad

After filing and grinding... perfect almost more smooth than the original!

K200 ... grinding ... nice!

You remember the pictures of the carrot-rocket-...thingies earlier? Well, this one was quite hard filing and grinding, but this seem sufficent.

Filing + Grinding = ... okay

Cutting! Watch out, fingers in danger

Sooo, time to get the paint on your table and make the first tries. Remember to always use clean distilled water with a tiny tiny drop of soap for thinning. That way you won't get a ugly lime-edge on your brushstrokes and the surface tension of the water is lowered so the paint will distribute itself nicely.

First paint

As you may see here, the paint-job isn't perfect. Yours probably also won't be. Its just hard brushing. When thinning properly and applying the paint in more and more and more steps, each with only little paint at a time you can reduce the problem.

Carrot paint detail after 1x 100%, 1x thinned

If you're not putting soap in your water ... this is what will happen!

Over-Thinning paint...

But after getting to know that trick the paintjobs get better and better.

By the way, another nice trick if you gotta mix your colors yourself is a so called "wet palette". It basically works by putting sandwitch paper or baking paper on top of a shitload of soaking wet cleenex into a closeable box. That way your colors will stay nice wet even overnight and over the term of days.

The painting gets better..

And on we go to the next subject, applying putty. Here its used to make the head a bit rounder and also to fix that gap between the two halves of the head.

Apply it by taking some on a knive, putting it on the subject and pressing it into the holes/gaps with the knive. It's better to use a bit more putty than you need so you can press it in there nicely. Here it's not everything in the gap and the rest taken away cause' i want to model the head a bit more round.

dried rough putty on the head

detailed rough putty

After some filing and sanding action the back of the head is in a nice state, ready to be painted!

filed and grinded

isn't that bad

the top still needs to be done

putty on the head

putty on the head

This is what the putty looks like after filing and grinding with K600, be sure to sand it again with finer K's... the paint won't look nice on that.

The paintjob somehow is the worst part of the whole build-process - i already mentioned thinning the paint and adding soap. If you made your first try without those you feel like those will solve all of your problems. Still, its unbelievable hard to make large uniform areas look good.

Here some examples (those small speckles are sensor-dust on my camera. Note to self: don't use bellows too often )

arm painted

carrots painted

ears painted

As you see it's ... okay - from a larger distance. You ought not to get too close . If you want a way better result the only thing you can resort to is using a airbrush, which is what we'll do for the next model.

Anyways, some more putty action. The back of the neck wasn't aligned nicely and the edge to the collar wasn't visible nicely. So first mask everything not to harm the already nicely painted face.

masking for applying putty

Apply putty, a bit more again to re-model the edge of the collar.

More putty action!

By the way, masking is really really important. Here you can see how we masked the arms for painting the gloves - the little cutout at the palm / inner hand was tricky .

Masked arms

Masking the gloves of the arm

And what does the finished model look like? you may ask.... here comes the gallery:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Last hint, a cheap good source for modelkits, not original japanese, but also not as worse as "thai" kits is e2046.com - which is where mina is from. They have reasonable prices and reaaally fast shipping. Great!

If you're about to start with a modelkit i hope we could give you some rough guidance. This is - once again - by no means a attempt to a complete guide or anything - sadly something like that's still missing on the net. After we've gained more experience with more kits we'll attempt to put together a nice guide for you .

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and seeing the Mina-Pics ...

Be awed by the Christmas present from roBernd we got (Thanks again! It's great, I always use it when I'm in front of the computer which means.. a lot.) It's the Sudoh-Bucks mug from ToraDora!. Unfortunately we dropped one when it was still in it's package. Hey, roBernd, if you're on your way to make more, give us a call xD

It seems like there's an official Sudoh-Bucks mug but the only thing I've found is a tumbler that you may still be able to order if you want. But it's not the original mug the use in the series.

Because Sudoh-Bucks beats Starbucks anytime!

For everyone who wants to make this great merchandise: here's the svg

Kindly provided by roBernd

This is one of the awaited chrismas present tutorials, a gift we've made for a good friend who happens to like everything thats cat-ish, especially - of course - if it has its origins in otaku-culture, like this:

Nyamo and Miyuki (figure)

We decided to give a Nyamo (the small catish thingy) a try and make it. As a base we used the well known Poring Plushie pattern, attached ears and tail, cut the right face and swoosh, there it was. But step for step for now...

First take a sheet of Cloth thats quadratic if you fold it in half, so 25x50cm for example, add the markings as shown.

Folded cloth with markings

Sew along the markings, fold the cloth over and add the markings once again, this time on the folded side, like this:

After sewing fold over again, mark again, go

After cutting off the excess fabric it should look like this:

Cut off the excess edges

Then we want to cut off a round piece so we can attach a circle which works as a base later:

Mark the bottom cutout

You need to measure the base with a flexible measure to know how large your circle has to be (notice saber lily in the background watching the action!)

Pin the bottom to the bottom cutout

We decided that the tail will be simple sewed from a large piece (27x12cm) of cloth with a double round shape (4cm in heigt) at the end so the end (when sewed together and turned inside out) will look nice and round.

The tail ... mockup

See the markings for the round cutout at the end:

Pin up the tail for sewing

Fill and close the tail now so its ready for attaching.

Tail sewed, mockup (aahhh, don't look at that shape)

Attach the tail, you'll notice you filled it too much .

Fastening the tail to the corpus

Then the most important part, the Neko-Mimi.... i thought i'd not scan the Shapes and provide them as a pattern cause its so dead-simple, everyone can make it. So you also have a bit more of your own.

Yay, Neko Mimi

They consist of 3 parts each, two "main ear" parts and the "inner pink" which will be hand-sewed onto the sewed-together-and-already-turned-inside-out-main-ears

This is how the pink gets on the Nekomimi

Don't make the same mistake as i did...

But sew it on there nicely

XFin

Yay, the ought to look nice

The face, as always is one of the biggest problem, cause it will determin how cute and nice the plushies look will be when finished, so some experimenting needs to be done, first the eyes, with standard-sparkle....

Cut out eyes, glue the sparkle on the eye-black

No Hitler-beard for Nyamo...

Not bad already, the mouth wasn't quite it... also the eyes are not too nice. If you've seen lucky star all that nyamo does is yawning, so a more sleepy face needs to be found...

Better ... not quite

Yay, but too ... awake and lively

Its not nyamos face in that state, but THAT IS IT!

Better, smiling knee

And sleepy eyes on Nyamo

Only the whiskers are missing

And fin, with whiskers!

And yay, with whiskers

Now, i hope this is a nice idea for everyone who loves making things themselves, and loves lucky star. If you have a dear otaku/nerd whose birthday is coming up, or who you want to give this for chrismas (well, planning early ... a bit) or any other occasion, i think nyamo is a nice idea . I hope you enjoyed this tut, and maybe also enjoyed making a Nyamo yourself.

Hope to read you soon again, up for more plushies, tinkering and general nerdism .