Hasegawa 1/72
Winner “Best of Show”, Mecha Resolution 2003

The introduction of the valkyrie range from Macross by Hasegawa must have been a dream come true for many modelers and macross fans alike. Hasegawa is known to produce the best aircraft kits and it is no doubt that no one else comes up with better looking kits.

But how about something as fictional as the valkyrie? I mean, they can’t just go out to measure how long is the nose cone right? Well, leave it to the people at Hasegawa to cough out the best and argueably the most ‘accurate’ valkyrie ever!

Construction

Construction of this kit actually began more than a year ago when I first got my hands on it. Actually, it didn’t came about easy for these old hands of mine because I think I have been building too many Bandai Gundam kits where it’s easy to snap together and the plastic tough to withstand handling.

The valkyrie kit came about as more refined and certainly no snap-together joints here. I stopped building because I was trying to depict a valkyrie in flight and as I was trying to find the pilot, *gasp* where is the damn pilot!?

I could have sworn that I saw many included pilots in their valkyrie and I wondered where is mine… Asking around, I found out that the pilot was only included in the weapon set… *grrr*

So enough said, the kit was put on hold (while I search for the weapons set) and many kits after, here it is, I finally completed it.

Actually, I got nothing much to say about construction since it built it entirely out-of-the-box except of course modifying the gears doors closed.

Painting

Painting was really something that I had looked forward as I wanted to replicate the dirty and worn look depicted on the box art. I painted the entire model using Vallejo and Mr. Color only and I must say that the paint it much smoother than Humbrol which I swore by. I guess the pigment in Humbrol has higher granularity.

Weathering the plane was achieved by preshading and panel lining. I delibrately left the wash longer and clean off lesser in certain areas to increase the effect of the dirty look. It helps to take note of how dirt and grime appears on real aircraft.

Decaling the model was abit of a dilemma. The decals are really nice and adds to the realism of the model. But upon looking at the decal sheet, one cannot help but to be put off abit. There is more than a hundred decals to apply and many so tiny that you can hardly make out the words, well, this IS a Hasegawa kit.

I took care to weather the decals after applying them in some areas to avoid the weird look of clean decals over dirty plane.

Disaster

Building the valkyrie was rather smooth-going. In fact too smooth that it worried me. I mean I would expect small mistakes here and there but there was none. Hm… I spoke too soon.

I was trying to mount the plane on a 1.5mm aluminium rod. I thought it would be easy, just drill a hole and pop in the rod. Damn, I should have listened to Murphy (that Anything that can go wrong, WILL go wrong). I should have done that before painting and just when I was so cock-sure, I drilled the wrong hole in the centre of the part to be mounted. It interfered with the gun pod and have to be relocated to the side.

Thats a stupid mistake to make and now I gotta re-paint the part, then damn, I drilled the second hole on the INSIDE! Which makes it directly in the way of the gunpod! I guess it always works on the 3rd try huh…

Additional Images