When the new Zeta movies came out a few years ago I started to appreciate a few mobile suits I had previously blown off namely the Hyaku Shiki. After watching the triology I wanted to own a Hyaku Shiki and I managed to do just that when I built the HGUC Hyaku Shiki, and modeled a MG Char Zaku II after it.

I was fine with just those two for sometime but after looking at various collection display pictures I noticed that the original plated MG Hyaku Shiki always stands out no matter where it is or how many other kits surround it. So I got tired of waiting for the fabled Hyaku Shiki 2.0 which looks like it may never come to fruition and decided to look into purchasing a normal MG Hyaku Shiki.

Knowing its age I wanted to make sure that it would look acceptable if I bought it so I looked at Dalong’s scans of the manual and found that not only was it undergated but that the gold parts only have one pair of seamlines on the back wings. Now I am sure anyone reading this is wondering why I just didn’t do what everyone seems to do and strip the chrome, fill the seam, and paint it in gold. Well during my look into candy coats during the Sinanju build I found that chrome plating especially when it comes to colors creates a shine that is almost unparallelled. If you look all over the internet even the greatest Japanese modelers cannot recreate the shine and reflectiveness of the plated gold on the Hyaku Shiki. So with knowing that and seeing the lack of seams on the plated areas I got the MG Hyaku Shiki.

Even though I looked into the kit beforehand once I started building it I did experience a few surprises. First it was just the lack of pieces. The simplicity of the design, accessories, and the lack of an inner frame resulted in a kit with few runners. Secondly was the lack of articulation. This kit is over 10 years old and it shows with its extremely basic leg movement but even ignoring that things like the design of the hands were just unusual.

I think I was so concerned about the seams in the gold pieces that I failed to see just how many seams the rest of the kit had, which was many.

Had to do a couple of modifications to get around some of these seams.

One really unfortunate thing I started to notice as the build progressed was that not only was the undergating a bit too close to the edges resulting in spill over chipping but some visible pieces weren’t even undergated at all.

Considering the few amount of pieces and me not having to paint about half of the model the build went past fast even with the mods. Before I knew it, it was time to paint and I wanted to create a contrast to the gold as it seemed to drown out every other color on the kit so I went with flat brighter versions of the original colors.

While painting I was deciding on how to do the decals so I did a few tests to see how waterslides look on plated gold. The good news is that Mr. Softener didn’t seem to have any negative effect on the gold. Though the bad news was that the gold’s shininess made the silvering just too noticeable for me so I opted to go for dry transfers.

When it comes to the decals a whole other set of problems occurred but I’ll talk about that in the final post.