This is turning into one of these builds that stretch over months mostly filled with inactivity, plus I’ve now posted two videos about it on Youtube and nothing here, so I think it’s about time for a writeup.

Originally, this build was intended for Youtuber ZakuAurelius‘ Kotobukiya contest, but the deadline for that was, um, back in March. The plan, really, was to address two things that have always bothered me about the Berserk Fuhrer (or “Fury”, as it was known in the US, for obvious reasons) – the horrifying lavender color of the armor and the fact that it’s armed with two giant spinning kitchen appliances. In fact, I’ve had plans to do something about this going all the way back to the release of the original Tomy version of this model, and I still have a spare Tomy BF whose armor I wanted to paint white.

So what’s in the process of happening with this kit is that the armor is getting a proper pre-shaded and weathered white paintjob, and I’m replacing the blades on the back with the Dark Horn gatling gun. Here’s a mockup of what that’s going to look like, with the aid of some Blu-Tac and a bottle of Microset to fight the wobbly ankles.

Needless to say, a good deal of modding is still going to need to happen to the backpack. I also think I’ll want to add one of the smaller guns from the CP set to the other side, and the ammo belt that it comes with is just a chunk of rubber and will need to be replaced with something scratchbuilt, if I can pull it off.

Anyway, the first step was to paint the inner frame, because this kit actually comes with a complete inner frame like an MG or PG Gunpla kit that you then add the armor to. So I primed it all with Vallejo’s Metal Color gloss black primer, then painted it with Gunmetal and Duraluminium, also from that line, assembled it, drybrushed it for some weathering and then hand painted the details with an assortment of Citadel paints. Basically the same process as with the PG Strike, just with different paints. Needless to say, the Citadel paints made the detail work infinitely easier and more fun.

Here’s the Youtube video I posted at that point.

The next step was to paint the armor parts. Without assembling anything, I primed them white, pre-shaded them with Tamiya Light Grey and then blended it all with Flat White.

And that’s where I ran into kind of a motivational bump in the road. I’d already missed the contest deadline, and the parts needed to have some grey areas painted on them, not only because that’s what it looks like on the box, but also because the armor clearly needed some color separation. And I just couldn’t find the motivation to do all that masking.

Ultimately I just ended up hand painting everything with Mechanicus Standard Grey from Citadel. It doesn’t look as even as airbrushing would have looked, but I’d be very surprised if you could still see any of that after the gunk wash and the matte topcoat, the number of slight mistakes is probably about the same as it would have been with masking, and there was actually some stuff that I couldn’t have done with masking at all because of the shapes involved. And after a few months of painting Warhammer minis, to be honest, I’m just comfortable enough hand painting this stuff that it’s faster and comes out looking fine.

Add to that the decals and a gloss coat, and the parts were ready for weathering. But after looking at everything for a bit, I realized there was no way I could do that without assembling it first. So I did.

As you can see, I left off some things because I was just too worried about breakage. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have put the head armor on either – I really have no idea how I’m going to get those parts off for topcoating without snapping everything into pieces, but I guess we’ll see.

Also pictured is the tail; the original plan was to leave it with the red fins exposed (which I did paint specifically for this purpose) in “CPC charging” mode, but looking at it now, I’m not so sure anymore if that’s what I want to go with. I don’t want to have to move these parts around too many times before I’m done because I know it’s going to wreak havoc on the paintjob, but I’ll have to figure that out at some point.

So that’s where I am right now. Next is going to be some chipping, a few heat streaks on the legs and maybe some vertical rust streaking, and then a gunk wash to conclude the work on the armor. Then I just have to figure out how I’m going to get that gatling gun on there in a way that looks good. Meanwhile, here’s the second Youtube video I made for this build.