1/144 High Grade God Gundam

Mobile Suit: GF13-017NJII God Gundam
Release Date: May 2010
Series: Mobile Fighter G Gundam

Start Date: May 17, 2025*

The identity crisis Gundam. Sometimes simply referred to as "G Gundam" and localized to "Burning Gundam" in America due to the religious angle, the God Gundam is the mid-season upgrade suit for the series protagonist. G Gundam is in its own self-contained universe within the franchise and the designs focus a lot more on hand-to-hand combat, martial arts, and camp - but as the protagonist suit, this design still plays pretty close to the chest and has the fundamental Gundam color scheme and proportions.

This kit is very anime accurate in details and panel lining, but updates the proportions a bit - the torso feels a bit shorter and thinner, and the shoulders are smaller as well. I think it's a solid revamp and I actually prefer the design over the Master Grade version.

The start date is a bit of a lie. My roommate and I bought kits - including this one - in the fall of 2010. We planned to spray paint these and did but had no idea what we were doing.

Since we were strapped for materials and money we just... painted parts by half on cardboard outside the dorm. Predictably, this didn't end up looking super good.

Kind of a globby textured mess. (Also peep the torso which got mixed into my rommate's parts and was painted black and half-sanded back down). Anyway, we both abandoned these, probably due to being pretty dissatisfied with the paint. To be honest, I don't even know why I pushed for us to paint at all.

I've had the kit in storage though since it just felt wrong to discard. I recently read about some success stories with stripping old paint and decided that this could be a way to revive it.

I decided to make a list of goals for this build, since it was going to involve a lot of firsts for me, and I wanted to be intentional about what I wanted out of it and avoid scope creep:

• Focus on surface prep, sanding, and clean parts. The paint stripping will probably yield some compromised parts, so this is extra important. Included in this is very light part modification to fill in some part fills, but no other customization.
• Rescribe panel lines. I've always had gripes with these in other kits, and have researched rescribing as a way to achieve cleaner, better lines. I won't be scribing any new ones - this will be my first time with a chisel and I just want to focus on technique.
• Airbrush. I've only ever used spray cans, but they're so expensive. Since this kit is "free" I can sink some money into getting a setup going and use this as a practice piece. I won't do pre-shading or post-shading - I just want to focus on clean coloration here.
• Only add color separation as necessary - I won't be adding sub-tones for armor pieces.
• Custom decal application - I have some leftover 1/44 scale decals from RG Tallgeese that could be used here.

Progress Update 1

Started with the old parts in a plastic baggy. I snap-built the kit just to make sure I wasn't missing everything and it looks like everything is accounted for.

Close-up on this horrendous paint job on the core lander.

I dissassembled as many parts as I could and soaked in ~50% isopropyl alcohol.

Quick explanation of paint chemistry: modelers typically use acrylics, enamels, or lacquers to paint. Lacquers are considered the toughest, most resistant paints, and acrylics are the least durable. Acrylics can be dissolved in water (although some brands like Tamiya and Mr. Color do use a proprietary solvent) - enamels and lacquers always use chemical solvents (i.e. paint thinner). The solvents will melt plastic if too much is applied or is left wet for too long. When airbrushing or spraying, this is normally not a concern, as the application is very light and dries quickly. For paint removal, any soak would destroy the plastic entirely - so we have to use less aggressive chemicals to work through the paint layer.

As far as I can remember, this kit used spray enamels. Alcohol should be plastic safe, but is normally recommended for breaking down acrylic paints - since enamels are tougher, I wasn't sure if it would actually work. I'd forgotten that we actually did do some cementing/seam-line removal on these kits, so not everything was disassemblable, but most should still be very paintable with minimal masking.

Broke this piece on the left shoulder when disassembling. I think we built these parts before the paint fully cured, and didn't mask joints - so there are several pieces that glued themselves together, basically. I should be able to fix this with cement, though. For other stubborn parts, I soaked them assembled and figured that the paint breakdown would help to unfuse them. The thrusters must have been gouged when I did the initial snap build all those years ago... not sure how to address this. Considering replacing them with some thruster option parts.

After roughly 48 hours soaking, we got... some results. Definitely some breakdown of the paint. But primer was almost completely unaffected, and scrubbing was yielding nothing further, so I decided we needed a different chemical approach.

I had some even more ancient painted parts from the 1994 1/100 God Gundam, so tried out this kitchen degreaser and this auto parts cleaner.

The auto parts cleaner peeled the paint almost immediately, but it was obviously muddying the surface texture of the plastic, so wasn't usable.

The degreaser took longer - but after about 8 hours I was definitely getting some paint removal with no effect on the plastic, so resoaked all of the pieces from the main kit.

After about 24 hours, had really good progress. Some primer was still clinging, so I brushed everything off to get rid of the vast majority of paint, then soaked in fresh degreaser for another 24 hours.

After another round of scrubbing, the vast majority of the kit was cleaned. I rinsed in water just to prevent any long-term chemical reactions from taking place.

Placed and vaguely organized pieces to make sure that I didn't lose any at the bottom of the jar. Not all parts are visible here, as about 10 had to go for one more soak. Mostly blue pieces, for whatever reason.

I did notice some parts had some rough texturing - not many, but enough to be annoying. I don't think this was the degreaser melting the plastic - rather I feel like we way might have oversprayed primer to the point that the enamel solvents etched into the plastic slightly way back when. I say this because I didn't see it at all on unpainted surfaces, which would have been hardest attacked by anything in the degreaser. Most parts will be easy enough to sand or putty out I think, so I'm still not concerned - it'll just lengthen the surface prep stage.

Done with the degreaser soak and doing another loose snapfit. This is just to really check my visible surfaces and start planning any further sanding or masking that is required.

I left a few parts unassembled where I felt like it would be too much trouble to unsnap them.