Metal AT-AT from my past
Time to take a break from the plastic, and work with some metal!
If you've no connection with pop or nerd culture what-so-ever, that's the AT-AT walker from STAR WARS.
This kit I was actually really excited to get to, as it holds some personal significance to me. If you dont care about that stuff skip this paragraph, but otherwise: I just found it again while organizing some gaming stuff. I picked this up with some of the store credit I got from an Android:Netrunner regional. First off, Android:Netrunner is one of my favorite games of all time, and if you haven't checked it out you absolutely should, its still a fantastic game and I believe the NISEI organization that currently runs it is going to be coming out with some starter friendly stuff soon. But anyways, my friends and I were into this game very competitively for several years, in that we played it every thursday, had a local tournament every month or two, and during the competitive season we road tripped to most of the championship events that were within 4 hours, often staying overnight (a friend who worked at a hotel chain got us cheap rooms wherever we went). It was a fantastic part of my gaming life. Road tripping with close friends to competitive events had a lot of the camaraderie I used to feel in high school team sports, and working hard and earnestly to do well against serious competition is just a great feeling. If you've never done anything like it, I highly recommend it, even if you're not super skilled. Just going to a tournament, speculating about how it'll go and supporting your friends and commiserating and checking each others scores and having a good time is a great experience, no matter the game. But anyways, I did really well and got some store credit in addition to other prizes, and as the store was four hours away so I dont stop regularly there, I wanted to pick some stuff out before I left. I got a mediocre board game and this little like $10 kit, and then this kit kinda sat packed away in a tote for a while. Pulling this kit out again just brought back awesome memories of the good times and long car conversations and that gaming group I've since moved away from, so really motivated me to build it, so that every time I saw it I'd be reminded of those people and those times we had.
But I've never done one of these thin metal folding kits before, so lets dive in:
Doesn't seem to hard, right? Once you free the parts from the sheet, you just bend them into shape among pre weakened creases, and then theres only two ways to fasten them. For tighter but more unsightly joints (so mostly used when the tabs are hidden inside something), you twist the tab after inserting. For a looser but neater joint you fold the tab flat after inserting it. Based on this I got out some not quite needle nose but close enough pliers with textured surface for the more forceful jobs, and some wider flat tweezers without texture so I could squeeze the visible areas without leaving teeth marks.
So it has us start with the head, not too bad. They're nice easy parts to get used to this with. Originally I was concerned I might have to get out the nippers to free some parts, but most are secured at only 2-3 points and you can just wiggle them free. The metal breaks pretty cleanly. If you really inspect up close I guess you can see it, but the tabs are a much bigger eye distraction, the kit wasn't built to look perfectly clean, just really good from like a foot away, so I'm not worrying about it. A few more folds, a few more tabs, a few more folds, a few more tabs and we have an AT-AT head!
Feeling more confident now, even with the trickier neck circle - the trick with that was just to slowly flex it small bit by small bit and keep reforming the circle at any angular parts until it was more malleable. Which is good, because these legs look a bit tricky. There are several non flat parts that you have to shape in a smooth arc, like around the knees and the top parts of the legs. I buckled down and didn't get a whole ton of pictures of the process, but....
So we just need the feet and the body. The feet have EVEN MORE strips I have to form into circles, but thankfully the smaller arcs on the legs have prepared me. I gotta say, the build progression on this is actually nice. To make it even smoother looking, I'm going to bend in the tab and hook so they both appear on the inside instead of the outside.
The body was actually quite complicated. Its one bit flat piece with 16 (!?!?) different flat surfaces you're supposed to fold between. You can peek back at the instructions to kinda see it, also available at https://www.fascinations.com/me/360/mms252/index.html, and while you are there check out the tabs on the feet and why I decided to avoid that by putting them on the inside so it looks much cleaner.
And it actually looks pretty darn solid! Now to put it on the shelf my primary monitor sits on, next to the mini Serenity and the tiny zen rock garden. And then we're all complete, a nice memory made solid into a fun little kit. :)
If you've no connection with pop or nerd culture what-so-ever, that's the AT-AT walker from STAR WARS.
This kit I was actually really excited to get to, as it holds some personal significance to me. If you dont care about that stuff skip this paragraph, but otherwise: I just found it again while organizing some gaming stuff. I picked this up with some of the store credit I got from an Android:Netrunner regional. First off, Android:Netrunner is one of my favorite games of all time, and if you haven't checked it out you absolutely should, its still a fantastic game and I believe the NISEI organization that currently runs it is going to be coming out with some starter friendly stuff soon. But anyways, my friends and I were into this game very competitively for several years, in that we played it every thursday, had a local tournament every month or two, and during the competitive season we road tripped to most of the championship events that were within 4 hours, often staying overnight (a friend who worked at a hotel chain got us cheap rooms wherever we went). It was a fantastic part of my gaming life. Road tripping with close friends to competitive events had a lot of the camaraderie I used to feel in high school team sports, and working hard and earnestly to do well against serious competition is just a great feeling. If you've never done anything like it, I highly recommend it, even if you're not super skilled. Just going to a tournament, speculating about how it'll go and supporting your friends and commiserating and checking each others scores and having a good time is a great experience, no matter the game. But anyways, I did really well and got some store credit in addition to other prizes, and as the store was four hours away so I dont stop regularly there, I wanted to pick some stuff out before I left. I got a mediocre board game and this little like $10 kit, and then this kit kinda sat packed away in a tote for a while. Pulling this kit out again just brought back awesome memories of the good times and long car conversations and that gaming group I've since moved away from, so really motivated me to build it, so that every time I saw it I'd be reminded of those people and those times we had.
But I've never done one of these thin metal folding kits before, so lets dive in:
Doesn't seem to hard, right? Once you free the parts from the sheet, you just bend them into shape among pre weakened creases, and then theres only two ways to fasten them. For tighter but more unsightly joints (so mostly used when the tabs are hidden inside something), you twist the tab after inserting. For a looser but neater joint you fold the tab flat after inserting it. Based on this I got out some not quite needle nose but close enough pliers with textured surface for the more forceful jobs, and some wider flat tweezers without texture so I could squeeze the visible areas without leaving teeth marks.
So it has us start with the head, not too bad. They're nice easy parts to get used to this with. Originally I was concerned I might have to get out the nippers to free some parts, but most are secured at only 2-3 points and you can just wiggle them free. The metal breaks pretty cleanly. If you really inspect up close I guess you can see it, but the tabs are a much bigger eye distraction, the kit wasn't built to look perfectly clean, just really good from like a foot away, so I'm not worrying about it. A few more folds, a few more tabs, a few more folds, a few more tabs and we have an AT-AT head!
Feeling more confident now, even with the trickier neck circle - the trick with that was just to slowly flex it small bit by small bit and keep reforming the circle at any angular parts until it was more malleable. Which is good, because these legs look a bit tricky. There are several non flat parts that you have to shape in a smooth arc, like around the knees and the top parts of the legs. I buckled down and didn't get a whole ton of pictures of the process, but....
So we just need the feet and the body. The feet have EVEN MORE strips I have to form into circles, but thankfully the smaller arcs on the legs have prepared me. I gotta say, the build progression on this is actually nice. To make it even smoother looking, I'm going to bend in the tab and hook so they both appear on the inside instead of the outside.
The body was actually quite complicated. Its one bit flat piece with 16 (!?!?) different flat surfaces you're supposed to fold between. You can peek back at the instructions to kinda see it, also available at https://www.fascinations.com/me/360/mms252/index.html, and while you are there check out the tabs on the feet and why I decided to avoid that by putting them on the inside so it looks much cleaner.
And it actually looks pretty darn solid! Now to put it on the shelf my primary monitor sits on, next to the mini Serenity and the tiny zen rock garden. And then we're all complete, a nice memory made solid into a fun little kit. :)
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