[REVIEW] Dragon Momoko MG Avalanche Exia Unboxing

I've been holding out from buying new kits lately until I finish most of my projects. And It's been really hard since the kits being released recently keeps getting better and better. Bandai or otherwise.

Ever since the Dragon Momoko MG Avalanche Exia was announced I've been keeping an eye on it. I was able to resist the Bandai or the BL Providence, or the DM out frames. 

But I wasn't able to resist this one. Primarily due to the kits potential for LED mods.

So for now, here's an unboxing review of the kit. (WARNING: Photo heavy)

After the MG Strike Freedom and the Destiny. DM went back to their simpler box designs. The box shows the two "versions" of the kit. The one with the "Dash" parts on one front and side, and one without on the opposite sides. 

The manual is thick. There are a few pages showing the kit in various poses or featuring its extra parts. Looking at the manual, it can be observed that this is a new inner frame design. So the armor parts wouldn't normally fit with the existing MG Exias.

There are a lot of runners. Good news is that details are really good. edges are sharp, panel lines are deep enough. Very minimal mold flashes which are very manageable.

Aside from foil stickers. The kit also comes with water slide decals.

The blades come in a metallic silver finish. I'm not sure if it's painted or plated. Kind of what they did with their version of the MG Akatsuki. The finish looks really good. Unfortunately, nub marks will be hard to hide with this kind of finish. Especially the gates here are placed at the edge of the blades.

I tried scraping the finish off one of the metallic runners and it shows the plastic is an opaque plastic. Maybe I'll just repaint the whole piece if I'm unable to find paint that matches that kind of finish.

The kit also comes with "GN Power Lines". This is a thick sheet of clear plastic yet very flexible. I don't expect to encounter any problems attaching these.

It also comes with the metal build - style display stand. Though the markings are different.

The kit also comes with 2 LED units for the GN Drive. It even comes with batteries for the LED. Looking closely, it appears that these LED units are not the same as the Bandai versions as the Bandai versions use 2 pcs, LR44 button batteries but this LED unit uses only one battery. 

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[TUTORIAL] LED techniques 1

I have been asked countless times regarding my LED techniques. So here's a bit of documentation on how I do my LED mods. Do note that the stuff I'll be talking about may not be electronics common practices or standards. Some might even find them unpractical. I'm just sharing you how I do things and how they work on the things I want to do. 

For today's lesson, I'll share how I power my works.

I have 2 ways of powering my circuits, using a 3 volt and a 5 volt source. The 3 volt source comes primarily from a button cell battery. The 5 volt source can either be a phone power bank or a phone charger that outputs 5 volts.

I mainly use the 3 volt battery during WIPs where I need to quickly test parts that I'm working on. While the 5 volt supply is for displaying finished kits.

One of the most frequently asked questions along with the power supplies would be the nature of using resistors. I often get asked by people what value of resistors they would need for their circuits. Resistor values generally depend on several factors: Voltage source, color of LEDs used, Number of LEDs used, and connections of LEDs.

I'm not going to discuss those into detail since there are already tons of tutorials on the internet and there are even calculators that make computing easier. But to show you an idea, here's some pics of LED circuits with various supply voltages, LED colors, connections and numbers.

See how varied it can get? So to spare myself the trouble of having to compute and get the right values of resistors for any specific circuit, I keep my circuits simple and consistent.

The simplest I can think of is to do my circuits with 1) no resistors and 2) wire all LEDs in parallel. I know it sounds inefficient, impractical, and a little bit lazy. But for something like Gunpla building, I don't think I need to consider power efficiency and also since I'm working with very tight spaces, additional components would make modding the kits really troublesome.

To achieve the no resistor circuit, I need to match the power supply to the LED's required voltage. And that's where the 3 volt battery comes in. 

If I can run my circuit with the same voltage as the forward voltage of the LED, no resistor would be needed since as per the sample above, the circuit would only require a 1 ohm resistor which can be considered negligible.

That makes sense when we have only one LED. But what if we have to use multiple LEDs?

That's where the parallel connections come in. As seen in the sample above, the positive terminal of all the LEDs are connected to the positive of the power supply and the negative terminal will all be connected to negative of the power supply, neglecting the resistors.

Also note that I primarily use white LEDs since they're close to 3 volts and that by painting them with clear colors, I can get different colored LEDs. I find that more practical than combining different color LEDs in my circuits since each color LED would require a specific resistor value to be used together with the other LEDs. 

One side effect of this would be that the nature of parallel connections tend to draw the same amount of current for all components. Meaning parallel connections will drain the batteries faster.

Once a kit is done and ready for display, 3 volt batteries wouldn't really be enough to display the kit for as long as I wanted to. That's where the % volt power supply comes in. I currently have a 5 volt power bank  and a phone charger. The power bank can store enough charge to power my displays for a long time or if there's an outlet, I can use that for longer periods. But since the Supply voltage and the LED's required voltage isn't the same anymore, we'll have to use a resistor here to lower the supply voltage.

The sample above is how an LED is powered by a 5 volt power supply. This will require a 120 ohm resistor to lower the voltage to 3 volts similar to the LED. For multiple LEDs, instead of multiple Resistors + LEDs combination, I directly connect the LEDs at a point after the resistor where the voltage has already dropped to 3 volts, as seen from the image below. This way, I've managed to lessen the number of components and minimized the area the LED + resistor would have taken inside the kit.

Also I like using this connection since keeping all LEDs in parallel helps in troubleshooting bad, burnt or broken LEDs.

I hope this tutorial helped you in designing your LED circuits. Again, this is in no way standard practice and feel free to improve on these techniques. Stay tuned for more updates on projects and/or more tutorials.

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[TUTORIAL] DIY Custom peg tutorial

Ever broke a peg on 1 of your kits? Or needed 1 for your custom builds? Here are a few tips that might help you.



First, I prepare the piece where the peg will be placed. For this example, I needed to add another peg between those 2 existing pegs. So I drill a hile on the part. The hole should be the same size as the peg we will be adding.

For this example I used s 3mm rod from a gunpla runner as the peg. I add some cement on the hole and the peg piece then put them together. It is important that the hole should match the peg piece so to have a tight join.

You can see that the peg piece went through the flat piece, and that I made the flat piece a bit thicker by joining 2 runner tabs. The idea here is that the thicker the piece that the peg goes through, the more surface area it can stick to when the glue dries. This will ensure that the peg will be strong.

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[TUTORIAL] HG Geirail Head LED tutorial

Finally had some time for a new post. Here's another sort of tutorial/ guide on how to add LEDs on heads of HG kits. This time, it's the HG Geirail from the Iron Blooded Orphans anime.

Drill a hole on the "main" head frame. This is where I will be attaching the LED. Though the actual sensor of the MS is rectangular, I decided to go with just a small hole for simplicity and since there is still a piece that will diffuse the light.

For this I will be using white 0603 SMD LEDs, wires are 30AWG wires. Total radius of the wires will be 1mm. So I need a 1mm or bigger drill bit. I decided to use 1.2mm to give it a bit of clearance and so the wires don't get stuck in the holes. I mostly get them online since these stuff isn't available locally here where I live.

Once the part is drilled, its time to glue the LED in place.

Next we plan on how the wires will exit the head, towards the body. There's actually plenty of space in the HG Geirail for this.

Testing the LED after putting the head together. It's good practice to test if the LED after putting together a section of the kit. It would suck so bad if you just find out that the LED or wiring broke after putting the whole kit together.

Next would be passing the wires through the body, luckily, plenty of space here.

I decided to stop here, below the body since I still don't have a specific plan for this kit. I can continue passing the wires through to the feet to hide wires while standing display or anywhere where it will not be noticeable.

The red clear piece diffused the light really well giving a cool effect.

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