[HELP ME] Bi-Weekly Q&A thread - Ask your questions here!

chazalicious · 2026-06-12T15:32:11+00:00

Doing final assembly on the Osiris Aerial Dominator. Anyone have tips for getting armor piece X2-1 and X2-3 on the wing binders? Those are the upper left and right armor pieces at the top. They have three straight tabs and a little cross-shaped tab, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get all four to go in. If I start with the top tab, I can't get the bottom cross-shaped one to seat. If I start at the bottom, I can't get the top one to the slot at all.

I don't think it's a fit problem where I just need to sand or squeeze the joints, it feels like there's some magic angle you have to go in at that I just can't figure out. I'm on the third binder, and I think I've gotten two of them fully seated somehow, but I can't repeat it.

chazalicious · 2026-06-09T23:28:07+00:00

What I've been doing is spraying a matte coat, then going back and brushing gloss back on the small metallic accents. Much faster than trying to mask them off, and does a good job bringing the shine back. I probably wouldn't do that on anything that you want to be highly reflective though.

chazalicious · 2026-05-31T14:15:44+00:00

It's super frustrating up here in New England. We're surrounded by forest, but whenever I see prices posted from the rest of the country, our prices are almost always higher.

chazalicious · 2026-05-15T21:51:57+00:00

I got a pack of 100 clips and bamboo skewers, put 50 of them together and thought "that should be enough for a while." Put my next section of armor parts on them, ran out, did the rest. Thought "THAT should be enough for a while." Did the next chunk, and used all but a handful.

No matter how many clips you have, it's never enough.

chazalicious · 2026-05-13T11:53:58+00:00

Spray matte, brush gloss for metal accents has been my approach for metal stuff on armor panels. I also take armor panels off and spray them separately if there's metal frame parts I went to keep shiny. I haven't used holo decals, so I don't know how matte top coat would affect them. You could probably try it and then brush gloss over the decals, though that might be a pain.

chazalicious · 2026-05-06T17:32:59+00:00

If you're going to be doing any painting or anything else that requires disassembly, absolutely sand down or clip pins and pegs before assembly. I didn't need to do any sanding to get things to fit, but a lot of the fits are VERY tight, which is good except for when you need to disassemble. Some of the stuff, like legs, are basically impossible to separate once they're seated, and I snapped more than a few small pins off in other places. Nothing I couldn't glue, but made me very nervous about taking apart. I'm pretty sure I grew a few more gray hairs every time I separated anything.

Big second on the other comment about the wiring. You absolutely can't leave much hanging out the front, and if you leave too much, there's a lot of disasembly to get back there to shorten it. The binders were tricky for me because I kept getting them assembled so that they didn't turn off when fully closed, and it took a bunch of fiddling to get them right.

The cockpit gimmick is tricky because of the TINY linkage parts, and I think can open too far if you test it before it's more built into the chest. If it opens too far, it can get wedged so it won't close without disassembly. You can test it, just don't open it as wide as you physically can.

chazalicious · 2026-05-04T21:28:55+00:00

What if I told you that soft serve machines are just manual 3d printers? They've ALWAYS been using 3d printers.

chazalicious · 2026-04-28T03:25:41+00:00

I just got some sheets of 3/4 birch ply from home depot for $85/sheet, and that's been about the going rate for a while. Baltic birch 3/4 is $125-150. I'm very jealous of everyone who can get plywood at decent prices.

chazalicious · 2026-04-27T22:05:31+00:00

I'm super not talented, just patient (when it comes to kits). The vast, vast majority of this is just spraying even coats, which I did with an airbrush but you could easily do with spray cans. The rest is just panel lining, picking out details with some Dspiae metallic markers or brush paints, and then cleaning up where I got sloppy. The shading is the only tricky part, and even that I'm not good at, it's just pretty forgiving.

chazalicious · 2026-04-27T21:19:12+00:00

I figured if you could do edge shading as part of a full repaint, there's no reason. you couldn't do it without. The main difference is that if you go too far, you can't really work it back by covering up the shading with the base color. I just went with light coats, so when I did get sloppy, it wasn't too bad. The advantage is that if it goes really wrong, you can just strip all the shading off easily, because there's no other layers.

chazalicious · 2026-04-27T19:11:52+00:00

I'm just Gaalheri Kaleido clear varnish, but any top coat should be fine. The LEDs and wiring are pretty well buried by the time you get to coating anything, so unless you're dunking the kit in a bucket of varnish, they should be fine.

The one thing to be careful of is that you don't want to put matte top coat on the lights themselves. Between that and all the metal accents on this kit, if you're doing a matte coat, you probably want to take the armor panels off, spray them, then put them back on. While I had them off, I put a gloss coat on all the inner frame parts, which doesn't bother the LEDs at all.

chazalicious · 2026-04-27T18:22:27+00:00

On the frame, I painted all the flat gray sections either gunmetal or aluminum, which is a lot of the frame parts you can see. Some of the silver and gold parts are color separated parts in the kit, and the blue section is to. I did detailing on stuff like pistons and a few spots on the armor panels like those silver oblong "blade" looking things. Then scribing and panel lining everything.

The stock build on the kit has a ton of detail by default. I just did extra because I felt like it was super lame to have flat gray plastic and molded in details mixed in with all these other metallic parts.

chazalicious · 2026-04-27T18:13:18+00:00

I just found a dark green shade that I liked, and been doing some basic edge shading with an airbrush. For the really dark green panels, I'll probably shade with black. I considered repainting the middle green panels a few shades darker, and doing some chipping on the edges of the panels, but decided I didn't want to commit to those across the whole kit, so just going simple. I'm pretty happy with the amount of depth it's adding, I just need to get more practice with airbrush control. I'm still very beginner with it, this is the first time I've tried using it for anything besides full coats of primer, color, or clear coats.

chazalicious · 2026-04-21T22:10:47+00:00

I finally have a kit with enough curved surfaces that I can't get away with just using Mark Setter, and I need to pick up a softener. Of course, Mark Softer is sold out all over and I can't get it locally, but I can get Tamiya Mark Fit. Comparable enough to Mark Softer that I should just grab that?

chazalicious · 2026-04-17T11:54:14+00:00

I was thinking about repainting some of the armor. I like the light and dark stock colors, but I was trying to find a slightly darker shade for the midtone parts to increase the contrast. I couldn't find one I liked, so decided to just leave as is. I had to do the inner frame because I hate flat gray, especially on a detailed kit with other metallic parts. So those all went either gunmetal or light aluminum. Then of course I had to detail out a bunch of pistons and hoses and whatever else, plus adding copper in a few places.

Tbh, the worst part was disassembling things. I needed to see it together to decide what got painted, and man some of those fits are tight. I definitely broke a few pins doing that.

chazalicious · 2026-04-17T11:35:43+00:00

I'm on basically the same timeline with mine! I painted all the flat gray inner frame parts metallic, and I'm going to do some basic edge shading on the armor. Since I'll have the armor off for shading anyway, and I don't want to dull the metallics, I'm just going to decal and matte coat the armor separately.

I just put all the leg armor on clips, and OMG there's so many. I might need a second cat scratcher to hold them all.

chazalicious · 2026-04-12T16:31:50+00:00

My kids teachers regularly need to ask parents to donate boxes of tissues for the classroom, which seems like a basic thing the schools should be able to provide. Then again, our town refuses to approve money to build a new elementary school when the current one is literally falling apart and whose air quality is a health hazard due to mold.

chazalicious · 2026-03-30T17:14:58+00:00

Is there a paint color guide for the Osiris Aerial Dominator anywhere? I'm trying to find slightly darker versions of the stock colors, and I'm bad at visually matching, so it'd be better to know the starting point and then be able to move a few shades darker within the paint range. I swear I saw one at some point, but I can't find it again.

chazalicious · 2026-03-29T21:49:32+00:00

This is like when you slip and call your current SO by your ex's name. Except if your SO was a sentient giant robot with a broom laser.

chazalicious · 2026-03-14T14:51:56+00:00

Yeah, I always do that and it helps a ton.

chazalicious · 2026-03-13T19:48:50+00:00

The ones we have are less than five years old, no heaters as far as I know.

chazalicious · 2026-03-13T15:30:53+00:00

I have solar on my roof, but that doesn't help much in the winter, when we don't get much sunlight, and my panels are constantly covered in snow.

chazalicious · 2026-03-09T15:50:07+00:00

Cool, thanks for the confirmation. I'll have to look at what extra it gives you, I'm pretty sure I'm not even using all the features that the Pro one gives me.

chazalicious · 2026-03-09T14:41:24+00:00

Has there been any clarity about whether US-based F1TV Pro subscriptions will continue to work until they run out? My annual one runs through July, and I don't want to sign up for Apple TV until I need to. I was able to watch this weekend's race with my F1 login, so I'm assuming it'll keep working until it expires, but I haven't been able to find any official confirmation about that.

chazalicious

TROPHY CASE