With the completion of the Destroid Defender this kit is next up on the hit parade.
I want to try my hand at doing splinter camo on this fellow.
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Cooooooooool. Highly interested in this!
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Splinter camo should fit right in on this one.
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You know I’m in… 
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This amazing kit was a gift to me 3 years ago shortly after I resumed the hobby.
The kit comes with two figures. A pilot and a mechanic. I’m starting with them. There’s usually some sort of story that plays in my head that sets the scene and influences how I decide to paint and weather the kit. This one I’m not sure of yet. I’m hoping it will reveal itself as I work on the figures.
To begin, the alignment of the figures isn’t the greatest and there are a good number of mold seams.
This is the pilot’s torso. I marked the more egregious areas with sharpie since I was having a hard time getting them to show with the camera.
The legs are even more apparent.
Since the pilot will be seated in the cockpit much of this won’t be visible. But I’ll know so I’m cleaning it up. The good news is that because of all the soft folds in the flight suit it should be pretty easy to blend without any worry about losing details.
The mechanic is just as bad.
There’s lots of scraping and shaping in my future.
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I cant wait to see what you do, I have this kit sitting in my closet right now. It’ll probably be there for a bit, I just finished up the Ma K camel and like to mix it up a bit.
Despite my recent Macross binge I too enjoy mixing things up. I did my first and only Ma.K.about three years ago. It was a SAFS Raccoon. I had so much fun it inspired a friend to gift me this Falke. I love the look, but the kit intimidated me at the time. 3 years later and a lot more models under my belt I think I’m finally ready to tackle this big boy
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I’ll say. That is some poor fit. But like you said, it’s mostly on fabric so, assuming the plastic isn’t too bad to work with, making it look presentable should be relatively forgiving.
I’m not familiar with this Ma.K. world at all and am hesitant to research it too deeply for fear of getting sucked in. Wasn’t that long ago that I thought I could just, you know, read a single 40K novel to see what it was all about. Now look at me. 
But I’m tuned in here. Feel free to dump some lore in the thread if you want…
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Hey @Toimi_Tom,
There isn’t a whole lot of official Ma.K. lore available in english language. I’ve only ever seen two summaries that I would call coherent.
The wikipedia page provides a decent summary.
One thing I found delightful is that for many of the kits they include what are called Combat Scheme Cards. They contain a bit of history for each vehicle and often short summaries of notable pilots careers. As well as painting suggestions.
They are all in Japanese, but in this day and age google lens makes it a breeze to translate. I’ll dig out the card that came with the Falke and share it’s translation.
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That sounds delightfully mysterious!
The background story of MaK is that Earth suffers a major nuclear war that renders the planet uninhabitable. The surviving humans flee into space for 700 years. Earth slowly recovers from the nuclear Armageddon, and so colonists return to repopulate the areas least affected by radiation.
A kind of “gold rush” begins, where colonists race to stake a claim in the habitable zones. There is the inevitable lawlessness and chaos that we humans are so good at doing when there is no one to spank us when we are being naughty, so the space government sends in the Strahl Democratic Republic to establish law and order in the colonies. The colonists respond by raising a mercenary army to oppose the SDR, and thus the story of Maschinen Kreiger begins.
When one looks at the designs from MaK, it appears that the Germans are fighting the Australians. The SDR machines all have German names and the soldiers dress in WW II uniforms, while the Mercenaries wear cargo shorts. 
So while the SDR appear to be the “bad guys”, when you consider the story line, they could actually be the good guys. Or it could be seen like colonial America vs Britain. That’s the thing with MaK, everything is kind of ambiguous and subject to interpretation.
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@RealG, that’s probably the best write up I have ever run across. Thank you for that!
No problemo. I’m a long time SF3D/MaK fan, since 1985!
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It turns out the history of the vehicle was on the box. Here’s a snapshot of it.
And here is the marking suggestions with pilot histories. Turns out there was a recommendation for splinter camo included. lol Had to do screenshots of the google lens translations. I tested and they were pretty legible. Any weirdness is entirely google’s fault.
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Thanks for all that stuff, guys. Super interesting little world.
I noticed in the pilot history for the 500th SFBW, they named the top ace “Annoi Juutilainen.” Surely this is a reference to the Juutilainen brothers, legendary WWII heroes of Finland. Ilmari Juutilainen was the top scoring Finnish ace of WWII – he shot down 34 Soviet planes in a Brewster Buffalo, and another 58 in a Bf-109G!
His brother Aarne Juutilainen wasn’t a flier, but a famous member of the prewar French Foriegn Legion in Morocco, then in the three wars Finland fought in as part of WWII, most famously for holding the line in the Battle of Kollaa. His reply to the general asking if they could manage, " Kollaa kestää", or “Kollaa holds!”, became a famous rallying cry for the rest of the war and after.
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That was a great bit of history. I would not be surprised if it was a reference to them. Ma.K. is definitely influenced by WWII.
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Started assembling the figures. The pilot’s head comes in two pieces with no locator pins. Sometimes those pins are a blessing, sometimes a curse. In this instance I wouldn’t have minded a couple. I have a bad history with pieces drifting after gluing and clamps are a 50/50 chance they’ll hold in place rather than causing an unpredictable shift. Given the irregular shape of the head clamps wouldn’t really work.
So I got creative and stuffed the head full of blue tack.
That seemed to work in this instance. The pieces stayed aligned well enough to finish assembly.
It’s a pretty cool looking helmet.
Next up were the legs. If I’m dealing with something that has fairly poor fit I’ll apply a layer of glue on each edge. Start with one side to be assembled, apply all around it, go to the other half, apply the glue. By the time I’ve finished applying the glue on the second half, the glue on the first half has mostly evaporated and started to soften the styrene. I’ll then go around and repeat the process again wait a few moments for more to flash off and then press them firmly together. This usually results in a very gooey seam but tends to fill in all but the most egregious gaps. This process doesn’t work with Tamiya extra thin. It flashes off way to quickly. I use my 30 year old bottle of Testors Liquid Cement. I will be very sad once it has been exhausted.
Anyways, once that’s all done and the plastic has had a chance to set up I can begin the scraping. In this case, LOTS of scraping.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Still some touch up to do but much better looking than before.
For the mechanic, my luck wasn’t so good.
Most of the body aligned well but the shoulder areas on both sides have a big ridge standing proud. The dark spots long the side are holes where the parts still didn’t meet up. I’ve got some puttying to do. I’m thinking for the shoulder rather than grind it down I may just put a big old blob of epoxy putty on it, place the arm, and use whatever squishes out to hide the joint. That could work, right?
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Going on a brief build hiatus. I just got another shipment of tools and materials and it’s swamped my current setup.
I need to finish the construction of my materials organizer so I can get this crap off my bench and organized.
It’s basically a bunch of different sized pigeon holes. I put it in use before I’d added all the pigeon holes. It’s going to suck for a while because I need to empty it before it can be completed 
Build Interlude:
Much to my surprise it took me less than an afternoon to get the organizer updated.
This was the setup before I got started on the work. It’s not entirely visible, I built it with capability to house 9 more dividers. It’s designed to slide into the existing cabinet above my bench. It’s a nice snug fit.
Despite having misplaced my blueprints some quick measurements with a ruler addressed whatever I had forgotten. I then proceeded to make copious amounts of wood dust, and I resized a few pieces of plywood too.
Anyways. After finishing the initial set of cuts I realize I only have enough material for 6 more dividers. Not a big deal. Until I screw up the second set of cuts and ended up with only 4.
“I don’t understand. I cut the board 3 times and it’s still too short!”
Still, some is better than none. Installing what I had allowed me to achieve this.
Kinda weird. Only four dividers installed, but it sure looks like a lot more.
Filling it up with what I had in the immediate area…
The missing dividers may have been a blessing in disguise.
Even managed to pack in few more things since the last photo.
Mission successful(ish)!
Work on the Falke has resumed. More to come.
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I just read through this to get all caught up. First off, you’re doing a great job with the figure start up. I can’t get over all of the mold lines in the figures and I’m sure you’ll have your work cut out for you for a bit on those.
Funny about that 30 year old bottle of glue. I haven’t seen one of those bottles in like …ages!!
Love the backstory to all of this as I never knew what this was all about till now so thank you for that.
Finally, your organizer really looks like the way to go and I need to do something like that. Although I’m not the messiest guy out there at the bench, I could still use a little more organization.
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