Finished assembly on the ZZ. All that's left now is decals (which are honestly mostly superfluous with this one, but I'll still put 'em on).
Cross, you want some action poses, but there's honestly not a lot that can be done with the ZZ. At least, not without a weighted action base. I have some ideas for some cool poses but like, they'd probably cause the action base to tip over. Also, just like the video we watched, ZZ is completely incapable of holding his weapons in a cool manner. You have to do some weird contortions just to get the guy to hold his gun out forward:

This is a cooler angle:

ZZ can't really do many cool poses with the gun because it's heavy as fuck, and the ZZ's hands are made of potatoes. ZZ is also completely incapable of holding his beam sabers, because they're even heavier than the gun. They have these little things that swivel out and plug into the hands for stability, but they're poorly designed and barely plug in, so they might as well not exist. Here's the ZZ trying to hold his beam saber in a cool position. When I posed it, it was aimed straight up, but by the time I could take a picture it had drooped that far down.

There's unfortunately not a lot that can be done about this; I already had the joints pretty stiff; they're just too damned big.

And that's not Bandai's fault or anything, they're that big in the show. It's part of what makes the ZZ so badass, because his giant beam sabers are super long and not just slice entire mobile suits in half, but basically melt the entire enemy suit in one swing. But the unfortunate side effect is that all that bulk and junk & the trunk makes for an unweildy gunpla.
This is the coolest pose I came up with:

It's based on the eyecatches for ZZ.
Cross also said you wanted some transformed pics? Here's the Core-Top and the Core-Base respectively:


I'm never EVER transforming the ZZ ever again. It's such a huge pain in the ass. I also broke a landing gear while doing this. It's currently drying for repairs. But here's the G-Fortress:



Jenn also wanted some before and after pictures of seam welding. So here's some pics:
The pictures didn't come out great, but hopefully you get the idea. Here's a pic of after I plastic cement'd this piece together. The lighting is kinda bad but you should be able to see where to the two pieces of plastic meet, and also the surrounding area there plastic is a little warped/off color because of the extra plastic cement that gooped onto it. It doesn't look too off in this angle, but under better lighting, it looks really different from the normal plastic. I'm only welding the bottom half, btw:

So next step is to reshape with a heavy grit. I'm using ~320 grit IIRC, but anywhere in that ballpark will do. Sometimes you can just shave it down with a knife, but I used too much plastic cement and the ridge is too prominent and requires this heavy sanding. I think people's common instinct while sanding is to do circular motions or to go both ways, but I've found with these plastic kits that you should always sand in one direction, because it just cleans up a lot easier that way; otherwise you're much more prone to leaving scuff marks. I probably should have sanded against the seam here, but I was being lazy.

Here, I began to take a much more fine grit to smooth it out. I have 1000 grit I probably should have done before this step, but this is the 1500 grit:

This is after going at it with 2000 grit. If you do it right, this can be your finished step, but it takes some practice, and usually it's easier to pull off on less complicated pieces. However I'm kind of a shitter, so I then take a finger nail polisher/buffer to it next:

And here it is after a polishing. The seam is basically gone. There's a couple of scuff marks left but I could have gotten rid of those had I cared. There's a little bit of discoloration where the nubs once were, but that's kind of my fault for doing a shitty job at removing the nubs. Had I sanded the nubs down with this same step procedure instead of knifing them, you'd have seen nothing. This is also a really zoomed in look at a seam that's pretty small and if you're eyeballing it IRL you wouldn't see anything.
