The arms on the Unicorn turned out to be rather more complex and involved than I thought they’d be. As with the rest of the kit I’ve used extensive masking to put detail onto the armour and to follow through the colour scheme I’ve established with the body and legs.The inner frame of the arm is rather simple and even though the end join is going to be covered  I spent the time to mask it, and I went with my dark grey/blue complimenting the large joint where the legs join the waist.  I added some yellow and fluorescent yellow onto the bend of the elbow joint mirroring the similar detail on the back of the knee. Again following the paint scheme of the knee I painted the joint cover with polished aluminium and the medium and dark grey/blue, with the flat end section gunmetal. The wires are threaded around the parts of the kit, through and under the elbow. It’s really quite clever how the kit and wiring have been designed. (You can see the evidence of the extensive masking on my work mat!)   The arm sections that go over the elbow join were painted with my lightest grey/blue, similar to the sections that surround the knee joint. Similarly I used the light grey/blue on the top of the shoulder.  The arm is just about complete and what an absolute pain it was! You pre-assemble the beam-sabre holders and are told to just slide them into the psycho-frame. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that and in my struggle to figure out why it wasn’t fitting I managed to break one of the side pieces.

With further investigation I found that if you fully bent the elbow you could see more clearly how the sub-assembly attaches and with just a bit of upwards pressure (with the wrong end of a paint brush) I could push the inner psycho-frame section up so that the inner part of the sub-assembly would slide into place.

To repair the snapped piece I ended up stripping all the paint off it, gluing it together (roughly in place so that I got the two broken pieces correctly placed with respect to each other) and then removing it to further work on it when the glue was dry. I put a few drops of super-glue on the back of the piece to give it a bit of strength and used some Tamiya putty on the crack to fill that in. Once dry I used my fine sand paper and sanding sticks to smooth everything out and then re-painted the piece. For the section where the hands join on I painted the inner part polished aluminium and the outer with my darkest grey/blue. Here’s one arm complete and the other awaiting the broken and fixed piece to dry. The shoulders went together quite well and are pretty solid when complete. There’s some what appear to be strange design elements on the part which attaches the shoulder to the rest of the kit, but you soon learn they’re wiring guides when you come to assemble everything together. The hands are really nice and large. They’re all moulded in one piece so there’s a lot of work on the clean up of the nubs. I used the lightest grey/blue for the backs of the hands. You can see here more of the masking detail I did on the arm sections, mostly on the bevelled edges.  Here’s the big guy getting his arms fitted. The wiring is tricky, with how it gets you to fold the wires around the body and up into the armpits where you find that some more details are really just wire holders and channels for the wire to run in. While Unicorn was on its front, I put some small details onto the back with fluorescent green paint. Back on the stand I quickly fired up the LEDs to check that all was working and it was! As tricky as the wiring is, Tamiya have done it well and it feels reasonably robust. Now you really get to see how massive this kit is. Out of all the modern PG kits I’ve built, you really get a good “PG” feeling with this one, with the scale and level of detail. I’m very happy with how the colour scheme is tying the various sections together. Next up is the head, but after the stress of fixing the arm part, I might just call it a day and not press on too hard with the build.