AMX-011C Zaku III Late Type Land Use

The Zaku III HGUC was a kit that sat in my backlog for a very long time, due to it being one of the very first HGUC's, it's pretty rough in terms of parts layout and requires far more work to even look decent out of the box. With the amount of work needed just to get it to look passable, I decided why not just go all in and heavily modify it along the lines of Hitoshi Fukuchi's land battle variant. After a little bit of time spent gathering all the needed kitbash parts, I got to work on this almost 20 year old HGUC.

A large amount of work went into this kit to get it both presentable and modified to represent the spirit of the artwork. Thankfully, it all paid off when this kit won the GBWC qualifier at Fanime! I was really overwhelmed and shocked as there were many well done entries and very proud to represent our Northern California community in GBWC.

The main modification was to remodel the armor and make it look more "armored" overall. The Zimmerit texture was applied using polyester putty and textured with a DIY Zimmerit tool made from styrene strips. Parts of the armor that originally had space thrusters set in them were covered with putty and smoothed over.

The kit head was replaced with a Geara Doga head per the original Fukuchi artwork, as was the stock shield with a 1/100 Zaku II shield. The sub-arms under the front skirts are movable and were a mix of the sub arm parts from the HG Kshatriya and Silver Bullet. A panzerfaust from the HG Zudah, and a HG Dom Beam Bazooka round out the armament. The exposed waist was scratchbuilt and I was inspired by all the IBO kits I was seeing online at the time.

The tiny 1/144 Wappa is from the Ground War set, and I hoped it would give a sense that the unit were partially Zeon remnants allied with Neo Zeon and still used some One Year War vintage equipment. The base is made from acrylic medium for the crackling effect dry pigments were used for the dusty desert effect on the feet.

While the HGUC Zaku III could certainly use an updated kit if you are trying to straight build it, it makes for pretty good customization fodder. Sometimes you need to have a challenging or rough kit to force you to get a little creative and I'm glad this project came out the way it did.