Longtime lurker wanting to get active.

Hi, my name is Dan, I go by Funaka on the forums I am a member of. I build about 75% mecha (robots) from Japanese anime (mostly Gundam) and about 25% aircraft (mostly WWII, but I've picked up some modern fast movers as well).

I'm active with a group of anime models builders in the area who meet once a month to build and BS and we're always out to promote our niche of the hobby both to anime fans who might like to build models and to your typical IPMS historical modelers.

Our mecha-oriented forum where we share out mecha models and plan our meets is here.:

gamerabaenre_forums

I have a website where I display my works and in-progress explanations as well as a few tutorials. Most of these are mecha-oriented since the mecha-building community as a whole are pretty inexperienced but my decal-design tutorial might be of interest to anyone. There are also links to various mecha communities and web pages for those interested. Here's my site's address:

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Funakatown

I recently won the US leg of the 2010 Bandai Gunpla Model Kit World Cup. This contest works kind of like the old Tamiya-Con where a winner would be flown back to Japan to compete internationally. In this case, I won a trip to Hong Kong, where I was beaten pretty badly since Gundam model-building is much bigger in Asia.

I wrote up a report on my trip there, you can check it out here:

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Gunpla_World_Cup

I hope to learn some more tricks here since there's a much deeper pool of technique and experience here, and also to share a bit of the world of mecha modeling. I'm sure if I could get a few of the masters around here to build a Gundam kit, they could actually compete really well against the best in Asia.

Here's a few of my works, both aircraft and mecha: