(Translated from the original post on July 20, 2022)

Hello, this is Inaba.

The GR IIIx Urban Edition will be released this weekend.

Just before the release, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about the design.

The distinctive body finish used on the GR IIIx Urban Edition Special Limited Kit released in April and on the GR IIIx Urban Edition standalone this time was first used on the GR III Street Edition. I remember that the process of achieving this finish was very difficult.

There have been many variations of GR special editions in the past, but for the GR III, I immediately decided to use the "street photography" theme and paint the body to look like asphalt, but my intuition told me that it would be difficult.

Up until four or five years ago, there was a wide range of paints in the world that could be used for special treatment. In recent years, however, I have heard from paint manufacturers that there are fewer and fewer specialty paints available due to the increasing number of environmentally friendly and material-oriented products, so I began my personal research before the project began.

This is the first paint sample... Not good at all. At first, I thought that if I made the darker metallic gray paint surface rough, I could get away with it. But it didn't work.

I thought that the only way to do this was to change the painting method, not the paint itself, so I asked the paint manufacturer to create samples using different painting methods.

The inspiration came from the leather-like paint used on SLR camera bodies.

We call the painting technique used in SLR cameras “scatter painting” because the amount of paint scattered is small. To make the body look like leather, the body is filled with paint particles by increasing the amount of paint droplets.

Based on this conventional painting technique, we used metallic paints, which is usually strictly forbidden, and used the same metallic paint for the base coat and the paint to be sprayed, another strictly forbidden method, to approximate the impression of asphalt.

The reason this method is strictly forbidden is that metallic powder would inevitably accumulate, making the area look darker. The asphalt-like texture is created by blackening, which is usually considered a failure, in other words, it is difficult to adjust, but we found that the mix of blackening, the original shine of the metallic and the unevenness of the paint gives a good finish.

Happily ever after... No, not at all. The photo above is a sample of the paint applied to a flat board by hand by a craftsman from the paint manufacturer. The actual mass-produced product will be machine-painted on the factory line, meaning that the hand process will be replaced by a machine to reproduce the painted surface.

I visited the factory many times to ask the paint line engineers to do the impossible. Looking back in the diary, there are records of me saying things like “increase the thickness of the paint film by 3 microns,” which makes me break into a cold sweat, but thanks to their efforts, we were able to successfully deliver the product to you (I appreciate the factory staff for all their hard work).

This paint looks completely different in light and dark places, so I think it matches the impression of asphalt pavement, which looks different depending on sunlight and weather conditions.

Looking at the diary, I was surprised to see that it took us about six months to get to this point.

Finally, as an asphalt-related bonus, the GR IIIx Urban Edition has a background image of asphalt on the exit screen. It is an edited version of asphalt in a snapshot I took of a parking lot.

It may look like a CG at first glance, but I used an actual photo of asphalt, so when you turn off the power, please remember that.

For those of you who will receive your GR IIIx Urban Edition over the weekend or already have one, I would be very happy if you could take a closer look at the body paint and think, “They did it!”

Please take it outside and have fun taking snapshots!

See you soon!

(Inaba)