Making it Gundam Style

A semi review of:

So it's been a long, long time since I've built a Gundam model kit. The newest two I have are from when G Gundam was running on Toonami, so around 2003ish. Needless to say, I haven't done this in a while. I didn't actually set out to buy this model kit initially.

I recently found my old Gundams and added them to the display atop my dresser:

My nerdiness knows no bounds

There was but one problem. My good old Shining Gundam's head appears to be missing (and my Gundam Deathscythe original is pretty unusable too). I couldn't find a suitable replacement for it, so I ordered the Master Grade Shining Gundam off Amazon.

The only problem is, it looks like it's shipping direct from Japan and won't arrive till mid February, but the tools I bought for it got here quickly. I knew my local bookstore had some Gundams so I checked their selection. Now I don't know this particular variant of the Strike Gundam, but Gundam Seed is one of my favorite Gundam series', so I do like the Strike.This appears to be a build fighters variant on it, but it was the only thing they had that was close to what I would know.

So I built this sucker over a few days. I started with all this:

All you have to do is put it together

Needless to say it was a lot of work. After the first day I just had a torso and a head and some shoulders.

If I only had some arms...

If I only had some legs...

The next day things got more interesting...

One, one arm! Ah-ah-ah!

Two, two arms! Ah-ah-ah!

I was finally getting somewhere, though looking back I made a ton of errors at this time, I didn't put the shoulder armor on properly, and missed a part of the arm, something I would discover later. Next I built some legs

You don't have a leg to stand on!

LOL JK

That's better

♫ We are dancing in the space!

weapon madness

Finally getting the Gundam frame together made me pretty happy but I had a long way to go. My next few steps were to make the included stand (thank you Bandai!), and the weapons for this guy. Was quite an interesting run, especially the gun that had some intricate moving parts. This was around the time I started noticing issues, mainly in noticing the sticker sheet was pretty full, and there were more parts than I expected to need to build the backpack and shield. But I'd really notice the issues with the hands - they would swivel pretty wildly and the gauntlets were always pretty loose.


Turns out I was missing some arm and shoulder parts. Something I was finally able to remedy once I noticed them, which allowed the backpack to peg in, and made the hands much more stable.

surprise!

I got my model supplies at this point, up till then I was using my kitchen scissors to get at the parts. The box to the supplies was trashed, but at least I had nicer tools to do this with (which should really help when I upgrade from 1/144 scale high grade to 1/100 scale master grade). Building the backpack from there was pretty simple, and the final piece ended up looking great!

one sexy bastard

So, with that all out of the way, do I recommend building this model kit? It was fun and if it looks like something you'd like I'd say go for it, it was a nice refresher for me for an old skill I haven't used in a long time - in some ways easier than I remember it, though the real test will be on the larger size master grade. Still, I'm quite happy keeping this guy protecting my Masters of the Universe Classics Castle Grayskull.