Category: Crafts

Candy Making Sunday!

October 19, 2025

We bought seven candy-making kits on recent trips and it’s time to make them all. I’ll cover one a day for the next week.

I’ve made Kracie brand kits before on this blog, but not this one which is traditional Japanese ‘fair food’. This one hasn’t been released in the USA so I had to rely on a translator to understand the instructions, but there wasn’t any complex steps so this was arguably not even necessary.

The above shows the contents of the box, and as usual for such kits everything begins in powder form and is mixed with water in the provided trays.

The powders are usually white and odorless and when you add water they take on their final colour and the smell (usually fruit) comes out. This is the candy apple base, which was then added to molds to make the apples.

The banana base was similar, although while the apples were fluid and had to set for a while (to become gummy) the banana material was plastic and sticky. All the other parts of the candies were made using similar means.

Here’s the finished product. If you compare this to the photo on the box you’ll note the grilled corn looks very different from the packaging! This is because the little candy pieces didn’t adhere to the base material. The rest looks good if I do say so myself, and ended up closely resembling the box photos.

The shaved ice (which was fizzy!) and corn (melon flavour) tasted best while the apples and bananas – while not bad – were not as good. The apples had a strange ‘grainy gummy’ texture which was a bit disagreeable, but the shaved ice bore an astonishing resemblance to actual ice!

Overall this was a fun platter of ‘food’ to make and tasty to eat so this kit (as with most Kracie kits) gets two thumbs up.

Berserker Armor Guts

May 7, 2025

I recently assembled the above model kit. It appealed to me not just because it’s a character from a manga I love, but because it’s designed to not require painting and has a cloth cape!

This is a Kotobukiya kit which means it’s got a slightly different design approach to Bandai, and from experience kits from this company are a little more finicky and difficult to assemble.

Appropriately, I used my new ‘GodHand’ nippers to make this kit. I bought these during the last Japan trip, and they cost more than a typical model kit! They are designed to produce a clean cut from the runners, which minimizes sanding and cleanup. They work very well, and I should have purchased a pair years ago.

There were no stickers and a tiny amount of pre painted pieces, but aside from these and the sword blade…

…everything else is black. This proved a bit problematic during assembly, since it was sometimes difficult to see the tabs and holes on the tiny pieces. Some parts are also very sharp, and I almost cut myself once or twice!

Overall I’d say assembly was a bit frustrating and a bit difficult compared to the average Bandai model. Aside from the reasons already mentioned, I was surprised to see some pieces required rotations when you assembled them, and others even required glue! The joints are also very stiff, and I even broke a wrist joint during assembly although the kit seems to consider this a possibility since the runner contained extras.

Here he is finished sans cape and sword arm. Incidentally – and unlike Bandai – the instructions contain no English.

The cape looks great and is threaded with wire to make it poseable, but it was a massive challenge to actually get it correctly on to the figure. A sort of collar device is supposed to lock it into place, but despite Herculean effort I never managed to get it working as the instructions suggested, so my cape is a bit ragged around his neck.

What’s interesting is while this is a model kit, once assembled it feels like an action figure. The seams are all but invisible in the black, and the stiff joints and excessive possibility mean you can display Guts into all the usual poses, including the crouching one I’m leaving him in.

And although it’s a kit (or action figure) once posed it looks like a statue, and will look nice on display. This may have been frustrating to make, and a little pricey, but I’m happy with it 🙂

Robo Chan Man

September 8, 2024

While I actively still buy and make model kits, I rarely blog them these days. This one is a bit different though, so let’s look at it:

It’s a Bandai kit from the early 1980s called ‘Robo Chan Man’. I believe this particular kit is based on a kids cartoon of the time, probably forgotten now.

I found this at an antique store in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t very expensive, and I was surprised it was intact and unmade after 40 years.

It’s a small and simple kit, but you can see it includes a screwdriver, screw and a pull-back motor.

The plastic is thicker and more brittle than what Bandai uses today, and it’s almost impossible to easily get rid of the cut lines when the pieces were removed from the runners. As you can see it’s also two-colour only, and while it is snap-together, it obviously needs painting to look ‘good’.

There’s the finished kit. It has very minimal articulation, and the girl (called ‘Patty’ apparently) is just a single solid figure.

With his legs up he can be pulled back and released, at which point he rolls around with surprising speed! I can’t show that here so I’ll illustrate with a photo of the manual:

It’s difficult to find information about this kit online, but it seems it was one of many including some based on larger properties like Gundam. Here’s a photo I found of five of them including the one I made:

I wonder how many of these kits still exist? Mine is made now, so there’s at least one less. It’s simple and unsophisticated but this was a fun look back at the early days of Bandai model kits 🙂

Robot Claw