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Death Stinger

Saturday, February 29th, 2020

With my birthday fast approaching I figured it was time to catch up on old birthday gifts… like this guy:

That’s a silly-big model kit of a robot scorpion ZOID! Do I know anything about ZOIDs? Not really, but they look cool and this is one of the coolest. I got this kit for my birthday 2 (?) years ago and dedicated myself to completing it before this birthday. So I did!

The box is massive. Here’s what was inside:

So many runners! So many pieces! And yet the instruction manual wasn’t the biggest I’d seen in a kit, mostly since there’s a lot of repetition.

Assembly wasn’t particularly difficult, but took me 4 weekends working maybe 5 hours at a time. As I reach my dotage I find that my developing arthiritis tends to make these tasks a little trickier, and Kotobukiya kits are harder than Bandai ones because they don’t shy away from very small pieces and complex connections.

Luckily I had assistance to help with the complex bits:

I’ll spare you the interim photos and get right to the finished piece:

It’s impressive isn’t it? It’s also quite massive; easily the biggest kit I’ve assembled. I’d say it’s about 10 inches from front to back (with the tail folded up) and wider than my outstretched palm. There’s an insane amount of articulation: not only do all the limbs and guns move but you can even open lots of the flaps and vents (probably to emulate cooling systems) which can make it even bigger than it is here. Here’s the scorpion head when you open up the head armour:

It was a lot of fun to build and looks great in our glass cabinet. I wouldn’t recommend this kit though since it’s a) way too expensive and b) not ideal for a beginner. If you like the look of ZOIDs start with a smaller kit, or even better a toy version since those are much less pricey.

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Lunar Module

Sunday, November 24th, 2019

As soon as I saw the above in the LEGO store window I had to have it.

It was built in three stages; the lunar surface first:

Of course I had ‘help’ 🙂

The descent stage was next, and was a lot of fun to build including a lot of ‘metallic’ parts.

It also contains lots of little details, including a tiny model laser reflector, which I often use in examples during one of my lectures!

The finished Lunar Module:

It’s a fantastic kit, and one of the most fun LEGO builds I’ve ever done. I give this my highest LEGO score 🙂

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Scaredy Cats

Sunday, September 29th, 2019

Time for more craft! This time, a house for our beasts:

This thing is a Target exclusive and apparently quite popular. KLS snagged the last one from our local store.

It’s a simple cardboard kit held together with double sided tape. It’s well designed and easy to make. As I did, Emi was watching attentively:

As you can see the floor (and roof) are cardboard pickers. Emi particularly loves these, so it’s not surprising she was excited.

It took maybe 10 minutes to assemble, and it didn’t take long for Emi to show interest:

But then, a challenger appears:

And then after a couple of fuzzy slaps (from both parties) Zoffy moved in:

And since then the house seems to have become hers:

This cute little abode will remain in our living room for a long time and will no doubt switch owners many times. But I wonder how long it will take for them to notice they can sit on the roof as well? 🙂

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Ultraman [B Type]

Tuesday, August 27th, 2019

The new Ultraman series on Netflix is fantastic. It adapts the recent manga which has updated the series for the modern era whilst not rejecting the past, and in my opinion succeeds tremendously.

When I first learned of it I was wary of one of the major aspects: the combat suits. Ultraman was no longer a being, but a human in a suit. However – and without giving anything away – by the end of the first season I loved the suits, and happily and eagerly picked up the two model kits recently put out by Bandai.

That’s the first one. It was a little pricey compared to a Gundam, but it’s a very high quality kit with a very nifty feature.

This is not a beginners kit. The metallic gray is painted on, which means cutting from the runners leaves white (the colour of the underlying plastic) edges that need to be cleaned up. There’s also a lot of tricky-to-remove tabs on the red pieces that require a lot of patience. Cleverly Bandai has designed the kit to hide almost all of these after assembly but I needed a silver paint pen to fix a few spots.

Secondly the kit has a lot of stickers that in some cases were fiddly to attach. I’m not a great fan of stickers, but found them particularly unusual in this case since they were the same colours as the runners. We’re this a higher-priced kit I suppose the stickers would have just been extra pieces, and I don’t know why the cheaper Dragonball kits can do this level of detail sans stickers but this one couldn’t?

That said – and despite occasionally interference from a fuzzy thief – assembly wasn’t difficult and it looked great once finished:

As usual I was happy with just the figure, but there’s a lot of Ultraman’s various energy (‘specium’ to be precise) weapons that can be assembled and attached. But even without any accessories this kit is special for an extra feature; a first for one of my kits:

He has lights! His eyes and chest light up, and the chest can be set to blue or red. It looks incredibly good, and the simplistic but effective interior design (with light pipes and a sticker-mirror running from an LED unit) is charming.

An amazing kit therefore. He looks and can be posed like a high-end action figure, but he was assembled from scratch. I can’t wait to make the other one 🙂

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Two Ptimo Kits

Sunday, May 12th, 2019

While in Japan back in January I picked this up:

It’s a weird superdeformed Hatsune Miku model kit that I previously didn’t even know existed. Even better it was only about $20! Today I made it.

So far so good, lots of pieces in many colours. However I immediately noticed that the runners were all single colour, that the plastic was somewhat brittle and that there was a frankly unacceptable amount of flash on many pieces:

I usually make kits by Bandai (Gundam) or Kotobukiya (ZOIDS, Frame Arm Girls) and the QC on those kits is so high that I can’t recall ever seeing flash. Furthermore they have multicoloured runners, pieces made of all sorts of plastic (or even rubber or metal) and everything goes together perfectly.

Here, not so much. Assembly was tricky and at times difficult, seams were often visible and due to the brittle plastic a few pins even broke off when I tried to attach pieces. But I soldiered on and in a couple of hours had mostly finished:

Look at those tiny legs! The kit didn’t come with a stand and while I initially assumed the hair would function as some sort of standing mechanism this wasn’t the case. In short, she can’t stand at all and even though she looks ok complete she’s definitely supported by the books in this photo:

Yes she’s cute, even unpainted. But it was a frustrating build, and not half as good as the other Miku kit I made a while ago. But I have to say assembly was fun, if only because I had a helper…

So Ptimo was a bit second-rate compared to the (admittedly far more expensive) other kits I usually buy. Would I recommend them? No. Would I buy Ptimo again? Well… it turns out I already had:

Yes this was another Japan pickup, and yes it is (incredibly) a Rilakkuma model kit! It was newer and more expensive than Miku. Here’s the parts:

Unfortunately this kit had the same flaws as Miku, especially in ease of assembly. Kuma’s head in particular stubbornly resisted going together seamlessly and of course once completed he was incredibly difficult to stand unaided:

But they look great don’t they?!? Though it was a fiddly kit to make, with frustrating imperfections, I’ve got to say I’m happy with them both for the uniqueness. Overall the better of the two kits.

Lastly, speaking of Miku kits, I also in Japan bought the astonishing Frame Arm Miku kit (on the actual day of release no less). This will be my next build and assuming it doesnt disappoint you can look forward to seeing it here…

Posted in Crafts, Miscellaneous, Models, Otaku, Toys | 1 Comment »

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