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Archive for the ‘Models’ Category

Not-LEGO UFO

Thursday, July 10th, 2025

Bernard generously sent me the above: a Tuomo brick-building kit of a UFO. Tuomo is a competitor to LEGO, and a well-reviewed one as well. Let’s build the kit and see how it is!

Much like LEGO, the pieces are separated into bag groups, numbered 1 through 3. These correspond to steps in the instruction book, to make assembly more streamlined.

The instruction book was in a bit of a state since it seemed to have been shoved into the box after all the bags. This has never happened with a LEGO kit, which usually protects its instructions in a cardboard envelope. Happily the book wasn’t damaged, just folded.

The instructions included steps with many more pieces than the average LEGO kit. I’m in the camp that believes LEGO has gone too far in recent years as far as dumbing-down instructions so I think this is actually a plus. It reminds me of LEGO instructions from my youth.

The pieces are the same size and look and feel like LEGO. The vast majority of the pieces in this particular kit are identical to LEGO pieces, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they all are. I could only detect two obvious differences: the ‘grip’ of the pieces seems stronger than LEGO, and of course they don’t have the LEGO logo on them!

The kit includes some metallic silver pieces. I’m sure LEGO have these, but I can’t remember seeing any (aside from little coins in the castle kits). I can’t tell if these are painted or cast with metallic plastic, but they look good and you can even see my reflection in the curved one.

There are no stickers, which is a massive positive. LEGO claims stickers keep costs down, but this kit has about twenty printed pieces and is much less expensive than LEGO.

It includes a light brick, which is turned on by twisting the top. The LED and battery seem to be sealed inside the brick and not replaceable, but I believe this is true for LEGO versions now as well (like the flame in the medieval blacksmith kit).

And lastly before I get to the assembly, the instructions contained a single error. You’ll see it asks for three corner bricks with a diagonal face, but the bags actually contained two normal corners and only one with the cut face. The diagram itself matched the bricks provided, so it was just the bricks listed in the blue box that were wrong, but it was an error regardless.

This could potentially be confusing for a builder, but I’ll forgive it since the diagram is clear and I’ve had LEGO kits with errors in instructions as well.

The base is built first. Previously in these Chinese brick kits I’ve seen things like woeful instructions, poor structural integrity or questionable engineering but this was solid, easy to put together and rests flat on the table. I’ll say this again, but if I didn’t know otherwise I’d just assume this was LEGO.

I didn’t take a lot of photos of the saucer assembly, but I found the design ingenious especially the ring that held the top and bottom halves together. This is a hidden-stud model, which means the top and bottom halves are inverted, and I was impressed by how this was achieved in a relatively small model.

Notably the kit has no minifig. While LEGO no longer has a copyright on the brick designs, they do on minifigures, which is why the competitors either have different figures or omit them entirely. The alien in this kit is made of sixteen pieces, but I believe the model would be better with an alien minifig in the cockpit.

And here’s the final product! The saucer sits on top of the ‘tractor beam’ and the light brick is underneath the saucer and easy to turn on or off.

And here’s what it looks like with the light on. I’ve placed my only minifig inside to show scale, and I think you’ll agree it looks fairly good.

This is a well-designed model, was fun to build and looks good made. This is by far the best LEGO competitor I’ve ever built, although it feels weird to call it that since the pieces are essentially identical. I don’t remember exactly how much this cost but I know it’s significantly less than were it an actual LEGO product, which is another positive. In short, this is essentially LEGO with a different name.

This is another example of why LEGO is under increasing pressure from these competitors, and why their prices are increasingly eye-opening as these competitors become more widely distributed. And as good as this particular mode is, I’ve read that another LEGO competitor makes an even higher-quality product so I’ve bought one of theirs and you’ll see it here as well one day.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Models, Toys | 5 Comments »

30 Minutes Fantasy

Tuesday, July 8th, 2025

Bandai has a new series of model kits out called ’30 Minutes Fantasy’. They are inexpensive, fantasy-themed, and they don’t take long to assemble. But the big gimmick is they are modular, and can be modified to create different fantasy-themed character classes.

I bought the above in Japan, and (for a model kit) it was very cheap at only ¥2100. As you can see it’s a knight, and part of the ‘Liber’ nation. I believe these are the good guys, with the other nation (‘Rosen’) being the bad ones. There’s an elaborate story behind the series, involving a ruined Earth and mechs using elemental magic and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if an RPG is being developed.

The lore goes deep with elements and jobs (the Japanese term for ‘classes’) and as you can see this knight is a starter class, at rank I. But it’s still a class, and much like any other RPG there’s a level below, in this case called a ‘silhouette’. Assembly of the kit begins with making the silhouette.

There’s a lot of runners for such a cheap kit! If you’ve made any humanoid model kits before you’ll notice how much simpler this one is, including no ‘under gate’ pieces and the lack of stickers or decals. I’ve made loads of kits, and I’m here to say that yes, the silhouette did indeed take me under 30 minutes:

In D&D parlance, the above is the ‘level 0’ equivalent character. The peasant that hasn’t adventured yet. The young man or woman about to join the army (fighter) or enroll in the magic academy (mage) or dedicate themselves to a pious life in the local religion (priest). Of course the big difference is this is a mech, but you get the idea.

For such a simple kit it’s very posable, and of course there are several different hands depending on what you want to do with it. But it’s also fairly generic, which is unsurprising since it’s the basis of all other classes. So let’s change its job!

Since I bought the knight kit, it came with the knight armor, and as you can see from the above pic the first step is to remove a handful of parts from the silhouette build. You then go through about 10 minutes of further assembly attaching the knight armor, until it looks like this:

It looks great for such an inexpensive and easy-to-build model kit! I don’t paint my models, and I feel this guy looks good enough without it. It’s very posable and holds the sword/shield well.

You can also see it’s got some obvious holes and slots as well. In Japan I saw impressively assembled and painted examples that had gems in a few of these empty holes, but I’m not sure if that was a custom job or if you can buy the gem pieces. Regardless, the holes are there for upgrades into higher level classes, such as these two shown in the instructions:

The advanced class armors are available in upgrade kits (for under $10) and once you own a silhouette you can change it into as many classes as you buy upgrades for. There seems to be about a dozen available now, and knowing Bandai many more are on their way. I don’t think I’m going to get many of these, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen based on this knight I’ve made.

And I’ve also got this bishop kit, which is another silhouette with two (Class I and II) upgrades included 🙂

Posted in Models, Otaku | No Comments »

Berserker Armor Guts

Wednesday, May 7th, 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 🙂

Posted in Crafts, Models, Otaku | Comments Closed

Robo Chan Man

Sunday, September 8th, 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 🙂

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Cardboard R2

Friday, August 2nd, 2024

Bernard sent me this:

It’s a cardboard R2-D2 model kit! Here’s what was inside:

Six cardboard runners with pieces, an instruction book, and a tiny tube of glue (which I never used). It also includes a cardboard tool to assist in assembly, which is fairly useless (I used tweezers myself).

The model is assembled by punching out the pieces and putting them together using a tab/slot system. Most pieces have slots that need to be punched out, and this can be a little tedious since some of the slots are too small and need to be enlarged before use. Some pieces are scored to bend, and this works better than I expected. I had actually purchased a different kit from the same manufacturer before and assembly was a nightmare, so I was nervous.

The initial steps included a lot of framework and placement of curved pieces. Unlike the other kit I mostly failed on, this all went together surprisingly well and in a couple of hours I had finished the main body.

The legs were a lot more finicky, and there may have been some cursing trying to get all the pieces together well. Once or twice I had to cut off tabs since (curved) pieces didn’t go together correctly, but I was able to do this in a way that was transparent to the final version.

After about 6 carefree hours I’d finished the four main sections, and it was time to put them together. This was also a bit nerve-wracking, since the potential for damage seemed high. But my worry was premature, and this final step was almost effortless.

And here he is! Doesn’t he look great? He’s about a foot tall and surprisingly sturdy considering he’s cardboard. As I said I didn’t use glue, but everything is together tightly and I don’t feel I need to be fragile moving him around.

Here he is compared to the two of my other recent R2 pickups: a Lego version and a vintage action figure.

Overall this kit gets a resounding thumbs up. As it turns out when Bernard sent it to me I had already purchased one myself, and I’ll therefore be sending him back one so he can make it for himself.

As for mine, I could just put him on the shelf, or in my office… or I could set him on fire and post dramatic photos on this blog! Let me know in the comments which is preferred?