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Another Robot Dinosaur

Sunday, June 28th, 2015

It was time once again to reach to my giant pile of unmade plastic model kits and remove another for assembly. The lucky kit this time was:

Another ZOID! I’d bought this kit about a year ago after falling in love with the design, but I was a bit daunted due to it’s size (easily the biggest model kit box I’d ever seen). But I’m no amateur! Here’s what I found inside:

That so many pieces right there, somewhere over 700 divided amongst an astonishing 47 different runners in at least 9 different colours! This would be a fun build…

There’s an in-progress shot. I used the same old tools I always have, only this time kept a bottle of glue handy just in case. In theory I wouldn’t need it since this was a snap-together kit. The ipad you can see played mostly Amiga or ZX Spectrum longplays off Youtube while I assembled, which was done in approximately 2-3 hour sections over a period of about 6 weeks. As with most kits of this type assembly is done in sections: head, breast, torso, legs and lastly weapons.

Here’s the completed head:

Menacing isn’t it! The mouth opens and closes, the spines on the crest and lower gun are posable and the entire upper half of the head opens to reveal the cockpit (the driver looks out through the green glass eyes). Very quickly I learned that this was no beginners kit and I needed to take things slowly, and a few steps during the head construction were technically difficult. The whole thing took maybe 90 minutes and contained an amazing 71 individual pieces!

The breast and torso were next, and a real pain at times. The kit is designed to a very high level of precision, and there is little ‘wiggle room’ for the sections when they all come together. Joints are quite tight, and some even lock together when you put the pieces in. This means you need to pay very close attention during assembly since it can be challenging to take pieces apart if you make a mistake.

I managed to avoid any major problems during assembly, but if you look closely at the completed breast section above, you’ll see two flexible pipes protruding out the back. These would eventually connect to the torso section once they are combined, but (since the instructions are all worded in Japanese) I did not notice they had to be trimmed from their original length to precisely 87 mm and had to do a bit of disassembly to fix this after the fact 🙂

The front and rear legs are both made in pairs (left and right being reflections of each other) and were the most fun parts of the kit to assemble. Each are highly articulated and at the same time look very stocky. Each of the two legs shown in the above picture have 45 pieces in them.

This particular ZOID is (apparently) a heavy weapons platform (almost literally) and the weapons are the last part of the assembly. From the left you see some sort of beam weapon (let’s call it a ‘linear wave motion cannon’), some sort of mass driver projectile weapon and a conventional chain gun. The mount on the lower right connects the weapons platform electronically to the cockpit. Often in kits like this the weapons are a bit of an afterthought, each consisting of a few pieces and mostly secondary to (and in some cases not even attached to) the main figure.

Not so here! Weapon assembly is a full quarter of the instructions, and they are just as complex and have just as many parts as the main kit sections. The wave motion cannon for instance (big grey thing, lower left) is articulated in three places, and contains an amazing 37 pieces.

Here is ‘Dark Horn Harry Special’ once he is all finished and assembled:

Another shot showing scale:

All told I’d say it took me about 10-12 hours to assemble, and was one of the most finicky and difficult kits of its type I have ever made. 99.9% of the joints were snapped-together; I only ever used one single tiny drop of glue. Perhaps due to the challenge – and certainly the design – I immensely enjoyed making this kit, and think he looks great on my bookshelf where he will now live.

Next though I think I’ll move onto something a bit easier. Didn’t I have a HG Gundam somewhere in that big pile of unmade models…

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The 30 year old Zoid

Thursday, May 14th, 2015

A few weeks back I went to a local convention and bought this:

I’m sure I don’t have to explain why, but in case you’re having a senior moment…

This, my friends, is a Zoid. Specifically from the series called ‘Robo Strux’, which were the US Zoid rereleases from 1985. Zoids are robot animals (often dinosaurs or predatory cats) and I’ve always liked their design. As a child we were too poor for me to ever own one, but I’ve been remedying that in recent years! I was agog to see such an old one for sale at my local con, and my agog-level doubled when I discovered it was unmade. A quick ebay search told me his price (at which I first baulked) was low, so I snapped it up. I was a very happy man that day.

Unquestionably the value of this product was mostly due to the fact it was still unmade and almost complete (only the sticker sheet was missing). Were I a fanatical collector, I would have put it somewhere safe and been happy in the knowledge I owned it. But I bought it to make it, and this past weekend I did. Here’s what was inside the box:

And this was between the pages of the manual:

So it was purchased in NYC back in March 1987, almost certainly for $9.99. That’s about $21.50 in todays money. Which is much less than I paid 🙂

The basic construction of the kits is remarkably similar to today’s models. There were several runners, molded in 5 different colours. It was snap together, and very easy to assemble with only cutters and a file (to remove the flash). However since the model is motorized and the legs need to move, some pieces were loose against each other and held on by interesting rubber caps:

Even after 30 years, the rubber was still perfectly pliable.

As a kit designed for children, there weren’t nearly as many pieces as one of the ‘High Grade Master Model’ kits I’ve been buying recently, but there were still enough to make it interesting and fun. The design was very clever, especially of the legs. Here he is the first time he was able to stand up:

Assembly took me about an hour, and was great fun. I wish the dude at the con had had more of these buggers for sale!

And here he is finished:

Oooh! Dangerous and mighty he looks, but Gordox (or more correctly Gordos) is apparently a specialized command unit more useful for his long-range sensor and communications than his offensive abilities.

He’s also a bit slow…

Isn’t he cute!

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Sniper Girl

Sunday, April 26th, 2015

I’m a big fan of the Etrian Odyssey game series. Not only are the games fine examples of the first-person dungeon crawl genre, but they have wonderful graphics, due in no small part to the character designs of artist Yuji Himukai.

Here is his design for the female ‘sniper’ character from the first game in the series:

Therefore you can imagine my delight when Kotobukiya released this model kit:

Figure kits are rare, so I eagerly bought this one when it came out. Last week I assembled it. Here’s what was in the box:

So many colors of plastic! So much detail on the pieces! Even before I pulled the runners out of the bags I was impressed.

Very quickly it was clear this was a god-tier kit. The engineering of the pieces was superb, and almost no trimming or sanding was required. Everything snapped together tightly, but articulation of the joints was perfect. The balance was also incredible, quite an achievement considering her tiny feet!

She was very easy to put together, and on top of the ease was a lot of fun. It took me maybe 2 hours only to finish her. Although she’s on the base in these shots, she can actually stand unsupported:

There is some customization decisions to be made. She can have her goggles on or around her neck, she can hold the bow by her side or in a firing position with arrow cocked, and she can have one of four faces:

Here’s the face I chose:

She looks a little tsundere 🙂

Another shot of my finished ‘sniper girl’:

And here she is in her new home on the shelf:

This is a very impressive kit. It’s inexpensive (about $30), easy and fun to make, and she looks great. Highly recommended.

(She also has a sister kit – the ‘Imperial Girl’ – which I also bought and will make one day)

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Strandbeest Rhino

Sunday, March 29th, 2015

At the risk of turning this blog into a “look what model kit I made this week” list… I got this curious thing for my birthday the other week:

It’s a model of a ‘Strandbeest’, which is a type of wind-propelled walking sculpture made by Dutch artist Theo Jansen. You can read more about his creations here. His ‘beests’ are massive and insanely complex, but this model kit reproduces a smaller version of one of them using the same principles.

Here’s what it looked like before assembly:

Everything looked clean and relatively simple; a nice departure from some other kits I have made recently.

Assembly was very quick. Each of the twelve legs have only 6 pieces that snapped together tightly with very little effort. The instructions are very clear, the pieces easy to remove from the runners and everything fits together perfectly. This is a very well engineered kit.

That’s a shot of the first two legs showing the crankshaft and drive-rod mechanism. It’s very clever how everything fits together and still has a very large range of movement.

That’s six legs attached. One half of the kit is complete!

And there’s the finished guy! In theory, when wind turns the fan propeller on the top, a gearing mechanism will turn the crank shaft and make it walk along. It’s complex but very simple mechanically, and it only took about an hour to assemble (with no glue or tools). But does it walk…?

Here’s the proof:

Not bad is it!

The actual rhino strandbeest was much bigger and could actually carry people inside. It weighed 3.2 tonnes, and is now a permanent (immobile) sculpture in a pond in Amsterdam. Here’s a photo that was taken the day it walked on an abandoned runway in the Netherlands:

As it turns out I actually received two (different) strandbeest kits for my birthday. I think the other one will patiently wait for a while 🙂

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Mortar Headd Engage

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

I received this model kit for Christmas from my brother:

I’d always been a fan of the design of the mecha in this series, but this was the first time I would build a kit. It’s made by a company called Wave, who I’ve never made a kit from before. I planned to do the best I could, since I wanted to get it looking as much like the photo on the packaging as possible.

Here’s the contents of the box:

Two things stood out: firstly it had water-applied decals (yikes!) and secondly this was not a snap-together kit. The latter was unusual, since the kits I’ve made by Bandai or Kotobukiya are snap-together and have been for many years. I had thought that kits that needed gluing were restricted to military-style models, and this is certainly the first mecha kit I’ve made that has needed glue (in 15 or so years).

I briefly started with some crappy glue I just happened to have on hand before buying this stuff:

It’s very fluid – like water – and does an extremely good job. Recommended if you want to make a plastic model kit.

The Mortar Headd is assembled in 7 stages which will be put together at the end. You start with the body and waist, and very quickly I found that this was no beginners model. Parts were designed to be movable even after assembly, and very often the assembly itself was fiddly (even irritating) and required very precise glue application:

It was also apparent that they didn’t go together as perfectly as it seemed they should. I’m not sure if this was a molding or design issue, but sometimes there were hairline gaps between pieces (even after gluing) or they didn’t match together quite right. Some of the piece design was questionable as well and seemed only to increase the piece count. For instant there were cases where tabs (to insert into other pieces) were glued on separately rather than molded, or when obvious single pieces had been split into two for no apparent reason. This leg for example has about 40 individual pieces in it and was a real pain to assemble:

Before I get to the end comments, I invite you to speculate as to how easily this kit may stand given the design of those feet? 🙂

The hands were particularly bothersome. You are given a choice of eight different styles (per hand) with many different pieces from which to assemble them. Unlike most other kits of this type, rather than simply make one articulated hand you’re supposed to choose which weapon or position you want the kit to have and then pick the appropriate hand for it. This would be ok in theory if
1) The hands were easy to switch (which they absolutely aren’t), and
2) The hands actually held the weapons they are supposed to (again, they don’t)
So one of the final steps – making and fitting the hands – ends up being one of the most frustrating.

Building the kit took many hours. This was because the pieces were tiny, needed a lot of cleaning up (the connections to the runners were often positioned poorly) and because the glue – while very good – had particularly strong fumes which necessitated working in small periods 🙂

But eventually the pieces were all together, and it was time to assemble the final product. Here’s a shot pre=assembly:

And here he is about thirty very frustrating minutes later:

During assembly the head, hands and part of the waist broke. I was able to fix the head and waist, but the thumb on the hand broke cleanly off (not along the glue line) so he ended up thumbless. All these breaks occurred because of the force required to attach the limbs via ball-and-socket joints. Again, I attribute this to poor design. It would have been vastly better (a la the Gundam model) to built a skeleton first them put the armor on afterwards.

You can see he’s still unfinished. It was time for those pesky water-applied decals:

Putting them on wasn’t so bad, but it turns out they aren’t quite the same technology as I remember from my youth. To be specific, there is no adhesive in the decal binder anymore, and surface tension is not enough to hold them on to the model when the water dries. You are supposed to apply a binding agent both before and afterwards, which ‘melts’ the decal plastic onto the kit. I had no idea of this, and was quite surprised when they all started flaking off shortly after application!

But I snapped a few photos first. Here he is post-decal and with some (unimpressive) detailing using a Gundam marker. Even between these shots you may notice some decals have come off:

Don’t be fooled by him standing. It took forever to balance him and if I even thought at him the wrong way he fell over!

As you can see he’s nowhere near as impressive as the packaging, since he obviously requires a lot of detailed paintwork to look perfect. I’m happy enough with how he ended up though, given the frustrations and difficulties I had with the kit!

Last word: if you’re after a robot model kit, avoid Wave! Go with Kotobukiya (incredibly complex and detailed snap-together kits) or Bandai (slightly simpler but no less impressive snap-togethers), both of which produce easier-to-assemble models that are technically more impressive than this one.

If only Kotobukiya would get the FSS license…

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