Category: Models

Dinosaur Models!

March 25, 2023

I recently bought and assembled three dinosaur model kits. Collectively they cost me under $40, which is less than a (single) typical model kit that I usually buy.

The first was this Triceratops which seems to be part of a new line they’re calling Plannosaurus. It’s a beginners kit that allows you to build a skeleton or normal version of the beast.

The instructions are in colour and contain lots of information about the dinosaurs presented in a cute style. The kit is easy to make (you assemble the skeleton first, then if you want you put the skin on) and I finished in about half an hour.

I’m assuming this is aimed at kids, so I think that while it’s well-engineered (you barely need nippers or sand paper), I found I had to use glue to get certain pieces of the skin to stay on. Also the stickers were fiddly to attach, and I think kids would get frustrated with them quickly. But it looked great once I finished.

I also got this Tyrannosaurus kit, from the same line as the Triceratops. It’s extremely similar, only as you can see it has more parts since the assembly (and parts) is slightly different depending on whether you build the normal or ‘feathered’ version.

Here’s proof that model kits can be educational! There’s lots of this sort of thing in the instructions 🙂

I chose the ‘non-feathered’ mode since I didn’t want to put the stickers on. I think he looks even better than the Triceratops, and considering the low price I’m very impressed with the quality.

Lastly, I also made this curio: yet another Triceratops skeleton kit (also from Bandai) but made from a new non-plastic material called Limex. This is an environmentally friendly alternative made from calcium, and they’ve only used it for an extremely small amount of recent kits. This kit was extremely inexpensive at only $7!

It’s a trivial skeleton to assemble – it took me maybe 5 minutes – and the material is extremely white and seems very slightly translucent which is why it appears to glow in the photos. I think it’s well suited to a skeleton kit like this one, but I’m not sure Bandai will be switching their Gundams to Limex any time soon.

While these are all fairly simple kits, I think they were great value and for their intended audience of kids I think they’d be a big success. All three of these will go to work and be displayed on a cabinet in my office next to the other dinosaur skeleton kit I made a year or so back (and a shark kit I bought in Japan). Maybe if I get the other two Dino-related kits I’ll make and bring them to work too 🙂

Japan Pickups: Model Kits

January 29, 2023

One category I hoped to refill in Japan was model kits, since I’d built all the ones I had and needed new ones. They’re also usually much cheaper to buy in Japan than in the USA. However I had no particular kits in mind, so what did I find?

This is a stylish female robot kit that was designed for pose-ability. It was manufactured in many different color combinations and I had my pick. I remember seeing this in Australia for about $100 back in June but bought this at Yellow Submarine in Akiba for under $20!

I don’t know the character but I thought the kit was cute and the price – about $8 – was too good to resist. Visiting Japan at new years and taking advantage of the sales turned out to be a good thing!

The Umamusume anime – about horses anthropomorphized as young women – is very popular in Japan right now and there’s loads of merchandise available. Early in the trip I saw this kit in a glass resellers case in Akiba for a too-high price and vowed to find an affordable one. Despite my best attempts searching the many shops that sold new kits I never succeeded (which is weird; why isn’t a Bandai kit available?) but then on the penultimate day found a new one for a great price (about $30) at Akiba Mandarake. This one will be fun to build 🙂

There’s a wide range of Ultraman kits available now, and I’ve already made a half dozen of them. The above was a new release, and a no-brainer pickup at under $20.

Despite the low cost and light weight of these things they take up a fair amount of luggage space! This was one of the reasons we bought a new suitcase in Japan. In total our four suitcases weighed over 140 lbs!

Lastly I found the above on our unexpected last day. It was very cheap, was the only time I’d ever seen it, and it called to me so I got it and found space for it in our already-packed suitcases! Just now I built it:

It only has about 20 pieces including creepy rubbery gums. The mechanism to open the jaw is impressively simple and it works very well. It only took me a (fun) half hour or so to assemble:

This one will go to work and be displayed on a cabinet next to my dinosaur skeleton kit.

LEGO Atari VCS

November 23, 2022

It’s ‘craft week’ this week (kls and I are using the days off to do a lot of craft kits we have), and I decided it was a good time to build this:

It’s the LEGO Atari Video Computer System, or VCS (later renamed the 2600). This kit looks like a remarkable reproduction of the original console only in LEGO, and has a few play features as well.

An immediate nice touch is the retro-style manual. There were about 20 of bags of pieces inside the giant box but as with all LEGO kits these days the bags were all numbered and assembly was easy and a lot of fun. All told it took me about 6-7 hours over two days.

It’s very big! I haven’t checked but it feels about life-sized and once finished it’s much heavier than the NES I made a couple of years ago. It also looks wonderful:

The switches all move, and the two on the right have rubber bands attached to they bounce back up like on the original 2600! This version however has a surprise: you can slide the cover forwards to reveal a nostalgic diorama:

Here’s some detail:

Look at the little me playing 2600 back in 1982 🙂

The controller feels life sized and it astonishingly accurate. The stick even moves (and due to rubber bumpers returns to the vertical position):

And of course the cartridges can be slotted in and out of the console or stored in the little caddy that is part of the set:

And lastly the set includes three small dioramas based on the three included games. These are cute but I would have loved this set even without them:

Overall this is an amazing kit. It looks great, it was great fun to build, and it hit all the nostalgia buttons. The only possible negative is that it’s quite large and I’m not sure where to put it!

With an NES and now a 2600 reproduced in LEGO do you think they’ve got more planned? If I were to make a prediction, I’d guess a first generation Apple Macintosh may be in the cards for a LEGO kit one day…?

Robot Claw