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Archive for the ‘Models’ Category

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 »

Perfect Cell

Saturday, April 6th, 2019

I haven’t posted about a model kit in a while, so here’s the latest I’ve made:

This is a character from Dragonball Z (a Japanese manga) done as a plastic model kit! Here’s the runners showing all the colours:

Much like the recent Miku bust I’d made the instructions were bilingual which I suppose makes the kit more accessible. But as usual the almost-completely pictorial assembly guide made it an easy build despite some tiny pieces.

Notably the kit includes a ‘muscle building’ system which just means his mottled skin is made by overlaying a lighter piece onto the darker background:

The precision is as usual for Bandai – excellent – and this works very well.

The head contains about 20 pieces alone and the final kit probably a couple of hundred:

It’s quite large and very posable, although as usual I chose not to display it in battle mode with energy ball attack.

Overall a fun build that looks great. If I was a bigger DBZ fan I’d certainly buy more from this range.

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Gun Sniper Leena Special

Sunday, April 15th, 2018

I got it into my head that there were too many ‘model assembly’ posts here so cut back on them intentionally. But here I break my own rule because:

1) It’s been a while since I’ve made a ZOID.
2) This kit was a gift from JF.

The kit I refer to is this:

And here are all the pieces before I started assembly:

As usual with these kits, it seemed a bit over engineered, with 3 or 4 pieces going together to form what could have been one. But the quality control was fantastic and although more difficult than your average Gundam everything went together nicely:

Those are the legs and arms, just before I attached them to the rest of the body. It’s ridiculously articulated and I was amazed how well balanced it was:

Here’s the cockpit, complete with tiny pilot:

Yes the orange ‘glass’ canopy opens.

Now I’m no Z.O.I.D. fan (says the guy with 6 pricey kits…) so I can’t give many details about this robot but I can reveal that Gun Snipers are (apparently) semi-autonomous ‘Helic’ ZOIDs created using the ‘Organoid’ system. I’ve no idea who Leena is, but I’m guessing the ‘special’ thing about her ZOID is the ludicrous amount of weaponry it carries.

You see the above shot was only half way through. It took me at least as long again (several hours) to assemble all of the weapons:

Attaching them all to the ZOID itself was no easy task but I managed after a little bit of cursing…

It’s pretty great isn’t it! Here’s an overly-treated scale shot with a LEGO minifig:

Overall a fun build and a spectacular looking kit once complete! Thanks JF!

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The Tiny Arcade

Sunday, February 11th, 2018

Bernard gave me this for Christmas:

It’s a tiny arcade machine. Better yet it’s a kit that needs to be assembled! Here’s what it looked like out of the box:

The critical components are indeed tiny, and fit easily into the palm of my hand:

Here’s the screen being tested:

Assembly of the case was tricky but not difficult, and I actually had more trouble affixing the super-adhesive ‘cabinet art’. Once finished, it’s tiny (about 8 cm tall) and very impressive:

The back is open to access the electronics, which include on/off switches, a plug to charge the battery and a micro SD card port:

The unit runs off an arduino-derived chip (I believe), and supports a tiny OLED screen that is very sharp and bright. There’s several basic games included but to be honest most are little more than tech demos. Amongst clones of Flappy Bird, Tetris, Space Invaders and even R-Type there is however a charming little roguelike by a Japanese dev: