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Starting from Gunpla Zero
The hobby shop a long walk down the road from me where I bought a flying model rocket last year contains plenty of other model kits. It shouldn’t be a surprise in this day and age that those kits include “science fiction robots,” and of course a good number of those particular kits are Mobile Suits from Gundam. I had started seeing those kits in other hobby stores years before without this shaking my conviction that my days assembling model kits were now decades in the past. In this store, though, I did notice a particular kit I’ve seen enough about “Gunpla” to understand as a no-tools, no-paint, no-stickers, no-glue endeavour perhaps suitable for the rust-caked returner too. It was also the Strike Gundam from Gundam Seed, and perhaps a sense of defiance in the face of general fan judgement nudged me towards buying it. Of course, defiance can be foolish.
Once I’d bought the kit, though, it did wind up for quite some while on a side shelf next to one of my old Apple IIe computers. The only excuse I can offer is that I don’t have a lot of table space suitable for building a model, and other things kept taking up that space, not including powering up the IIe. If one thought provided the next nudge at last, it could have been supposing this would be something to post about right when I hadn’t finished anything else interesting for a while. As it turned out, I wound up working on the kitchen floor because the light was better there; crouching did get to be a bit of a strain.
Despite the no-tools promise, I had happened on a sort of starter set in the hobby shop with piece clippers and a sanding block. The pieces (molded in five different colours) didn’t need a lot of clipping to come loose, and I did my best to sand off the plastic flaws left from that. One thing I did notice was that this could start marring the rest of the plastic, which I suppose is where paint comes in next. Decades ago I’d brushed on enamel straight from little rectangular vials, seldom in the exact recommended colour, and remembering how that turned out I did start wondering about impressions spray paint gets used today.
The pieces fit together well anyway, and I was a bit impressed with the engineering for all that once I had the Gundam’s head together I had the feeling it wasn’t very large especially compared to the box the runners had all but filled. It took assembling the legs before a certain lanky height developed. I’m familiar with the “Gundam action figures” that managed to get into toy stores over here over twenty years ago during the first big push to “promote the franchise”; the model is about a head taller than them.
A trilingual North American instruction sheet made an effort to provide a first description of Gundam as a whole; it also suggests moving up from “Entry Grade” to “HG” models. At that point I gather it’ll become that much more necessary to start painting, though. If assembling the model pushed me on to anything else straight off, it was looking for the volume of Genshiken where some of the club members assemble their own models.
Once I’d bought the kit, though, it did wind up for quite some while on a side shelf next to one of my old Apple IIe computers. The only excuse I can offer is that I don’t have a lot of table space suitable for building a model, and other things kept taking up that space, not including powering up the IIe. If one thought provided the next nudge at last, it could have been supposing this would be something to post about right when I hadn’t finished anything else interesting for a while. As it turned out, I wound up working on the kitchen floor because the light was better there; crouching did get to be a bit of a strain.
Despite the no-tools promise, I had happened on a sort of starter set in the hobby shop with piece clippers and a sanding block. The pieces (molded in five different colours) didn’t need a lot of clipping to come loose, and I did my best to sand off the plastic flaws left from that. One thing I did notice was that this could start marring the rest of the plastic, which I suppose is where paint comes in next. Decades ago I’d brushed on enamel straight from little rectangular vials, seldom in the exact recommended colour, and remembering how that turned out I did start wondering about impressions spray paint gets used today.
The pieces fit together well anyway, and I was a bit impressed with the engineering for all that once I had the Gundam’s head together I had the feeling it wasn’t very large especially compared to the box the runners had all but filled. It took assembling the legs before a certain lanky height developed. I’m familiar with the “Gundam action figures” that managed to get into toy stores over here over twenty years ago during the first big push to “promote the franchise”; the model is about a head taller than them.
A trilingual North American instruction sheet made an effort to provide a first description of Gundam as a whole; it also suggests moving up from “Entry Grade” to “HG” models. At that point I gather it’ll become that much more necessary to start painting, though. If assembling the model pushed me on to anything else straight off, it was looking for the volume of Genshiken where some of the club members assemble their own models.
