Super Model

After seeing these in the hobby shop display cabinets a few times, we thought we'd give a try at building our own model kit. Thought it would be a good picture taking opportunity with a review of sorts.

There are a virtual infinite number of models to get. During the search, somewhere between "not cool enough looking", "why does this cost so much money", and "okay how much time do we really want to spend on this" we settled on this character here for $30. A quick Internet search says this character is Fumina Hoshino from Gundam Build Fighters: Battlogue.

How's putting together a model kit? Click on the "Read more" below!

After opening the box, it looked like we might be in trouble. Look at all of those pieces! What have we gotten ourselves into here?

Oh, yeah. I guess there should be some sort of instruction sheet. That's a lot of stuff to read. Ain't nopony got time for that!

Good thing we already have some clipping pliers. Because it looks like you kind of need them.

Oh, wow. This looks like it's a lot. About now we start to appreciate normal packaged figures that are already put together a whole lot more.

So the "sheets" of plastic are labeled, and the parts all have numbers by them. So it shouldn't be too hard as long as we are careful.

We thought it was funny that this is the first part you put together. My friend says "Done! That's the only part we need!" Haha he's only joking but it does make a funny thing to joke about.

It's going a little slower than we thought, due to the pieces being so similar between the left and right arms and such. We want to make extra sure she's not put together backwards.

The eyes are stickers applied to this piece and then put into the head. It comes with an extra piece and stickers so you can use different eye "looks" without too much trouble. There are super tiny eyeliner stickers, too.

We did pretty good with the eye stickers and it was a lot better than having to paint them on. There's a lot of margin for error here so we guess it might be the most difficult part of the whole thing for some people.

We had an extra-sharp knife to trim the "flash" connection things. Where you break it off of the panel and you can see the remaining bit of plastic like on the upper part of this leg piece. I should probably mention somewhere that this is a no-glue-needed type of model, the pieces snap together snuggly.

Fast-forward to a few hours later, and she'd done! We realized we were extra-extra careful which is why it took so long. With a little more experience it probably wouldn't take as much time.

There's a bunch of this leftover. There were a few extra hands as fists we were sure not to throw away.

Did we mention her armor all comes off? Looks like it was heavy I'm sure she feels a lot better now. Notice the Robot head which was hiding on her backpack.

The armor pieces re-assemble into a tiny SD Mecha! SD stands for "Super Deformed" and basically means "Big-Head and Adorable."

She's got a lot of joints for movement and is pretty pose-able. Give Minty a hug!

It's a lot of effort to un-assemble and re-assemble the armor pieces. And it feels both fragile and sturdy at the same time, if that makes any sense. I think we are just being too careful.

Overall a pretty fun experience. We originally thought we'd get some paint and try to paint this, but it's got stickers on it and already looks finished enough. If you've got a display cabinet with some extra space, maybe you could try one yourself.