Much Ado About Everything

Since I got into Gundam Seed (Destiny) I decided to take advantage of my friend’s frequent visits to Richmond toy stores to tag along and get me a model of Gudam. Freedom Gundam that is piloted by Kira Yamato, of course – what else? I finished it in less than 3 hours, and while it looks good it’s not perfect by any means. I can easily see one spending days in using files and probably touch-up paint to hide places where plastic was cut to separate parts from the frame they’re shipped on. And then a fair bit of time painting everything that needs painting (of which there’s lots), down to meticulous detail. If you get one of the bigger $100+ models, that’s certainly what you should be doing, but this small model comes with most critical parts already in desired colours. For a few other parts, where a monolythic part with a weird shape (such as shield or antennas) needs to be painted with several different colors, they provided decals – and that’s the part I did worst. If you’re building a big gundam (master or perfect edition?), I’d imagine there would be no decals but it’d be all left to you to paint. In my model guns and sabers are not painted and there are no decals for them either – though actually you could set up the model so that all those parts missing paint are either not there or are not visible. At any rate, $50 special wire cutters I am normally using for removing excess wires after soldering components to my PCBs while building electronics devices sure came in handy to snap parts from frames! I can only imagine how uncomfortable would that task be without a good – and small! – pair of cutters…