I recently finished this vintage Japanese soft vinyl garage kit of the Studio Nue version of the power suit from Starship Troopers. The Powered Suit is an iconic mecha design in Japan, and you should read my review of the kit over at CollectionDX for more info and some history.
If you just want big pictures of a chunky mecha kit painted up, continue reading…
I will have a review and full write-up of this sweet vintage kit on CollectionDX hopefully soon, but I literally just finished the kit tonight and wanted to get some quick shots posted. Proper studio shots to follow.
B-Club is the specialty item arm of Bandai. B-Club makes PVC character figures, model detail parts, soft vinyl toys and kits, and more. They’ve released numerous reissue Bullmark kaiju vinyl toys, but have also released soft vinyl model kits over the years. At some point, B-Club released a line of 1/75 scale kits of mecha from Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. I don’t really care for the miniseries, but I like the machines in it quite a bit. When I learned about the line, I knew I needed to start tracking them down. Soft vinyl robot kits are a strange breed, but I love them. I wrote along, indulgent thoughtpiece about vinyl robot kit in a review over on CollectionDX. Go there to read lots of words, and scroll down for more and bigger pictures of the finished Zaku.
The Robot Spirits Den’an Gei review got a lot of traffic last week, so I thought it’d be fun to start posting links to my reviews over at CollectionDX as they go up in case people don’t check there too often. I usually cover Glyos vinyl releases, 3A stuff, Iron Man, and real robots. Maybe over the weekend I’ll through and put together a review links page, since I have done a lot over the last couple of years. This week I posted a pair of sponsored reviews:
Bandai Robot Spirits MS-07B-3 Gouf Custom
Bandai Robot Spirits Gundam AGE-1 Normal
So, I wrote this review for CollectionDX without realizing that we’ve already covered this figure. I didn’t want what I put together to go to waste, so I figured I’d post it here for my own edification.
When Armored Trooper VOTOMS was released, there were toys in a number of different sizes and formats, including the 1/60 scale AT Collection Series diecast minis, which were similar in vein to the 1/144 Dougram figures and the Takatoku 1/144 Macross Destroids. These little guys are sharply molded, nicely detailed, and had a good heft due to the diecast parts. They stand around 3″ tall. Unlike the Dougram and Macross minis, the VOTOMS figures did not feature painted much detail, since the idea was that you would paint them up and apply the stickers yourself, in that classic 80s Dual Model style. I made a few mods to this guy and painted him up. You can see an unpainted out of the box version in Veef’s review on CollectionDX.
When I posted the finished shots of my Master Grade RX-78-2 Gundam painted with Monster Kolor, Matt Walker aka Dead Pre$idents asked me if he could display it at the booth he was sharing with Max Toy Co at Winter Wonder Festival in Japan. Monster Kolor paint has been a huge success for Matt, and he is always looking for demonstrations of its use in new and creative ways. My MK on plastic Gundam model fit the bill, and was shipped off to Japan for display at the show. These pics of the booth come courtesy of Kaiju Korner Andy, who has been providing the best English-language coverage of Japanese shows and festivals out there for a couple of years now. Go check out the rest of his extensive WonderFest coverage here. He took a gazillion photos, and there’s more still to be posted.
Here’s a shot of the whole Max Toy Co and Friends booth! My Gundam was in good company. I think it’s giving Max Toy Co’s new micro Kaiju Negora sculpt a bit of a shakedown!
Bandai’s Master Grade RX-78-2 Gundam ver. 2.0 is a heck of a kit. The design is clean and ‘doughy’ in a way that manages to capture the feel of the anime very well. The sharp and clean design made the perfect subject for a Monster Kolor powered airbrushed paint job. I wanted to do something more original than a clean white Gundam, so I followed a scheme similar to the original Clover Gundam toys, which were silver instead of white. Obviously I could not leave it just clean and smooth, because that would be boring, so I proceeded to apply the entire waterslide decal sheet Bandai sells for this kit, making for some interesting contrast against the clean sculpt. Katoki would be proud.
Just a little something goofy I put together tonight. I’ve had scans of an old vintage Dougram paper model kit book forever, and I finally decided to print them out and put them together. The first up was the Soltic Roundfacer. It is rather primitive by today’s standards, but you have to give the designers credit for trying. The other figures in the book are the Dougram, Blockhead, and Crab Gunner, and I will be trying them out soon.
The Wave 1/24 VOTOMS kits are some seriously venerable pieces of plastic, reissued throughout the years with some occasional improvements. Out of the box, they are decently posable and have a bit chubby proportions, but are easy to build and can be vastly improved with a little TLC. I have seen many Scopedogs kitted out in Hobby Japan magazine with new articulation, adjustments to the proportions, and serious detail upgrades, so I wanted to try such an affair for myself. Adler’s Nest is a small firm that makes turned brass and aluminum gun barrels and hardware for scale models (tanks), and they for some reason also make a Scopedog gun barrel from turned brass and aluminum, as well as replacement machined aluminum eye cameras in the main VOTOMS scales (1/24, 1/18, 1/12 I think). I used the gun barrels and eye camera on this build, as well as a set of brass tubing smoke dischargers I made myself, and turned aluminum jet exhausts for the roller dash boosters. I also rebuilt most of the articulation from new parts to improve the articulation on the kit, especially on the shoulders, hips, wrists, and ankles. By the time I was done I also added some extra sensor bits to the visor (to work in a tight urban environment), some non-canon weld beads, stowage, and some etched metal details. With the new articulation, the Scopedog can hold its rifle realistically and be in some convincing ‘roller skating’ poses like the Turbo Customs do in the anime.
The paint scheme is a really ugly one I found while doing tank research, an urban disruptive scheme known as the ‘Berlin Brigade’ scheme. It features rectangular drab colors, and black paint straight across the lower portions of the machine (typically the running gear on an AFV) to try and blend in with both the urban structures and road. I filled out my Scopedog with a gamut of decals, and marked this guy as a special Red Shoulder unit, and threw in some battle damage to indicate he’s been campaigning for a while and has seen some heat.
