Mega Size Gundam - Building the 1/48th Scale Giant Part 1

 

Jumbo Love

To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Gundam Bandai released what is still to my knowledge the largest Gundam kit ever created, at 1/48th scale, 375mm or 15" this thing is huge, the box it's self is almost Jumbo sized.

Gundam never 'worked on me' as I often say to JohnnyBoy, no matter how much I've been into Super Robots, I've always found the overly complicated tech of Gundam unattractive compared to the brighter, simpler 60's-70's Robots that dominate the shelves of my collection. The only Gundam I own is a Chogokin from the Turn A Series, which of course is the least popular of all the designs due to it's elegant simplicity.

In the past year or so, the older designs of the original1978 series started becoming more prevalent due to the Anniversary and the latest series being a throwback design wise to the first series. The more I was seeing the RX-78, the more I finally realized how beautiful it was in its simplicity, and like any compulsive toy addict, I had to have at least one. But not just any one, the biggest one.

I was fortunate enough to have a co worker from Japan that was visiting her family in Osaka over the Christmas holidays, anything you'd like me to bring back she asked...well there is one thing I replied.

Scoring a great deal off of Amazon.jp, within a few weeks a giant box arrived at my workplace containing two of these giant beauties (one for me, and one for JohnnyBoy). And then like all of the model kits I've accumulated in the past 20 years it sat there in it's box. I used to love building model kits, but full time work lazyness and other adult commitments have prevented me from making the time to sit down with some plastic and glue and make the magic happen. The advantage of the latest Bandai Master Grade kits is the builder has the option to paint all the details they desire or leave it as is and the kit still looks great. These kits don't even require glue or paint, they are so intelligently engineered, they're practically a fully functional toy puzzle.

So I sat down the other night, determined to at least make a dent in the kit. I had a personal bet that it would take me an hour to make one leg, and I wasn't far off...I got two done in an hour and a half.

The box once opened was pretty intimidating, to be honest. Over a dozen cellophane bags filled with color coded parts and despite the lovely full color instruction booklet, everything is in Japanese but very easy to understand. It only took me 20 minutes to make my first mistake, which required me to struggle for 10 minutes to unsnap a portion of the leg I had just tightly secured. I guess they assume that more seasoned model builders are assembling these kits, and I overlooked the fact that due to the symmetry of much of the robot, most related instructions are only shown once, lesson learned. After that it was smooth sailing. The parts detached neatly from the plastic sprues, everything fit together perfectly, and all of the joints were beautifully articulated with a nice firm stiffness and even as a life long fan of Japanese toys it was never more apparent to me how incredibly well designed and engineered these pieces are, pure genius. Anyway, as I stated, after a little over an hour and a half both legs were done, I was mentally fatigued and I want to savor the experience as much as possible so I'm saving the rest of the kit for the remainder of the week. Stay tuned...

   almost 10" of pure leg