By Christopher Troy
When we last left off, it was time to build the arms and legs for the Unicorn. There’s no set length of time it take for me to usually build the limbs, as construction and painting usually factors in to that.
Luckily, the white pieces didn’t really need much paint, and the details do a fine job of accenting themselves. It looks really sharp despite the lack of paint, which made the kit appealing to me in the first place. Which such simplicity, this should have been a 10-20 minute construction job, what with separating, sanding down and assembling.
The Elbow joints had a different idea.
The hand pieces (far right) were simple to assemble, as it was all of 2 pieces each. The arms pieces weren’t as bad either, as they were simple snap together jobs. The killer was the elbow joints. For some reason, the right elbow joint (bottom) snapped together fine, but the left one (top) was a tiny plastic Satan, and was warped from the get go. I would have taken a picture as proof, but the image was hard to capture on a simple point and click camera. You can tell by the image by the gap in the joint. At the time of the writing, the joint has been assaulted with several tools, and finally works without popping out when bending the left arm, but I’ll save those images for the final post.
There’s the completed upper torso, with tiny plastic Satan ruining it for the perfectionist in me. If you look at the head, you can notice a little of green by the visor. Since I’m a terrible painter, I opted to use the sticker for the “eyes” as it was easier, despite being tiny. Last thing I wanted to do is smear green paint all over the head, and break out in a fit of nerd rage and swear off building Gunpla ever again. I’m not saying that happened, but there’s a reason we’ll never see my first kits posted on here.
Finally (for this post at least) we move onto the feet, with took all of 30 seconds to assemble. One of the things I’ve noticed is how complex some of the joint pieces are, which is odd for me when it comes to the 1/144th scale kits. Some newbies may be a little intimidated by this, but if you can master it on your first attempt, you can EASILY tackle a stand MG kit in terms of assembly.
So that wraps it up for this article. The next one will complete the Unicorn assembly, my triumph over lil’ plastic Satan, and bring closure to something I should have finished by now. Again, I blame Video games, my other job, and my wife. SCAPEGOATS A PLENTY! On the bright side, you’ll have a better written and more in-dept Loran article to cushion the blows between now an next week! (Hopefully.)
