Optimus Prime & Co.: A Newbies attempt at Gunpla

Last year I went on AliExpress to see what the gunpla situation was there and I picked up a couple of kits.  A Real Grade Bandai EVA Unit 01, and a BT Blade Liger.  I’d never heard of BT before and had no idea if either were legit, or would turn out to be nothing like the product in the listing.  They were significantly cheaper than buying similar elsewhere so I thought it was worth the risk.

The following posts are based on old imperfect memories and so may not be entirely accurate.  I built both of these months ago, and have been very lazy about updating any of my projects.  I’ve spent the week doing 8 months of catch up on the front and this is the final stage.

Zoids Blade Liger

I’ve done some research and apparently BT stands for Black Knight (Translation issue, I assume) and they do knock offs of the models made by Kotobukiya, another company I’d never heard of.  They seem to be about 25% of the price though.  Opinion online is that their models can be of variable quality.  Often they’re pretty great, if you don’t mind doing more cleanup (Gunpla guys are spoiled on the engineering precision front.  As a wargamer I expect cleanup).  The transfers are also always replaced with stickers.  That’s a shame.  Some of the accent colours are slightly different too.  I noticed that the gold parts are just coated that way.  Not an issue, except where you cut them from the sprue.  Maybe Kotobukiya’s parts are better?

In my case, I did have a few issues:

1. I had to enlarge many connector holes to let the pegs fit.  Not the worst, but it became very awkward during the final attachment of all the sub assemblies.  I needed to do a few repairs then.
2. A few parts benefited from some glue. Not as advertised, but I kinda expect that from any kit.
3. The main body piece had an extra block of plastic on it, at least the size of a 4×2 lego block.  It looked deliberate and sculpted, not like a miscast.  it was in the way of other parts and I had to cut it off.  I assume this piece was intended for a different Liger variant, with an otherwise identical sprue and I’d got the wrong sprue.  Thankfully there were no other issues like that.
4. The final piece looks great, but it feels like if I try and repose it, limbs will come off.  I don’t know if this is due to lower quality or if I would feel this way with the real kit.  I’m afraid of this happening with my other kits too though, so it’s probably just a fact of gunpla life.
5. The stickers suck.  The writing and symbols add to the piece, but the paper stands out.  Transfers would have been so much better.

It took at least 3.5 days to build and apply the stickers.  It was mostly a fun time, apart from when things weren’t going to plan due to the wrong part, or things needing a little more force to go together, making parts pop off.   Vertically, he’s not that tall, but he is much chunkier and bigger than the other models I’ve built.  Once built, I airbrushed the whole piece with matt varnish to remove some of the plasticy shine of the whole thing, and to act as transparent primer (Thanks for those old hobby vlogs, John!).  I then applied some GW Nuln Oil only to the areas I wanted some shadow or grime.

I’m up for building more Zoids.  I’m keeping an eye on ebay for a cheap version from the original manufacturer.  They appear occasionally, but I get outbid.  New, they’re too expensive for me.  Maybe at some point I’ll get tempted back to Ali Express, but I’d rather have the real kit next time.

Evangelion Unit-01

I think this kit might be real.  I suspect it somehow failed the quality checks and someone is selling their waste on AliExpress.  I had no issues with it at all.  Some of the pieces were a little looser than ideal, needing a bit of glue.  One tiny green piece from the end of one of his arm fins fell off and vanished never to be seen again, which is a huge shame, but at least it’s not a connecting piece, and it’s easy to not notice it’s missing.

This was a quicker and simpler build, without any other issues.  He came with both stickers and transfers.  Around 20 of the stickers are 1mm diameter silver dots.  There is nothing to hold them by while still leaving stickiness exposed to attach to a model, and they wanted to go on hard to reach places.  I opted not to use most of them.  They really should point out these stickers during the build, rather than waiting until limbs etc are in the way.  I’ve bought some decent tweezers since, so maybe next time?

I don’t have any more kits left to build at this time, but I do check ebay often to see what’s there.  Anyone know of any price comparison sites, maybe ones that’ll email me when a kit drops below a price threshold?

I have picked up a 30 Minute Missions kit as a Christmas present for a kid who’ll be about 10 at the time (bEXM-28 REVERNOVA).  I imagine 30 minutes would be optimistic for me, and it’ll take an afternoon for him.  Let me know if you’ve tried a 30MM kit and you think that’s too challenging for a 10 year old.  It says Ages 8+ on the Bandai web site, but I’ve no idea why realistic that is.