Yes, we are two months into 2021 and I haven’t built any kits since the year started, not even the Entry Grade RX-78-2 Gundam. I did have plans to continue the double and dual builds that I started in 2020 and I still have intentions to continue them in some way. But at the moment, I haven’t. That’s not saying I haven’t done anything related to the hobby. So I’ll first explain the stuff I’ve been doing that has partially kept me from building kits.
Now you can see at the background that I even got new racks for my supplies so I definitely have the intent for more hobby work. For the past two months, I’ve been mostly doing maintenance work on action figures, which started late December with those quick Dunbine figure detail ups. Then around January, I got new storage cases and started transferring my figures. I took out some that had been in storage for a quite a while and found these two, Super Robot Chogokin Solar Aquarion and Aquarion Evol. Both are in great condition, though some of the replacement hand parts had this sticky and tacky feel that’s common to action figures being in storage for long periods. Dealt with those parts with a quick layer of flat top coat.
Some pieces also had discoloration which is again, not that uncommon with action figures. This is usually remedied with a good treatment of hydrogen peroxide under UV light. This was also the first time I attempted to do this and I think the results came out quite great. With this success, I won’t be afraid to do the same to other figures that have discoloration problems as well.
Then in February, I went to another storage box and found my other Marvel Legends Iron Man figures. First was this old Toy Biz “Silver Centurion” Iron Man that definitely needed some cleaning. Some parts already had faded paint due to age but fortunately, I had multiples of this guy and basically mixed parts to get the best figure. There’s also the “Neo Classic” Iron Man from the 2012 Epic Heroes wave. It’s also another figure that’s very prone to paint fade, especially the forearm and lower leg parts.
Picking up from the Taubarn repaint I did last year, I also have the faded parts a good coat of silver and clear red on top. Unfortunately, I can’t do this directly as the original paint is still there. And there’s where all those used cotton swabs came from. I basically needed to strip down the original paint, but I can’t just submerge the parts in thinner unless I want them to end up soft and gummy afterwards. So I had to manually scrub the paint off each part and found how tough the paint Hasbro uses on their figures. I eventually got them all off and painted the parts. Doing this also required me to do the heat-and-pop treatment to disassemble the figure. That said, you need to be careful when doing the same during figure reassembly as your typical hobby paint isn’t as tough as those used by Hasbro and would be easily prone to chipping when heated.
The last figure currently in queue for maintenance is the Super Robot Chogokin God Reideen from 2010. For this guy, all the metallic blue parts are basically clear blue on top of silver paint and for the detached pieces you see here, the clear blue mostly faded away. This would be a relatively easy fix as I just need to put a coat of clear blue. For the other parts, disassembly was easy, but that wasn’t the case for this one replacement piece used in the transformation. I’m not able to disassemble the parts needed paint which basically means I need to do some masking. Not exactly precision masking but the tape would need to go to gaps between the gold parts just to get full coverage. Clearly I haven’t started on this but this is the next one I’ll be doing.
So here’s my 2021 personal outlook, I do think that I would be building less kits this year. Around this time in 2020, I already completed the MODEROID Savage Crossbow, HGUC Gundam NT-1 and was in the dual build of the Build/Try Burning Gundam. I can also see that I’d be getting less mainstream kit releases and would go more towards the more limited ones, most notably Kotobukiya’s The Brave Fighter and MODEROID releases. I just got my MODEROID Gaiking the Great set yesterday and I didn’t even pre-order some of the Premium Bandai kits that I’ve normally would in a heartbeat.
You could say that I am streamlining my expenses as I am preparing for some personal expenses later in the year so I would like to reserve all those allowable expenses on the more major releases, like that RIOBOT SRX set that had me write a 4-part post. I do have a ton of kits in the backlog so the build queue would remain full even if I don’t get new kits. So yep, a not-so-quick update as of March 2021!
