The 1/144 RX-105 “Gundoom” arrived while I was building up Sazabi The Second. It’s an interesting kit, so lets begin….I didn’t get the box so Hobbymate could keep the shipping costs down. The instructions have a good number of colour pages with nice photos of the completed kit, but the instructional pages are just black and white with simple outline drawings. There’s a few stickers with the kit that I’ll most likely not use as I’ll be painting, but there’s also a tonne of decals, and they look pretty good.

I started on the frame, painting it with Tamiya Gunmetal.

The frame pieces were easy to cut out and de-nub as the quality of the plastic used is pretty good. However, the quality of the moulding is not up to Bandai standard.

The hands have decent enough articulation, but they need the back-plate attached to keep the fingers firmly in place, so I’m being rather careful here with them while they’re being painted.Here you can see one of the blue runners and how it’s warped and won’t lie flat. I don’t think this directly impacts the pieces, but it does show and is indicative of the quality of the moulding.

There’s a reasonable amount of detail on the inner frame, so I used some Alclad chrome on the hydraulics, and painted in details with gold Gundam marker, adding Tamiya smoke too to finish the effect.

The polycaps are ok, and the fit of the frame sections is not too bad, but they seem somewhat oddly designed in places, and some of the pieces were very tight to fit into the polycaps when assembling the frame.