Building Wing Gundam Zero EW

While dropping off my daughter for art class, I had 1 hour of downtime. A Hobby Lobby was within walking distance, so I decided to stop by. I’d never been inside a Hobby Lobby before, so I didn’t know what the store sold. I soon realized that the store experience was similar to that of Joann’s or Michaels. It was more of an art and craft store sprinkled with random furniture decorations. Strolling through the store, I found a product that caught my eye: the Wing Fundamentals Zero. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s a Gundam model kit. I’ve always been interested in building one ever since I saw a YouTube clip of Adam Savage building one. Adam was marveling at how amazing the building experience was. I have never built a Gundam model kit, let alone any model kit before.

Luckily, the Wing Fundamentals Zero was also 40% off, which came out to $54.95. I quickly looked on Amazon to see how much it retails for and found out that Amazon sells the same product for $69. Figuring out that it was a good deal, I decided to purchase it.

As soon as I got home, I opened the box and saw components neatly wrapped individually.

I have never built a model kit before; the closest thing would be building a Lego set. It’s definitely a new and exciting challenge! Towards the bottom of the box, I found the instruction sheet. Upon opening it, I saw tons of Japanese characters with English translations. Skimming through the booklet, it looked relatively straightforward. There was some information about cutting, trimming, and painting, so we’ll see what that’s all about. In the middle of the booklet, I believe it talks more about the Gundam product, which I would assume avid builders are totally into.

Opening to the first step, I saw the instruction sheet label a component as G13.

The page before this has a reference sheet that lists out all the components within the box. For example, the “G” component was labeled as Gray, making it much easier to find. Each component has labels on top, which makes it super easy to identify. It also has numbers on each component, so you know which piece you want to take out.

I took out two components by twisting them by hand. Something didn’t feel right; it felt too crude to take out components by twisting. I learned that it wasn’t the proper technique; you want to use pliers to cut them off. I knew something was off as I saw some scuff marks when I was twisting the components. I need to pause here because I don’t have pliers, so I’ll have to stop by the store. So far, my reaction is that it isn’t anything amazing yet. The components somewhat fit nicely, but the two pieces I put together didn’t have a nice joint-click feeling. The material itself doesn’t look too shabby, but it looks like it could be 3D printed.

I ended up buying pliers from Harbor Freight because I felt that it was the most economical choice. A 4-inch diagonal pliers cost less than $5. When I stopped by Home Depot and Ace Hardware, they were selling 6-inch ones for $15 or more. They may be better, but because I am mainly using this to build this model kit, I felt like the cheapest one made sense.

After using the pliers, it didn’t seem to make a huge difference. It’s possible that I suck at using pliers, but I still felt like there were a lot of chunks that needed to be shaved off. Also, maybe due to not being able to make a clean cut, pieces didn’t connect nicely and had weird gaps, even though I pressed them pretty hard. Some components had a nice fit, but because some of the nubs were still sticking out, it looked out of place. I later learned that there’s a $60 nipper called GodHand that they recommend for Plastic Models. It’s definitely pricey for the average Joe and hobbyist. I guess I’ll have to live with what I have for now.

I started building page by page. I knew I couldn’t complete the entire kit in one sitting, so I decided to tackle each area like the chest, legs, head, body, and wings one day at a time. It would probably take me roughly one week to finish.

It’s crazy to see how tiny a component can get. If you didn’t know better, you may think it’s small nubs from cutting with pliers.

Here is the upper body complete. Sometimes I would have to scrape with my fingernails to get nubs off components so two components would fit together nicely. That was a bit annoying. I decided to watch some YouTube tutorials, and I saw that some people were using sandpaper to achieve a smooth finish. It would have been nice if the nubs came off cleanly or if the model kit provided sandpaper.

Legs complete. I actually thought the figure would be a lot taller for some reason. At this point, I showed the Gundam model to my daughter, and she thought it was cool enough that she asked me if I could place it in her room. I’m not so sure about it since the pieces are so fragile. I told her she could help build the rest of the components.

Here it is standing by itself. I wanted to see if it could. Please forgive me that it’s leaning a bit.

My daughter helped twist off the base plate, but after taking out a few components, she became bored. So the strength required to take out the components is minimal.

Here is the complete product. The weapons are attached to the wings rather than the hands because I didn’t bother switching out the hands so it could hold the gun.

Even though I completed the product, there were leftover components. Those were extra pieces if you wanted to configure the Gundam model differently. For example, you could transform the model so it’s holding a sword, but you would need to switch out several components. I’ll probably keep the extra pieces in storage just in case, but I highly doubt I’ll ever change it.

Overall, here are my takeaways:

Building the model wasn’t fun. What was originally supposed to take 1 week took over 2 weeks since there were days I didn’t want to build. There are people who still love building these models, so I want to give it another try a few years down the line before I completely write it off. Some similarities to building a Lego would be that the components would be mixed in each bag, meaning that you would have to grab some components from "A" and join them with "B".

• Difficulty rating: 1/5 - I’m giving it a 1, but I’m sure if you wanted each component to look polished, it could be closer to a 2.
• Fun factor: 1/5 - The joints didn’t fit nicely. I would say 20% of the time, the pieces made a clicking sound.