Building the 1/144 HG Gundam Aerial Kit from Bandai

It's been a long time since I assembled a Gunpla (Gundam plastic model kit). I keep buying the darn things, but never sit down long enough to crack one open to assemble. It turns out for the HG 1/144 scale model kits, there is variation in how detailed the build can be based on the Gundam. After building the 1/144 HG Gundam Aerial kit I checked the RX-78 kit and the Gundam GQuuuuuuX kits I also have and the GQuuuuuuX kit is even more complex than the Aerial. The RX-78 kit is the simplest and closest to what I remember you have to do. It took me 3 hours a day over 2 days to build the Aerial model with my cat helping me! My next kit will be the GQuuuuuuX!

My cat watching me snip and assemble pieces with the odd helpful paw in the way.

The level of detail means it was a more complex build which means:

1. Fiddly little parts, so it takes longer to assemble. Certain joints and the head take a lot of time.
2. Lots of stickers to be precisely placed. You should have a pair of very fine tip tweezers.
3. A few places where you need to be careful on the orientation of the pieces to fit them.
4. Careful how you snip the pieces off of the runners - don't cut the parts!
5. The instructions are never as clear as you would like in places. Take your time.
6. Use model nippers that cut flush. If you do it right, there isn't a lot of trim or sanding to be done to get a clean surface.

Aerial Kit.

Contents of the kit and I'm ready with nippers and tweezers.

Quite a few runners and I love how they are molded in colour. The grey ball joints now use a tougher plastic that isn't as rubbery as I remember on my older kits.

I still think it is pretty amazing you can assemble these kits and they do not require any glue! The parts are precision molded to fit exactly with each other to form a tight bond. I did find one part for the chest that had to be carefully bent to hold another part in correctly, but it worked beautifully afterwards. The molded plastic pieces are all formed perfectly - so Bandai has to have some trade secrets and proprietary precision machinery and plastic formulas for this.

Step 1 - building the head. You can see instructions are in Japanese and English. Mostly visual cues for construction, so take your time.

There were stickers and very small pieces to make up the very detailed head. I needed a magnifying glass to make sure some of the stickers and parts were fitted or were set flush correctly. My eyes aren't young anymore.

The completed head!

The chest was the next item to build. There are a lot of pieces that attach to a core frame. Lots of stickers and these cool shiny upper chest pieces that show like shiny energy. This caused some confusion as there were nicely done precoloured pieces and ones you did yourself. The instructions needed to be clearer about the two routes. I chose the precoloured version.

The head and arms attached to the upper torso. The arms were relatively straightforward with some puzzlement at the should joint area, but it worked in the end.

The legs were straightforward to build, much like the arms. The knee joint and knee cap parts were fiddly and you have to be careful of the orientation so you don't put things on backwards. I made a mistake here and had to undo the knee joint (slipjoint pliers helped - don't damage the plastic - cover it if you need to).

The assembled lower torso.

The last step was to assemble the upper and lower torso - dead easy!!!! Stick them together with a post.

The completed model. I still have the gun and the shield to do.

Completed model closeup. Looks great!

Other Anime Related Articles

Other Japanese Pop Culture Articles
Follow me on Twitter or Instagram at @Tostzilla or my feedburner.