The First Gundam of Mine…

My first Gundam was an SD Gundam.

I bought that Gundam when I was about 11 years old. Back then I had never heard of Gundam. The robots that I knew at that time were Transformers, Patlabor, Macross and Gobots.

Gundam? Never heard of it…

Even when I first bought it, I did wonder how that robot can fit into such small box. I had never built a model too at this time of my age. The pictures around the box do look attractive and beautiful though. Out of my strong curiosity, I bought one.

It was mesmerizing at first when I saw the runners. I have to build it! YEAH!

I was very new to plastic model and all the instructions in the manual were in Japanese but the pictures did help with putting the model together. So I actually did not have any problem at all. I did not have any plastic model tools at that time. So I twist the parts out of the runner and trim any protruding bits with nail clipper. I used the nail clipper file to file the protruding bits too. That was quite a rough work then comparing to how I build my Gundams today.

Bandai provided stickers to make your model slightly colorful. After sticking them on my Gundam, I was still not satisfied because my Gundam still did not look close to the pictures shown on the box. So I cut whatever left of the sticker into smaller pieces and stick them on parts that need some more color. Problem with stickers is that after you play with the model a few times, they tend to get loose and start unstuck, creating curls on the edge of the stickers.

Being green in plastic model, I even tried to use my color pens to add more color to my Gundam. I was actually quite pleased with it. I named my first Gundam Akira because I could not read Japanese at that time and I did not know the name for the Gundam. SD Gundams usually have different forms you can change to. For Akira, he has without armor form, armored form and power up form. I kept changing him into different forms like once every hour. Below are the photos of Akira with his armor parts.

Thus by a month, most of the parts were quite loose.

Today, I get to know the real name for Akira is actually Musha Gekitou Gundam.

Anyway, whatever it is, I had enjoyed the experience of building the model. It was exciting to see how Akira slowly built into a Gundam.

And that is how I started out in Gundam plastic model…