HGUC Gustav Karl

I’m going to begin this by saying that I love the Gustav Karl design. It’s among my favorites of the big chungus era units. However, this kit fucking sucks ass big time.

I started building on this in 2018 almost as soon as it came out. Back then, I didn’t have great access to an airbrush, so I intended to just gloss & mate coat the kit. However, I didn’t brush on the gloss correctly, and it came out pretty bad. It got chucked in a box till the end of 2020, when I disassembled it to strip the Future floor polish gloss coat off. Unfortunately, during this it’s parts were scattered across my house like the Shikon Jewel shards while moving projects back and forth. It wasn’t until early this year that I made the effort to find them again. Fortunately, /M’s 20^th Groupbuild had a theme that fit the project. I finished cleaning the parts off, and painted it up. I didn’t make any mods to it, and in the end, I truly wish I had.

The major problem is that this kit has some real structural issues, mainly in it’s torso. You see, this kit came out during a period where Big B was attempting to reduce the usage of poly-caps in their kits. To be clear, this bastard still uses them for his legs. Those are a problem too. They’re so small, that they make it extremely hard to reassemble the legs.

The torso. The problem is the torso has a mid section that “sits” on a plastic ball molded onto the waist. There would be no problem if it was just a post on the waist that the lower torso fit into. Yet instead, it’s some funky ass ball joint. Ostensibly, you can assume this was some attempt at giving this fatass the ability to do Gainax/Trigger poses. However, because of the bulkiness of the design, it just makes for a weak connection and adds no articulation.

Anyway, I had fun painting it. For primer/surfacer, I used Vallejo gray acrylic primer. I know this stuff is memed around as being the worst stuff to work with…and it kind of is. It’s usable, and I think if you can make it work, you have a great primer that is gentle on fussy plastics. Still, it was all I had at the time, as I was nearly out of gray Mr. Surfacer.

I painted the gray parts with Tamiya acrylic XF-77 IJN Gray (Sasebo Arsenal). The blue parts used a mix of Tamiya XF-17 Sea Blue and X-4 Blue. All of the black parts and joints used Mr. Finishing Surfacer 1500 Black. The red parts were painted with Tamiya XF-7 Flat Red. The verniers used the previously mentioned Black Mr. Surfacer for a primer, and Ammo by Mig Silver A.MIG-195.

The waterslide decals were some I bought from Dalin. Overall, these were wonderful waterslides. Having used Bandai slides on a project after this one, I can say that Dalin and Delpi decals will spoil you rotten. The Dalin decals wrapped easily, didn’t tear even once, and had great visibility and print quality. I can say without a doubt that you should probably get some if you plan on building a Gustav Karl of your own.

One reason I painted this kit was that there were a lot of stress marks from nub removal. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that I was still new and crappy at building kits when I got this dude. However, some of that can also be attributed to a phenomenon from 2018 – 2019. Many of the kits from that era have plastic that easily stresses. I thought it was just me being new at the time. However, many kits that I bought back then, I threw in a stockpile.

Since then, I’ve built them up using better techniques and better nippers. No dice; these kits are still fragile as glass. I’ve seen a few other anons on /M report having this same issue with kits from this time period. It includes new molds for those years, as well as reprints. The first HG Leo I bought was from the initial production run. This particular kit was fragile and stressed easily. Leo’s from later production runs that I bought from Hobby Lobby never had these issues. Some have attributed the fragile plastic to Bandai changing the formula of the ABS to a new material called KPS. The ABS/KPS parts are indeed extremely soft and fragile, but the polystyrene parts also easily stress.

Anyway, excusing the shit quality plastic that probably isn’t an issue for later print runs (:snicker: later print runs, yeah right), the kit looks amazing out of box. A standard straight build will look true to the Gustav Karl (well, at least the one from Unicorn), and the parts have nice, sharp details. The detail gimmicks are nice too, with lots of opening compartments for the missiles and beam sabers.

Overall, it’s a nice looking kit with poor OOB engineering. You should plan on making some mods to it to give it some better stability. For me, it’s prone to falling apart while handling or posing it. I enjoyed my build though, and am happy to finally have this complete in my collection now.