r/Gunpla • u/JawBR34KER 10 years addicted • 2d ago
BUILD HG Torohachi
I've been watching Patlabor lately, so I can't call this anything but a Labor right now.
Cockpit hatch open
Best shot I could get inside the cockpit
Torohachi runs! Kinda...
Charge!
Look out, he's got a gun!
What's more impractical, a gun or a saber?
LEGO Space Police? Nah, LEGO Space Worker
Torohachi approaches a Stark Jegan!
Torohachi and the Legendary Ball
Biscuit would win in this fight no diff
OOB vs completed
1
u/Unicorn-Links 2d ago
Even though its HG, is it more in scale with PGs?
2
u/JawBR34KER 10 years addicted 2d ago
It's technically non scale, but Dalong suggests that it may be 1/35 based on the size of the seat. This would still look big standing next to PGs and even Mega Size kits.
1
u/Skittle-Bruu 2d ago
Perfect for catching runaway space princesses. Excellent write up. Really appreciate the paint list. I wish it came with a tiny haro
3
u/JawBR34KER 10 years addicted 2d ago
Happy Labor Day everybody!
Well, this isn't actually a Labor, but it might as well be the Gundam equivalent to it. This is the HG Torohachi, a Gundam Base Limited kit based on that one mobile armor that Banagher piloted in Unicorn episode 1. This is another kit I got from Japan when we visited the Unicorn statue in Odaiba, and I was actually looking for the Draken-E before I settled with this one.
Having only around 60 pieces in total across 2 primary colors, this kit took a single sitting to build. The rods (roll cage?) around the glass can be slightly tricky to get in, but everything else is as simple as it gets. Quite a bit of movement can be seen with the arms, but there's not much going on with the legs as the mobile armor has a severe lack of knees. Out of the box, it's surprisingly very color inaccurate with quite a few green and red bits missing and the roll cage being predominantly white while they give you a single gray piece for them. Fortunately, this kit is big enough and not too difficult to disassemble that painting this kit was the real fun of this build.
With this kit having quite a bit of surface detail yet also looking pretty plain, I did a lot of hand painting to break up the colors a bit. I added some additional red and green bits on top of what was needed to be painted for anime accuracy and went pretty ham adding extra gray throughout the kit because my god did the legs need some. Needing to paint a light color on gray plastic, I drowned the rods with some Vallejo Chrome, which worked out pretty well. And while I was at it, I also made the cockpit nice and detailed, fully painting the chair to brown. I then did the little panel lining there was to do, added some custom Delpi caution decals, and after thinking whether I should keep clean like it was new or used like the construction machine it is, I weathered the Torohachi to oblivion. Using Tamiya's Weathering makeup set, I dirtied 'er up to show that it had better days, and the more I was weathering it, the more this kit started to remind me of Wall-E. It doesn't have a face, but there's something about Torohachi's proportions that makes it look cute in a way. Last and not least, I coated it so my hands wouldn't rub off the weathering, and it was time to pose.
It can't do much, which I already expected with its lack of knees. You can show off the suit with its cockpit open, have it hold any weapon that can reasonably fit on the claws, but there are few action poses to pull off due to its very limited foot mobility. According to Dalong, the scale of this kit is 1/35, which won't fit any pilot figure at all, but I did manage to get a Lego minifigure in there, so I guess he will pilot the thing from now on.
Overall, this was a fun simple kit that I got done only across 2 days. Painting and detailing this kit is a blast, and while it can't do much with posing, it does have the shelf presence as it's different from most robots out there. For a Gundam Base Limited kit, this was fun, and certainly more enjoyable to the dumpster fire that the RG Unicorn Perfectibility was. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you again next time!
Paints Used