Written by 9:22 am On the Bench

WIP : Max Factory 1/72 Soltic Roundfacer Pt. 1 – Construction

New year, new project. This time it’s a snapfit kit from Max Factory. The subject is the Soltic Roundfacer, a mass production mecha from the 1980s anime Fang of the Sun Dougram. This show was never exported out of Japan so I’ve never actually watched it. But I’ve always liked the designs of the mecha. For western folks who play Battletech, the Roundfacer would look familiar as FASA pretty much stole the design and renamed it the Griffin. The design of this kit is retro and has a certain charm to it.

Fitting-wise, the kit is not as well done as a typical Bandai kit. Also unlike Bandai, they don’t really make the effort of hide the seamlines. The molding is good in general though, and it can be easily painted in sub assemblies. The polycaps however, aren’t the best. Some of the fitting of the limbs is looser and the arms don’t fit well at all to the body: they fall off even just being left alone. All in all, I would probably rank this between a Bandai and a Wave kit.

The pilot figure will need to be cemented inside the cockpit since nothing holds it in place, which is odd. The size of the pilot also looks to be slightly bigger than 1/72. The gun also pretty much cannot be held with any positive lock by the hand. I fixed that with a small wad of blutack. A pleasant surprise is the prepainted canopy which would have been a challenge to mask properly.

Instead of trying to find and fit a smaller ball or socket polycap into the shoulders I tried the simplest fix first: I carefully sanded the ball joint flatter on one side and they now fit snugly. I did however, manage to lose one of the rings that go between the fist and the cuff so I decided to scratch a new one from some Kotobukiya Round Thrusters. I just needed to make sure the hole I made clears the square polycap on the cuff. The new part I made looks alright. It’s thicker so I went ahead and made another one to replace the remaining kit part.

Seamline fixing is next and I’ll be ready to paint this thing.

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Tags: , , , , , , , Last modified: 25 February, 2020
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