Grey Area: SD EX-S 'Gundoom'

I dunno why, but kits just fall down my lap.

Awesome Box Art

About the same number of sprues from a High Grade kit

Behold, Model Comprehend's (MC) SD EX-S 'Gundoom'. At first glance it looks like another rip-off of a Bandai kit.Until you find out that there wasn't any produced and that this kit is in a class in itself. This kit falls into that little 'grey area' within the hobby: we all know that Bandai has produced nearly every conceivable Gundam in various forms and scales but they never bothered with the EX-S. So Model Comprehend (MC) took the liberty of making one and its actually a boxful of surprises. In a way, this is not considered a bootleg.

This is not an ordinary SD (Super Deformed) kit. The owner had the head and part of the torso already assembled but there's still a ton of sprues left over for me to deal with. I took my time examining the sprues and I was just in awe with the complexity of the parts. It's not like Bandai's blocky, chunky scheme; whereas a typical Bandai kit would fit into a a box half the size of the Gundaoom's, MC was generous enough to provide a lot of detail into it.

The HUGE head

It took me about 3 hours to snap build the kit. This is when I became a little jaded on the whole thing.Though the whole thing looked good on paper, the fit and build were not in practice. Almost of the parts are misaligned and the fit are a bit tight. I had to result to trimming the pegs in order to align and fit the parts together (this particular per-paint mod would also help me when its time to cement the parts together).

Torso's also notable

The kit is a beast after all the work was done. It probably is next to a SD Kshatriya in height and girth when it comes to SD kits. Everything in this kit is HUGE: its weapons, backpack, fuel tanks, every bit of it is monstrous. MC didn't scrimp on the details too so much that it made the proportions nearer to 'chibi' (child-like) instead of SD to accommodate all the details.

So many bits after the build!

MC's SD EX-S Gundoom is a great kit overall. The build may be too daunting but all the effort is worth it. Thing is that 3rd party kits like this makes us builders think that there are more things beyond the big 'B' or even the big 'K'.

I may try out other kits like these by myself.

Snap built beastie!