Tomopop Teaches: Aisaka Taiga Garage Kit by HobbyLink Japan

3:00 PM on 09.15.2010   |   Chris Seto

It seems that HLJ have decided to expand their wares a little. Not content with providing us with the latest PVC figures and Gunpla (and a lot of stuff in between), they have now started to offer their own line of garage kits!! Their first offering is this kit of Aisaka Taiga from Toradora!, sculpted by Elliot and initially sold at Wonder Festival. HLJ have managed to beat the 1-day license rule and are offering a small number of kits for sale!

With this being their first foray into the garage kit scene, we thought it would be a cool idea to review the kit for our readers. And instantly, we came across a bit of a problem! You see, when something is reviewed, it is usually a finished product which we can take lots of pictures with and discuss the pros and cons of the figure straight out of the box. That's not really something we can do in this case as this is not a finished product (not yet anyway!) and even when we are done, the quality of the kit will depend on the builder (in this case, me). This makes it rather difficult to sum up this figure in a neat feature like we normally do, so we're going to try something different.

Are you ready for this? Instead of just writing an article on the kit once it's done, I'm going to give you all an idea of the process behind building a garage kit while pointing out any points of the kit which stand out during the whole process. Basically, this is going to be a tutorial on how to build a garage kit!

When you're ready to begin, hit the jump!

Luckily, the kit is rather simple and only has 13 parts. This isn't a near 100 part behemoth like my Knight of Gold from the Five Star Stories! With the parts laid out, we can get some idea of how much work is needed. For now, we're going to do what I call the "preliminary build." Basically, it's just removing all the excess resin you can see on the parts and put the kit together as best we can without doing anything permanent. And here are the tools we'll be using to do just that!

Seriously! That's it!! On other kits, we may have needed to use some tape to hold the parts together but that wasn't necessary in this case. The sculpt was made in such a way so that the parts hold together very well on their own and can support their own weight.  In fact, a lot of the parts designs try to make life as easy as possible for the kit maker. I think only the Try-GK line from Volks helps the modeller this much!

For the most part, flash removal is pretty simple, although you may want to keep just a little excess on the main part to make sanding a little easier later. The only parts which may cause issues are when you need to cut off flash which is hanging on the corner of the part.

In these instances, it's better to remove as much as you can from the top (the resin which isn't connected to the part) to level the area before removing the rest. The following video should give you a slightly better idea on what I'm talking about.

 And after that, we just need to put the parts together to see what we have to work with!

So this is what the kit looks like. Remember, no glue has been used yet so the parts can be separated at will. We didn't need to pin any of the parts to get to this point either, although I will probably do so out of habit. I'll cover that in a later installment.

The kit comes with 2 sets of arms for different poses. One set of folded arms which makes Taiga look more "tsun tsun" while the outstretched set seen above make her look more "dere dere." (I hope you know the term "tsundere," otherwise, that last bit will read like gibberish). The parts themselves make it very easy to swap between the two, but a little gap shows up on the left shoulder. That will need to be dealt with before we can consider parts swapping for the kit. But I like the folded arms look!

 The kit also comes with a little palmtop tiger as well. The tiger has made appearances on the covers of the original Toradora! light novels on several occasions and is a mascot of sorts, as well as appearing on Tomopop as our feature editor's avatar. It's also probably one of my favorite parts of the kit. I think I'll have fun when I get around to painting that.

And that's where we'll end this part of our little tutorial. 

In terms of the kit itself, I was very impressed with the lengths to which the design went to help the modeller. Very little work is required to get to this stage, even by the standards of other kits! The parts also fit very well, which is a good initial indication of the quality of the kit we are working with. Lesser quality kits (often recasts or bootlegs) often have larger issues with parts fits and leave gaps between them which require more work to fix. The resin is also easy to work with, which gives it an advantage over recasts, although one can only tell this difference once they've worked on both an original and recast kit.

The kit itself is a very simple affair with a basic pose and one which doesn't have an abundance of detail but one which works very well for Taiga.

And if you have any further questions about the steps, I'll be semi-active in the comments and will try to answer your questions as best I can. 

Next time, we're going to to parts cleanup and priming! 

[Many thanks to HobbyLink Japan for providing us with the kit. You can go here if you want to purchase one and try to follow the tutorial!]