I have yet to begin the build, so let’s go over some pre-build notes and remarks.
- I didn’t have to buy much in the way of tools. I got a new can of clearcoat, of course, as well as some new blades for my hobby knife. The only brand new piece of kit I obtained were these application sponges. I got them in case I needed to apply super glue or rubber cement, meaning I hope I don’t have to crack them open. However, after all the struggles I had trying to mend the torso of the Zeta Gundam, I’m glad to have them as backup.
- Five kits, five instruction manuals with different layouts and content. This one is the most different of all. Rather than being bound together like a book, it is one long sheet of paper folded up accordion style, like a brochure. I assume this has to do with the fact that there aren’t enough pages to justify the more traditional layout. But why assume when we can count the pages for ourselves? The RG Zeta Gundam’s booklet is 24 pages cover to cover, while the Tryon 3’s manual is folded into five double sided pages, for a total of ten. That’s less than half as long. I should point out that the both the fonts and the diagrams in the Tryon 3’s instructions are much smaller in size, but not small enough to account for the difference in length. There simply isn’t as much work to do.
I assumed that the manual would start by having you build the three animal forms individually, and then finish by showing you how to combine them into the Tryon 3. In reality, however, you build the Tryon first, and then it shows you how to convert it down into the animal forms. I plan on building the kit step by step, but I’m worried about what I might break if I attempt the transformation.
The kit has so many extra pieces that there is enough left over to build the Core Fighter from the Double Zeta Gundam (You can see this in the photo above, in the center page). If only I could read whatever it is they wrote in the manual to explain/advertise this feature. I find it both silly and sensible at the same time.