Gunpla Build - Real Grade Gundam Exia (Part 3)

I wasn’t expecting to finish this model so soon, but it turns out that the arms (in particular the shoulders) were not nearly as complicated as I expected.

The head, on the other hand, was a bit of a challenge …

Head

This could have been a disaster. It should have been a disaster. Instead, it assembled without any missing or broken parts - though some ended up benign a big mangled. I’ll take it as a win.

The main problem is that there so. many. tiny. parts. That means they are all extremely fragile and extremely difficult to clean up after snipping. You’ll notice in the following photos that some parts look a little bit mangled or “chewed up”. That was me trying to clean off nubs.

And while I didn’t technically break any of them, I came close. Some of the connectors got bent out of shape, and I had to do my best to straighten them out (and in some cases, use a bit of glue to make sure it all stayed together).

Anyway, let’s talk a bit about the actual build. You actually create a fully shaped out of inner frame parts, to which you first attach the face:

Interesting that its face shield has grill marks in it. It reminds me a bit of the Blazing Gundam in that way. We also get two green decals, which of course signals that there will be two green lenses applied over them.

A few more observations:

• The eyes are strangely hard to see unless the lighting is just right. I’m pretty sure I applied them correctly - I think it’s more to do with the fact that the head is so scrunched up.
• The Exia has a V-Fin, but in what is perhaps a callback to the Grandaddy Gundam, it’s not yellow.
• I really like the shiny green stickers on the front and back of the head. If you look closely, they actually have text on them.
• The yellow bits in the front of the face are two extremely tiny pieces. I came close to losing them several times, and in fact I’m shocked that I didn’t. I don’t think I fit them in as tight as they can go, but my one attempt at cleaning one of them up resulted in one of the prongs dangling around and ready to fall off. I just stuffed them in there and moved on.
• The little grey pieces coming off the sides of the head look a little too much like elf ears.
• The kit comes with two ribbons to embed in the head, but the instructions imply that you’re only supposed to put one on one side of the head. Sure enough, there seems to be a small notch embedded in the left side of the head for the ribbon to plug into, which as far as I can tell is _not_ present on the right side (though it is entirely possible that somehow I missed it). I guess it’ll just have to be asymmetrical, because I ended up losing one of the two ribbons anyway ¹.

I think my build of the head looks lumpy and misshapen. It’s the nature of the beast when dealing with a Real Grade. The head is the smallest part of the body, meaning it’s going to be made of the smallest pieces. You could argue that I could have been more careful, but I tried that at first, and it almost made things worse. This was a situation where the best call was to just get it all together while I had all the parts intact.

Arms

This was difficult at first, but once I got my head wrapped around it, the rest fell into place.

The trick was in remembering which arm was the left one, and which was the right one. This is important, because each arm needs to be oriented in a particular way in order to fit all the parts on. If any of them are positioned incorrectly, you’ll end up getting confused very quickly.

This is the second to last place where we use the bendy plastic ribbons, and this time I remembered to put the backing foil stickers down first:

It’s also the last time we’ll use any green decals and clear green lenses.

Interestingly, we don’t cover up the full inner frame with armor. Some of it peeks out between the layers, which is why I applied a bit of modeling compound for good measure:

Here’s a shot of the finished product. Note that the armor on the upper section is backwards, a mistake that I was (thankfully) able to easily fix.

Shoulder Armor

It’s often true that the shoulder armor on Real Grades is extremely complicated. That’s not the case here. It’s just two half pieces with a cap that goes on top. The only tricky part is that you have to secure the final ribbon in place before adding the cap:

Then you add a little connector in the back for the beam saber, and then you’re (almost) done:

The final step is to take the other end of the ribbon and secure it to the arm:

And now, my friends, the Real Grade Exia is finally complete:

Next time we’ll put it through its paces.