Sinanju: Buildup Part 1: Torso

And here we go with my review-as-I-go with the Sinanju!

Box open. Let’s rock.

The cockpit is, like in the Unicorn, molded in clear plastic. Green this time rather than pink though. I think it’s a rather neat bit, especially considering you can’t see 90% of it when you assemble the model.

When I first started building the torso I noticed that they’ve worked in quite a large amount of articulation. It could bend back and forward and side-to-side. More on this later…

The assembly of the beads on the waist is a solid plastic part, covered in a metal spring, then covered in the plastic pieces. It’s pretty nice and easy, but it’s not painless… You have top trim two sprue marks on every bead. One one of them I managed to cut my thumb open… Ouch.

I also found the fully assembled thing rather difficult to attach to the completed torso, as you really could only push on the beads, which were covering the metal, which was covering the plastic, which is what you actually had to insert into a plastic piece on the back of the Sinanju. Basically it took a bit of fidgeting to get inserted all of the way in since pushing on the beads didn’t give me a whole lot of force.

And here we have the completely assembled torso! As you can see, without any gold on this guy it doesn’t look incredibly impressive… But I think that will change as I continue.

Now, as for what I mentioned about the torso articulation, the giant black piece that is covered by the beads is all one solid piece, and thus it eliminates all of the articulation of the inner frame. It sort of makes me wonder why Bandai made the articulation in the first place… Perhaps this is somewhere I might look for modding prior to painting this guy.

A few notes on the final assembly. The cockpit mechanism is lovely, however I checked to make sure I didn’t assemble the it incorrectly, because as you can see in the second pic above, there’s a noticable gap under the piece on the chest with the crest (It turns out I DID assemble it incorrectly…  Fixed torso is in Part 3). Also of note is that the beads tend to look uneven… I can fix it by arranging them, but tragically when they’re just chilling out there, it doesn’t look amazing.

Complaints aside, this is still a piece of hotness though… Heading to the head and arms next!