This is the last of the three resin kits I recently got, the 1/100 MSN-04II Nightingale from SMS Workshop. Its one massive Gundam kit for a 1/100 scale and is pretty heavy.
The box is made of heavy duty cardboard and has a large SMS Workshop label and a picture of the Nightingale.
Opening the box, we get the manual, glossy color photos and some the decals. Unwrapping some of the bubblewrap gets us to layers upon layers of parts bags until we get to the bottom with the extra large pieces wrapped in bubblewrap.
In total, the box contains 5 parts bags and 10 bubblewrapped parts that contain either a single extra large piece or a few large pieces wrapped together.
The manual is clearly printed and the photos are nice and glossy. it comes with some water slide decals and metal decals; included with one of the parts bags. And like the Gerbera Tetra it come with a serial number card.
Quality of the pieces are pretty good. Surfaces are smooth with little to no imperfections.
The propellant tanks are made of plastic pipes and the only metal pieces included are the spring and rings for the piping/hosing around the waist.
Pour plugs for the extra large pieces vary from quite small and narrow to large and flat.
The large pieces mostly have small pour plugs.
Medium size pieces have small pour plugs mostly located in hidden places after the build.
Small pieces also have small pour plugs.
Now, despite the good quality of the cast on the surfaces, bad molding can't be avoided. Some are jagged edges, some are flash where the rubber molds meet, while some are areas that has a bit of patching added.
Some more bad molding happened on the small boosters where the molds got badly aligned. One of the boosters also had a huge bubble that will require more than just filling. One of the pieces was also warped but that can be easily fixed.
There is also quite a bit of thick, hard flash and a few parts had pour plugs that deformed the surrounding area.
Since there is quite a lot of repair work needed for some of the parts, I decided to just remove and clean the pour plugs and flash from the pieces so I can do the dryfitting. Because of the weight of some pieces, I had to do some pinning to completely build the kit without permanently gluing it together. Also, the boosters will not be included in the dryfit build.
First, start off with the lower body. The ball on the ankle just sits on what's suppose to be a socket on top of the foot. It does not lock in, it just sits there. The ball on the hip goes into a socket on top of the legs. Since the ankles just sits on the feet, the extra large propellant tanks and the back skirt are what keeps the Nightingale from falling backwards. Side skirts, front skirts and crotch piece require proper positioning of the legs to fit them in place.
For the upper body, a few pieces are dryfitted separately, like the head, arms, propellant tanks, shield and rifle.
Once the separate parts are dryfitted, the upper body can be dryfitted. Connecting the back pack to the torso requires pinning to support the weight that will be added later. The peg that connect the torso to the waist loosely fits and causes the torso to lean forward. To correct this and add support, I added a pin..
Due to the weight of the wings, I had to put three large pins to add extra support. Pins are also needed to connect the propellant tanks to the backpack.
To completed the dryfit build I moved the lower body to a hangar dio I have since moving lower body requires disassembling it and reassembling it again. Also, due to the weight of the upper body, I installed a support rod to the bottom of the hips as a precaution. The Nightingale comes with a hole pre-drilled for this purpose and I used a wooden dowel with the appropriate diameter and cut to the proper length.
Completed, the Nightingale is about 20" tip to tip of the wings, 15" to top of the propellant tank and 20" from the tip of the back skirt to the tip of the rifle. The hangar dio I placed it on can hold four PG kits and the Nightingale takes up about 3/4 of the space. This is just one massive kit.
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