Since I’ve started hand-painting HGs this year, I’ve been wanting to do another HG since my critically acclaimed HG Stark Jegan. Well, my family and I visited Gundam Planet for the first time since 2019, in their new location at Hackensack. We were immediately greeted with a bunch of HG Witch from Mercury kits, so I obviously got the HG Aerial, and my dad got the last Lfrith in stock, but I didn’t want to leave with just the Aerial after traveling so far, so I wanted to see if they had I certain kit I’ve been eyeing on, and lo and behold, they did.
The Silver Bullet Suppressor is one heck of a kit and a mobile suit. It comes with a ton of plastic, it’s ginormous, (also just comes with a bunch of spare parts, and the entire function of this mobile suit is to fire just one magazine of the Beam Magnum, each arm existing for each shot, like, jeez.
As for the kit itself, I knew what I was getting into. It’s a 2013 kit with some slight improvements over the original Silver Bullet, but it really needs some TLC to get the kit even standing. The elbow and knee joints are loose, the connection of the right upper arm to the shoulder is bad, the legs like to pop off the hip joint, the backpack is really heavy with all the arms on, and the balancing is terrible with the heels replacing the original feet. However, with the power of double sided tape, I was able to tighten the joints, but trying to get the kit standing on its own was still a hassle, even when I put tape on the soles so it stuck on the ground. Once that was sorted out, the kit looked great, even out of the box, but you know, the entire reason I got this kit was to make it look nice.
Painting: I used Model Air Gunmetal, Dark Gray (and Light Blue for the beam magnum magazine), and Tamiya Purple and Red, and I’m surprised how “clean” the paint job turned out once I cleaned the excess paint out. The purple I used worked very well, so yeah I went goddamn crazy on it painting every thruster purple. Then I panel lined everything, and used a thicker pen to do all the black rectangles. The only stickers I used were the eyes and the white ones by the ankles.
To top it all off, using Mr. Hobby’s Flat Premium Topcoat, I top-coated for the first time! I don’t know how to feel about it, I don’t think I did a great job. While it removes the plastic shine from the kit, looking at it up close, the kit looks quite dusty. I would appreciate some tips on how to topcoat for next time. As for now, I’m calling the kit done, kneeling with its sniper pose, and then I’ll be doing the Aerial!
