Forum - View topicGundam model kits/ legit stores
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gundamlion
 Posts: 48 Location: the Bebop, room of rah, jaburo(choose your fav!) |
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Hey, I'm a huge fan of Gundam and Japanese gundam model kits. A store I used to buy my models from turned out to have some bootlegs, so now I need a new place. http://www.hobbywave.com/ if any one could check this site and tell me if it's legit it would be great. Sorry for asking, but I'm not good at spotting bootleg model kits. As well, it would be great if anyone could tell me of a legit seller of model kits that they know of. Thanks!
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Asako
 Posts: 751 Location: Hawaii |
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Have you tried:
Hobby Link Japan or Hobby Fan? I think Hobby Fan has bootlegs though. |
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Randall Miyashiro
 Posts: 2451 Location: A block away from Golden Gate Park |
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HLJ is by far my favorite Gundam retailer. They also have a decent assortment of books for yen price. If there is a limited edition you might want to order it early since they tend to sell out fast and stop taking preorders as to not oversell an item. I'm just bought the Kalaba colored Zeta 2.0 LE MG which is still available, but might not be for much longer.
HLJ also has a great photo archive for each kit and announces new kits well in advanced. They sometimes take a week or more to process your orders from my experience. My shipment from Golden Week (when they were closed) was just shipped a couple of days ago, but then again they might have had to do some extra work due to taking a week off. |
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EVA fiend
 Posts: 314 Location: Somewhere in the UK. |
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IIRC, bootleg Gundam kits were made by a 'company' that called itself BenDai (as opposed to the legit Bandai company). Those bootleg kits were very badly made, & the quality of the plastic used was shockingly bad. I bought one in Hong Kong many moons ago just to compare them to the legit Bandai kits, & to say that it wasn't worth the time putting the robot 'together' is an understatement.
I had a quick scan of the Hobbywave site, & it seems to sell legit merchandise but I've never used them before so I don't know what their service is like. Like others have already mentioned, www.hlj.com is an excellent site, with excellent customer service IMO. I've used them for nearly 10 years, & I've only ever had one shipment go missing, which they promptly replaced when I queried it with them. |
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Randall Miyashiro
Posts: 2451 Location: A block away from Golden Gate Park |
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I've also noted that the quality of Bandai kits really vary between kits. For example the Gundam Fix ZII seems to have parts constantly falling off, while the Z-Plus in MS mode keeps falling apart. Even though the Fix kits sometimes are listed as 1/44 they are not to scale as my F-91 stands almost as high as my EX-S. Price also is not an indication of quality as the rather expensive GP02 and Re-GZ MG kits are not as moveable as the cheaper Nemo, or EZ8 kits. I highly recommend the 2.0 kits and am looking forward ti the Gelgoog 2.0, since most of the First Gundam MG kits are rather unimpressive. The MG kits are also to scale with the Zaku barely reaching the EX-S' waist.
I wish there were a good site out there with MG or Fix reviews since some of those kits are so good, while others really suck. |
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Subaru19
 Posts: 118 |
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When I was buying Gundam model kits, note this was back in the day when Gundam Wing was on TV and really popular, I actually found them at Toys R' Us. I'm not sure if they would still carry them or what kind of quality they had (I believe they only had the smaller 1/44 models, but again this was a long time ago), but I'm sure they were legit and pretty cool too. |
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