Review: Guro Skull Model

The last time I put together a model kit was in elementary school. I remember it was a ship, and it looked hideously ugly. The rest of the time I was playing with Mini 4WD cars, and those are so modular I don’t think they really count as models — you can knock one together in a few simple steps.

Guro is something a small toy merchant makes himself, and apparently there’s intellectual property involved and all that. I saw it was a limited sale at the time, so I put in a preorder. It arrived last November, and when I got my hands on it and took a look…

Holy crap, over 200 tiny parts, detailed down to every joint. Then I looked at the assembly instructions and my whole body got drunk. So it got shelved. Today I finally finished The Witch’s Dinner Party and felt sick to my stomach, so the only thing left was to assemble a model.

I saw someone on X bragging that they finished assembly in 15 minutes. I can tell you that guy is absolutely full of it. It took me almost 3 hours…

Just the head alone took almost an hour.

A few basic impressions:

1. You need to bring your own file. Lots of places need sanding, but the plastic on this model is really soft, so you can sand it smooth however you like.
2. Every joint connection requires you to open the hole with a small drill bit. They left holes in advance, but they’re very rough, and you have to rub them smooth yourself.
3. You need to bring your own 502 glue.
4. It comes with some small magnets. The instructions say you can use them or not — they’re just for reinforcement — but remember not to get the N and S poles mixed up, or it won’t be reinforcement.
5. It takes patience, and sturdy fingers. Damn it, my fingers hurt so much right now.

The finished product is pretty good, though.

After assembling it I found that although there’s a big bag of accessories, most of them are spare joints and various hand gestures — there are even several expressions. Of course, if you want to use them you have to sand each one down individually. Given that I’m already exhausted, I’ll have to save those for next time, and try to strike an elder’s pose…

Finally, I suppose this counts as an ad…

Purchase link: http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=22316128099