Build Log: Gunbluster

Is there such a thing as too many guns?

Both the Gun Blaster and America have the same answer: No. Definitely not.

The year is 2002. I, a 12-year-old boy, find myself at Toys "R" Us, face to face with this monstrosity. A dinosaur with twenty two cannons strapped to its back, looking mad and ready for war. But alas, my piggy bank is empty. The allowance had run dry.

The year is 2022. I, a 12-year-old boy at heart, see a post on a Zoids Facebook group. In it, someone is selling a bunch of Zoids, including one very loaded, very angry ankylosaurus. The Gun Blaster, or Gunbluster (ガンブラスタ) as it was called in Japan, was finally mine.

The Gunbluster I acquired was not the same Hasbro version I saw twenty years prior. This was the Japanese release, identical in pretty much every way. This version had way cooler box art though.

I built this in my extremely limited free time in the weeks following my son's birth. So I opted to keep it simple:

• Contray to what the box art depicts, the bronze pieces come in flat looking bronze-ish plastic. I painted these with Dspiae bronze with absoluately zero prep work on the plastic. If you look too close, you can see some spots where the paint didn't adhere fully. Most of it turned out just fine though.
• I masked and painted the teeth with the same bronze.
• The guns were painted with Mr. Color Steel, then top coated with Alclad II Matte.
• The rest of the body was panel lined with black Tamiya Panel Line Accent Color, straight on the plastic. I then top-coated the body with Alclad II Flat.

And the results are nice! I think it looks pretty close to the box art. The added bronze teeth really elevate the final look. This is one of those toys I remember always wanting so it's neat to finally have one for my collection.

A month or so later, I finally finished some home office renovations I had started the prior year. One of my favorite pastimes is getting 90% of the way through a project, and then getting distracted by other things. Anyway, part of this renovation included LED light strips on our large desk.

After several hours of managing cables and installing the lights, I wanted to see if they could be used for any sort of model photography. So I slapped that new Gunbluster down, set the lights to orange, and tried to recreate the basic look of the 1999 box art.

A few over the top edits later...

Donezo bunzo. Gunzo blasto.