Gundam Gashapon Assembly Guide

Agustus 15, 2019

Gundam Gashapon Assembly Guide

Gundam Gashapon Building Guide

Greetings everyone~ Today I'll show you some guide to build a Gashapon.

What's a Gashapon ?

Gashapon (ガシャポン), also called gachapon (ガチャポン), are a variety of vending machine-dispensed capsule toys popular in Japan and elsewhere. "Gashapon" is onomatopoeic from the two sounds "gasha" (or "gacha") for the hand-cranking action of a toy-vending machine, and "pon" for the toy capsule landing in the collection tray. "Gashapon" is used for both the machines themselves and the toys obtained from them. Popular gashapon manufacturers include Tomy, which uses the shortened term gacha (ガチャ gacha) for their capsule machines, and Kaiyodo. In the United States, "Gashapon" is a registered trademark of the Bandai Company, and gashapon are generally referred to as blind box sets. The gashapon model has been adapted digitally into numerous gacha video games such as mobile phone games and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs).

This time I'll try to assemble a Gundam Gashapon. Which is a RXF-91A Gashapon from Gundam Gashapon Senshi NEXT Vol.10. (If you don't know what it is, search at Google / Gundam.wiki).

Gashapon Senshi NEXT Vol.10 (I'll build is the first from left one)

Before I Start, let me remind you to KEEP IT OUT OF CHILDREN! This gashapon is quite small (smaller than a palm of my hand) so kids might try to to 'something' with this thing, you.... no.... WE defiently don't want anything bad happened to them. ~~Getting a new gashapon is easy, but happiness or even life is a different matter.~~

You have been warned!

This Gashapon is made of Rubber and plastic (for the joints). you may need extra tools like Model kit plastic nipper / Cutter, Although you can build this with your bare hand...... but not as neat as you build with the extra tools mentioned earlier.

Contents of the Gashapon + Model kit Nipper at the bottom

From the picture above, you can see the contents of this gashapon. As for the small grey-ish plastic runner, that is for the joints (Body-Legs + Shoulder-Body Joints). that parts ARE SOILD, which is why I recommend to use nipper to assemble it. I have tried to build it with my bare hands, my finger hurts in the process.

You can go straight to assembling the gashapon. BUT since most of its parts are made of rubber, there might be several bent parts like the ones below :

But this isn't your fault, these are the common issues for Rubber Gashapons. If you're dislike it, there's a way to fix it!

How? Simple!

PUT THEM IN THE BOILING WATER!

WHAT?

I'm not kidding, just put them in the boiling water for around a minute, then dry it with tissues and manually fix the bent parts. This method won't harm the gashapon. U~~nless you do something stupid.~~
By the way, I put them in the boiling water using a clean ~~obviously~~ coffee filter.

Here's the results :

As you can see, some bent part has already (at least slightly) straightened. Now here comes the hard (literraly) part, which is assembling the joints. separate each joints from the runner, you'll get 5 joints in total which consists of : 1 T-shaped joint, 2 non-hollow round-pegged joint, and 2 hollow round-pegged joint. assemble each hollow round-pegged joint to the 2 non-hollow round-pegged joint. these joint are very hard to assemble with bare hand, one wrong move and it can jumped out of your hand and dissapears OR you're hurting your fingers with it.

since these parts are small, I recommend to put them between 2 solid and flat surface. In this case, I USED THE DOOR~ (it worked anyway~)

You can also use 2 Tables to assembe them~ in the end, CREATIVITY MATTERS~

Result after using the door for assembly

Then put each joint to the 2 arm sections (shoulder to be precisely)

Now the arms are done, time to asseble the legs. this time is quite easy, just put the legs into the T-shaped joint and puth the waist part above that joint (like a sandwich). if you're done it should be like this :

Next is to assemble the body, just do the same as you did while assembling the waist (sandwich method), however it might be quite hard because the legs move so often during the process.

After that just put the arms into the body. Now were goint to assemble the head, just put the 'horn' (V-fin for gundam fans) into the head (just like in the picture below).

With this, the body of the gundam is complete. The last step is to assemble the backpack and the accessories (Weapon + Shield). each Gashapon's backpack has different assembling method, so you need to see the Gashapon image for reference (the easiest way is to see the paper that comes with the Gashapon).

Sometimes you'll see several defects on the Gashapon, this mostly caused during the production method. Sometimes old gashapons will also losing it's colour as time passed by, in this case, the eyes paint are starting to peeled off.