Partly motivated by my ongoing quest to have at least one post a month, I dug through my old pictures yesterday and found what appears to be the complete Iron Kong PK photoshoot I did for my Zoids website a few years ago in full size form. Hark, quoth I, these pictures be nice.

I’ll probably be doing more of this sort of thing if and when I find stuff. Sadly, I resized most of the pics I’ve taken of my motorized Zoids to postage stamp dimensions because at the time, 400×400 was a lot of real estate on most people’s displays. No video of this guy in action for the same reason – this blog mostly exists to cannibalize old content I created that nobody will ever look at again. I kinda want to do a more full-blown writeup about Iron Kong in the future anyway, and that’ll include a video. If any of my Kongs are still working, that is.

Iron Kong PK was a limited release that came out in 2000 and, along with Gojulas the Ogre, which was released at around the same time, very quickly became one of the more sought-after Zoids out there. It looks a lot like the limited Iron Kong Mk-II from the OJR, but apparently the red isn’t exactly the same and there are a few other minor color differences, as well as the stickers being NJR designs, of course. PK, as I didn’t find out until the HMM version came out if I’m honest, stands for “Prozen Knights”, tying this version to the Chaotic Century anime.

As you can see here, the kit comes with some really nice unique sticker designs; this was particularly noteworthy at the time because the NJR kits tended to come with an endless, monotonous deluge of the exact same caution markings that often didn’t even fit anywhere on the kits properly.

Probably the most pleasant surprise for me when I finally got my hands on this kit in 2013 was the color of the armor. Every picture I’d ever seen online made it appear as though the IKPK was almost pink, which made it pretty much impossible for me to justify buying one. Turns out the PK isn’t pink at all, but actually a very nice shade of red. I tried to capture it in my pics, but you be the judge of whether it looks good.

The main selling point of the PK for me, though, was the weapons. I’ve always been in love with that big beam cannon, and at the time, it was basically impossible to get the parts for it. It came from the OJR Empire Custmize Set (no, this isn’t a typo) and had otherwise only been included in the aforementioned Ltd Mk-II.

One of the few things Hasbro did right later in the OAR was to mass-release this weapon along with their version of Iron Kong, so I finally got to build what I still consider to be my ultimate version of Iron Kong, but I’ll have to save that for a later blog.

Sadly, as you can see, the canopy doesn’t close properly and it looks kinda crappy from some angles. Looking at this now, I still might go back and fix it, but by the time I finally got my hands on this kit, it was already sort of “vintage”, and I typically don’t modify vintage Zoids – whatever manufacturing flaws they have I consider to be part of what the kit is like in its “real” form. Either way, maybe I just got a bum version, but I doubt it – I’m pretty sure I have the same problem with other Kongs, so Tomy’s original mold was probably warped by the time the PK came out.

And now for the really good news – the Days of No Time are over, so I should be able to snap some pictures of more recent builds and maybe also some vintage Zoids in the coming weeks and update more regularly again. I’m not going to pretend there’s going to be any regularity to any of this – I’ll probably get too excited and then blow my wad within a few weeks, only to run out of stuff to post again. If I was smart, I’d say one new blog every two weeks because that’s a schedule I can actually keep up, but if I was smart, I also wouldn’t spend most of my disposable income and free time on plastic robots.