Yikes, has it really been this long since the last time I posted a HMM build? About time, then.

When this kit was announced at the end of 2016, I was giddy like a schoolgirl. Not that I’d ever cast doubt on the superiority of the original 80s Zoids designs, but the Storm Sworder was definitely one of the good ones to come out of the NJR in the late 90s/early 00s, and given how rarely new HMM kits come out anymore, they’re pretty much always good news these days. Needless to say, this one immediately jumped to the front of my queue when I got my hands on it.

Now as you might suspect based on Kotobukiya’s official build pics, the kit comes molded mostly in metallic silver, and if you know anything about Kotobukiya, I don’t have to tell you that it looks repulsive. The dark parts are in a really nice charcoal color, not entirely black, though I did ultimately paint them that way. There’s also a bit of missing color separation, and the only pistons that are separately molded in gold/silver are the small ones on the legs, everything else needs to be painted. I’m just summing up the colors here for those of us who don’t paint, I was really never not going to entirely paint the kit. It definitely needs a bit of detail work done to look box accurate, and don’t expect the metallic silver to look like the photos – that’s been painted.

Given Kotobukiya’s propensity for excessively tight parts fit (and it’s in full effect here, more on that later), I had to think about how I was going to get this one done. Once you snap something together on a Koto kit, it stays together, so post-weathering disassembly for topcoating wasn’t going to happen.

What I decided to do was, I went through the instructions page by page and cut/trimmed all the parts as if I was going to snap build. But I just used this to test fit a few things here and there and figure out what pegs needed to be masked, which joint parts would be completely hidden and could therefore be left unpainted, or what could be snapped together before priming. Then I primed all the dark parts black and the grey parts white.

The base coating was a simple affair since I decided not to do any pre-shading. I was tempted because of those big panel lines on the wings, but there are also lots and lots and lots of smaller panel lines all over this kit, and to be honest, I just had no idea if I could pull it off. I also figured that what I had planned would ultimately give enough unevenness to the surfaces to make them look believable and/or the pre-shading would get buried to the point where it becomes invisible and turn out to be a waste of time – again. That’s happened to me before. And pre-shading does take me forever.

So no pre-shading. I also actually didn’t paint the black parts at all, I just did everything straight on the primer. First I clear coated them with Tamiya X-22 Clear, then I applied the waterslides where needed, then another clear coat over them. Yes, this kit comes with waterslides, and besides, as an old-school Zoider, I really can’t see how you can not have at least a Zoid’s EZ/RZ model number and affiliation insignia on it. Don’t talk back to me, you know I’m right.

Anyway, next I drybrushed the black parts with Tamiya chrome silver as I’ve done a million times before, followed by Gunze rust. I’ve been meaning to try this ever since I accidentally did it on the RX 78-2‘s gun; it definitely produces a more random and believable worn look than just one color.

The pistons are all painted with Tamiya’s titanium gold and chrome silver, and mostly hand brushed – as mentioned above, only the small ones on the legs are molded separately, so all the others are painted over the black primer.

I briefly considered adding a filter to the black to brighten it and bring it a little closer to the original charcoal color, possibly add some additional streaking like I did on the grey, but ultimately I liked how it looked and just left well enough alone. Sometimes you gotta know when to stop, y’know. The matte topcoat ended up giving sort of a greyish quality to the color anyway.

The blades and the caps were painted gunmetal, drybrushed chrome silver and rust, then gloss coated. I really wanted them to pop against the matte finish of the rest of the kit, so I used gloss even though on metallics, it ends up giving them more of a glazed look than the actual reflective quality of the metallic paint. The result here is… okay, but I think semi-gloss is the way to go with metallics. The blades definitely needed to be topcoated because they’re moving parts, and to be honest, I’m a bit anal about finishing everything off with a topcoat in the end.

The grey parts, as tends to be the case with the lighter colors on my builds, took a lot more steps. Now you’re going to have to bear with me because I do want to write this all down in case someone wants to know how I got the parts to look this way, but unfortunately, I only took one single WIP shot when I was almost finished. So if you’re not interested in the minutiae of my weathering process… oh, who am I kidding, you’ve already scrolled down to the pictures anyway. So here goes.

The first thing I did, obviously, was prime all the metallic silver parts white and base coat them with Tamiya’s Light Grey. After hand painting the black detail with Revell’s black acrylic paint (because I didn’t have anything else on hand, and I swear I’m never using this garbage again) I gloss coated everything, followed by the decals and another gloss coat. Then I assembled the various sections of the kit and moved on to what the incomparable Foxx of the Modelmaking Guru Youtube channel calls a “gunk wash.” At least I think he’s the one who coined the term. It’s a pretty simple technique that produces really cool looking results. All you do is cover everything in oil paint straight from the tube with a brush, then wipe it off with a cotton cloth. Simple as that. It’ll tint the parts slightly (which is why it’s important to get it everywhere, otherwise you end up with obvious differently colored spots like I did in some places here) and stay in all the panel lines and recesses, looking like extremely realistic accumulated grime and producing slight shading effects here and there. The only downsides to it are that you’ll make a god-awful mess (do NOT do this without gloves), and it takes like five days to dry and cure.

I used Abteilung 502’s smoke for this step; Foxx swears by a color called Starship Filth which I ended up using later on during this build. Why not right away? Because I couldn’t get my hands on a tube until a few weeks later, but that’s a story for another day. Smoke looks good too.

I also noticed during the wiping off process that you can actually get all sorts of interesting effects if you don’t wipe the paint off completely, and it reacts differently to different surfaces; some parts of the wings weren’t as slick and glossy as others, and it ended up looking pretty cool. I’ll be doing more experimenting with this for sure.

I think I actually only waited three or four days until I moved on to the drybrushing; I figured it wouldn’t damage the gunk wash and the oil paint would still have enough time to cure properly before the clearcoat if I waited another day after the drybrushing.

First, I went over all of the raised edges and ridges with the same light grey I had originally painted the parts with. They had been darkened by the gunk wash, so the light grey was now exactly the right color to add highlights and just bring out the shapes a bit more. The effect is subtle, but it’s one of those things that you’d notice if it was missing.

Next I drybrushed scratches along the more exposed edges and on some surfaces. Here’s where I had to start thinking of what I was doing as basically classic airplane weathering. Most of the wear and tear on the Storm Sworder’s surface would be caused by airflow, so it all needed to be in that direction, and the sections facing forward needed to have more damage to them. I started with chrome silver and rust on a large number of surfaces and then added more with gun metal on what I thought would be the most exposed areas. The idea here wasn’t that there would be paint chipping off; the grey is meant to be bare metal, and it’s just scratched, not chipped.

Next I added some rust streaks. On the Gundam Mk-II, I just used watered-down india ink for this and I was happy enough with the effect because I’d never pulled off that kind of streaking at all. But if you look at rust streaks in real life, they tend to vary in color; they’re often reddish brown around the edges and darker in the middle. So what I did this time is that I first brushed on broader streaks with Vallejo’s dark rust “model wash” and then added thinner accents with india ink, mostly in the center of the rust-colored streaks. As with the multiple colors for drybrushing, the second step on top of the first added a bit of randomness to the parts that made everything look more believable.

Finally, of course I had to have some of my patented drybrushed heat streaking around the jet intake vents. I’ve been doing that since my first weathered build, and… well, if it ever made sense, then it was on this kit.

At this point I plugged all the sections of the body together to give the weathering a good eyeballin’ and decide what needed to be touched up. This was also the only time I took a picture during the entire process, so… here it is.

For some reason, looking at photos sometimes makes me realize mistakes I don’t see when I have the actual kit in front of me. In this case, the fact that those rust streaks on the throat didn’t look very good. So I fixed those and a whole bunch of other things before I took the kit apart into its sections again and gave it another clear coat of Tamiya X-22 before the final weathering step, which was an oil wash.

I had meant to do this pretty much from the start because I figured it would be a good way to add some more subtle streaking, and so some of the weathering I did up to this point looked a bit garish – I didn’t mind being rather bold because I knew the final wash would knock it all back a bit, serving as a filter.

After a bit of testing on plastic spoons, I settled on a mix of about 80/20 Abteilung 502 Starship Filth and Ghost Grey. As nice as Starship Filth looks (and it really is an awesome color, I immediately ordered four more tubes of the stuff), it looked too intense for what I was going for here and needed to be brightened a bit. I also used maybe 90% thinner. The panel lines were already done at this point, after all, so I was really more interested in just a bit of color adjustment and additional streaking.

So I slopped this thin mix all over all the grey parts. With Abteilung’s fast dry thinner, this only takes a few hours to dry, but that gives you plenty of time to manipulate it. One thing I definitely needed to watch out for was pooling; since I was doing this for the first time, I didn’t have a very firm handle on how much I needed to apply, so I probably put on more than necessary and it pooled all over the place. I was going to mess with it more, though, so that wasn’t a problem at all. During the entire drying time, I went back over all of the parts several times with a stiff, frayed brush, damp with thinner, always brushing in the direction of the air flow, to produce these thin, subtle streaks you can now see all over.

This was terrifying at first. I’d been working on the kit for weeks at this point, and all the plastic spoon testing in the world doesn’t really tell you what something’s going to look like on the real deal. I realized quickly, though, that oil paint on acrylic gloss coat is possibly the most forgiving medium I’ve ever worked with. In fact, I sometimes had to be careful not to just wipe it all off again. You can really just keep brushing away until you get the effect you want. With wetter paint, the streaks will be wider, as it dries, they get thinner, almost down to the individual bristles of your brush. If something doesn’t look right, add thinner or more wash and start over. You just have to take your time and pay attention to what’s happening so you get the paint when it’s behaving exactly the way you want it to. I’m super-happy with how this turned out – I expected from the start that it would be the step that really sells everything, and it ended up doing just that, smoothing out the color scheme and adding the last bit of unevenness to everything that it needed to look real. But as I said, since I’d never tried this before, I was more than a little anxious, so getting exactly the result I’d hoped for was supremely rewarding.

And that was it for the grey. I just had to wait for another 72 hours until the wash had dried and I could matte coat it with Vallejo’s matt varnish. And like on the Mk-II before, I painted on the lights/cameras/whatever after the matte coat to make sure they stayed shiny – along with the pistons, which I masked before the matte coat. The only actual clear orange parts on the kit are the eyes and the ones on the legs, everything else needs to be painted on. As per usual, I did clear (orange in this case to match the clear parts) over silver for this.

The final weathering touch was the eyes; I went back to my Gun Sniper to see what I’d done there. The cracks seemed a bit much for present purposes – the eyes are just too small, plus I wasn’t really going for the battle damaged look. But I did like the sponged-on light grey, so I did that again – with a twist this time. I also used a toothbrush, at first to basically drybrush on some grey scratches in the direction of the airflow, but I quickly realized the much more convincing effect was accomplished by wiping into the sponged grey with the toothbrush to make it look a bit streaky. Then I clearcoated this part with X-22, and that wrapped up the paintjob.

Poseability, as you can see, is serviceable, but not too crazy. I’d say you can get just about any pose you’d reasonably want with a pteranodon, but it won’t do anything unusual. The neck is just one solid piece, and the tail also doesn’t really bend much despite being jointed.

While the kit doesn’t come with the display stand depicted in these photos, it does include an adapter to pose it in this horizontal flying pose. I ended up liking this much more than I expected, and the adapter, mercifully, doesn’t fit too tightly. I still inserted a piece of paper tissue to avoid having it scratch the paint, though. I really wish they had come up with a way to display the kit without the adapter. For the more upright poses, there’s a polycap near the rear thruster that fits onto the peg on the display stand, but what you see here only works with the adapter, and it’s obviously not serviceable for painted kits.

And of course there’s also the fact that it’s ridiculous that you have to buy the base separately – I can’t imagine anyone displaying the kit without it. On the flipside, though, I have to say Kotobukiya’s bases are at least better than Bandai’s old ones. I haven’t tried the new Bandai action bases yet, but Kotobukiya’s (this is the “Flying Base Neo”) have ratcheted cylinders instead of Bandai’s screws to hold everything in place, which is preferable for a number of reasons I probably don’t need to explain.

Anyway, some tightness issues notwithstanding, switching the kit to flying mode works really well. The legs actually clip into the hip parts on top so it looks nice and even.

Another one of the kit’s gimmicks is that it can do this landed pose where you fold out the little “arms” on the wings. This looks stupid in every picture I’ve seen of the kit, but in real life, I actually quite like it. Not that I’d display the kit like this, but it’s oddly cool and also works really well – I had no balance issues at all.

You can swap out the claws on the wings for these guns pictured here – I figured it made more sense to use them in the landing pose because they have this weird ski thing at the bottom that looks hilariously out of place when the Zoid’s in flight. Not difficult to just leave that out if you want to use the guns, though. And yes, that’s my go-to mix of red brown and red I used for the stripe there, thanks for asking. And of course the camera’s painted on with clear orange over silver.

I also did my most detailed paintjob on a pilot figure yet. I still suck at miniature painting and this pilot will basically never be visible, but to be honest, I’m pretty happy with it. I just painted the visor and the visible part of the face a different color this time – unfortunately the blue of the visor came out so dark that it barely contrasts with the black (which I really should’ve known, it’s not like I’ve never used Tamiya blue before), but just that little dab of flesh color on the face makes a huge difference in selling that this is a dude in a helmet. In fact, I had so much fun painting this guy that I’m now toying with the idea of trying my hand at some Warhammer miniatures. We’ll see.

Overall, if I’m honest, the kit’s a bit of a disappointment. As far as looks go, it’s excellent, of course – it adds a ton of detail to Tomy’s original version, improves the proportions and just generally looks sharper and more aggressive. But there are a lot of cut corners here. One is the aforementioned lack of poseability in the neck and the tail, which isn’t too big of a deal for me, but there are also hollow parts showing, especially around where the neck attaches to the torso, that are just ridiculous. You’d expect this on a motorized Tomy kit from the 80s, but not the latest HMM in 2018.

My other big gripe is the tightness of the parts fit. I’ve never been this thorough about inspecting the parts before I painted and masking tons of pegs, and yet I still ended up with unsightly gaps on the legs and wings, and I practically destroyed the tip of one of the feet trying to get the two halves to snap into each other. The “armpit” flaps under the wings needed some serious sanding just to attach and keep them somewhat mobile, and the entire Zoid core section isn’t even in there because it scraped against the inside of the torso so hard that all the paint immediately came off. Oh, and there’s also a gimmick where the thrusters on the back extend, but mine never will because the paint is enough to make them completely stuck.

In other words, if you want to paint this kit and keep all its gimmicks working, you’re going to be doing a lot of sanding and other modding. But a lot of this you don’t realize until you’re snapping it together, and then it’s too late.

I’d still recommend the kit if you like the look of it and you’re thinking about buying it, but it wouldn’t exactly be the first thing I’d suggest if you don’t know which HMM Zoid to buy next – there are definitely better options.

Of course I’m just happy that Kotobukiya’s still making Zoids kits, and you can be sure I’ll keep buying every single one of them even if they’re flawed. But it kind of seems like once they’d made sure this one would look cool enough in pictures, they cut the R&D budget and threw the money at those creepy Frame Arms Girls kits instead.

As for my paintjob, I’m about as happy as I’m going to be with my own work. All the new things I tried worked out exactly the way I wanted them to, and I generally managed to be a lot less sloppy and more controlled with my weathering. There are still mistakes that I couldn’t fix anymore once I’d noticed them, but they’re mistakes that I know how to avoid in the future, so I’ve learned a lot from this build, and I certainly had fun.