Perfect Grade Unicorn Gundam: Build Progress Week 2

Welcome back to our PG Unicorn Gundam mini-series! Sunday night marked 14 days of building, and with the completion of the legs, we are now halfway there.

Here are the lessons learned from this week’s building sessions:

A little every day goes a long way

Last week, my goal was to build for one hour every day. I did not get there, but I’m happy to say that this suggestion made for a great guideline. Even if I didn’t build for an hour every day, I worked on the kit for at least 10 minutes every day. Sometimes I’d start cutting out pieces, cut myself or have trouble snapping something in, and just table it for the night. Other times I’d have a marathon session of 1.5 hours of tireless building! With the legs, there were a lot of steps that were duplicates, and everything was easier the second time around.

This goes to say that as long as I approached the building table each day with the goal of working for one hour, it all evened out. It wasn’t so much the amount of progress I made each day as the fact that I was committing to this project daily that made the difference. Honestly, this is less Gunpla 101 advice than it is life advice for any longterm goal—dedicate a little bit of the day to it, every day, to get into the mindset of prioritizing what matters most to you.

Don’t look ahead!

Sometimes I would get in this trance where I finished a step and looked at the next step, and then the next, and turned the page… and just completely lost my motivation. “Ten more pages, all for the legs?” I’d exclaim to John before getting up to take an anime break or something. A Perfect Grade is such a massive undertaking—22 hours according to our friend and contributor Emily—so just the sheer number of instructions (over 60 pages!) can be overwhelming.

Have you ever seen those cheesy ‘90s Gunpla commercials where Americans boast about how few hours it took them to build a Gunpla model? Well, this ain’t that. I have to keep reminding myself that a PG is a marathon, not a sprint, and to look no further ahead than the next step!

The return of the God Hand

On Friday, our God Hand replacement arrived just in time for a weekend of building. I used this Amazon link and the nippers I got are indeed official and not a knockoff. (One of the sure signs that this is legit: the holographic foil seal.)

Only… I haven’t opened them yet!

I couldn’t imagine building without my trusty God Hands, but in the time I didn’t have them I got very accustomed to my Gundam Planet Premium Side Cutter. They create a rougher cut and can’t be used alone—I always need to slice off the excess with my X-Acto knife. But once I got into the one-two routine of nippers then knife, I really loved the clean finish. And after breaking my first pair of God Hands, maybe I’m a little gun shy about breaking this pair, too.

I’m sure that as soon as I do get them open, I’ll be back to relying on God Hands for everything—they offer the most precise and cleanest cut out of all the nippers we’ve tried, and with the least amount of effort. Just check out our review.

Another week down, and about 50% more PG Unicorn to go! Here’s to another week of productive building, and stay tuned for the Week 3 update next Monday!

See previously: Perfect Grade Unicorn Gundam: Build Progress Week 1