I’ve been following custom robot kit builder and designer Kallamity for some years now and he has recently taken on the enormous task of building and painting the legendary Five Star Stories Jagd Mirage Twin Towers figure. This is a design like no other, impossibly complex and gravitationally impractical, the top-heavy bot features a huge rocket pack with two towers (hence the name) protruding from the top that double its height.

Unbelieveably there were several different scales of this kit made and I was lucky enough to see one fully built and painted in a toy shop in Osaka once as well as pick up several books featuring the kit whilst on tour in Japan around 2000. The one Kallamity is building is the huge 1/100 scale version with over 500 pieces, all which have to be glued rather than snapped together like regular kits. As someone said in the comments: Difficulty Level: Insanity. Kallamity is a master builder who creates custom robots from scratch though and his method is to assemble the kit whilst adapting and strengthening the pieces as he goes, fleshing out parts that don’t fit with filler and sanding down rough edges.

Additional details are added to areas that don’t feature them on the kit so that it most closely resembles the original drawings and designs from the books. He then disassembles the kit and painstakingly paints each piece, masking out layer upon layer of detail, lastly adding deep line work in the gutters around the hundreds of parts. Watching just one huge piece being shorn of its masking layers takes minutes despite being sped up and edited. The levels of detail are mind-boggling, each piece is an abstract sculpture in its own right. Here are the three parts so far, the unboxing and showing of parts, the initial build and the painting of the rocket pack. Part four should be the main figure and I think he finished the kit three days ago, I’ll add it here once it goes up.

UPDATE: Part 4 – just one more to go, this is a stunning piece of work!