Daughtress Custom

Reviewed by Adam Rehorn

1/144 DT-6800A/C/W Daughtress Custom

Scale: 1/144
Maker: Bandai
Type: Injection Moulded styrene – but more like a resin kit that you’d think!
Aftermarket: a couple of metal pins
Cost: $5-$20 depending who your source is.

This is the completed 1/144 DT-6800W Daughtress Custom doing what it does best – standing there! This kit has next to no poseability and is limited to simple standing for display. Despite its rudimentary nature, the Daughtress builds into a competent looking, if not foppishly-coloured, MS.

During the more than 25 years that Mobile Suit Gundam and its various spinoffs have been produced, several major lessons have been learned by Bandai, the company responsible for kitting every mainstream Gundam model. One of these lessons is that models of the various Gundams themselves tend to sell very well in comparison to models of secondary and enemy mobile suits. This has resulted in two very different, but predictable, outcomes.

The first of these outcomes is that Sunrise began to incorporate multiple Gundams into its MS Gundam stories. (This was doubtlessly at the request of Bandai, who wanted to sell more models, and therefore needed more Gundams to kit!) In the cases of those stories told in ‘alternate’ (i.e. non-Universal Century) universes, this manifests itself by making nearly every major MS a Gundam. While it might seem like cheating, the success of G Gundam’s “All Gundam” concept paved the way for this to be standard practice for the years to come, and the idea is still going strong with Gundam Seed and it’s sequel Gundam Seed Destiny.

The second of these outcomes is that Bandai simply stopped making models of most of the non-Gundam mecha in a given Gundam story. Whereas the earlier Gundam series (MS Gundam, Z Gundam, ZZ Gundam) had plenty of general-purpose ‘friendly’ and ‘enemy’ MS kits, the number of these second stringers seen in later lines is nearly negligible. While this trend has actually started to reverse itself with both the HGUC line of models and the kits from the Seed universe, it was in full effect in the mid 1990s, which is when the Daughtress was put out.

The 1/144 Daughtress Custom, from X-Gundam, is one of a very strange class of kit known as a ‘limited model’, or LM for short. LMs are techincally injection moulded sytrene kits, but they are far different from their ‘mainline’ stablemates. The Limited in LM means that the kit is less poseable, has fewer features and is less refined than other ‘normal’ grade kits of the same line. The LM treatment was generally used to produce models of mecha that only the hardcore fans were likely to want – namely the ‘generic’ mobile suits that so often end up as cannon fodder. LMs were made in smaller numbers than normal kits, and thus they tend to have a price that is out of proportion with their apparent value. However, there are many mecha that only exist in LM form, and it’s better than nothing.

The Kit:

The Daughtress is typical of a 1/144 LM kit. It is moulded in only one colour, contains fairly few pieces and is quite unrefined when compared to normal 1/144 kits of the same timeframe. This having been said, the model can still be built in one of three ways, which is something most Gundams cannot boast. The first option is to build a ‘vanilla’ DT-6800A, the typical grunt version of the suit. The second option is to build a DT-6800C, the command version with a different head comb and an extra comm aerial. The third option is to build a DT-6800W, a heavily armed support type with an A-model head but a large shoulder cannon. This is the version I chose.

The Daughtress comes moulded in a Bluish-purple-grey colour, which is similar to what is shown in the anime screenshots on the front of the box. However, unlike other Gundam kits that technically can look passable even if you don’t paint them, the Daughtress MUST be painted in order to look even half decent.

There are very few parts to the Daughtress, and what would normally be separate subassemblies on a 1/144 kit come moulded together on this one. A perfect example is the lower leg: Normally this is separate from the foot, which mounts to a gimbal in the ankle. On the Daughtress, the foot is MOULDED INTO the lower leg! There’s no articulation at all. The same is true for the shoulder/upper arm and the torso/front/side skirts.

Looking at the parts on the sprues, one gets the impression that the Daughtress is actually more like a resin kit than a traditional styrene one. The kit is solidly cast, with only rough ‘hollow’ spots for joints to fit in. there is only limited surface detail, and much of this is quite soft. In addition, there are no massive snap-fit locator pins; the Daughtress, like all LMs, requires glue to be put together.

This shows what comes in the LM Daughtress’ box. There aren’t a lot of parts, and the lack of full colour moulding is surpising given that this kit came out in the middle 1990s. Oddly enough, there is a full rack of polycaps, although only very few are used!

There is only a minimum of articulation on the Daughtress, and this is confined to the knees, hips, shoulders and elbows. There is nothing fancy, and the kit gives the impresson that it will build into a rather unexciting brick. There are no coloured foil decals with the Daughress either; just some of the horrible self-adhesive type that would be more at home on an older G.I. Joe toy than a Gundam kit.

 

Building the Daughtress:

Unlike many of the normal Gundam kits of this vintage in 1/144, the daughtress is a very simple, straightforward build. There are no transforming gimmicks, and, laudably, there is not one incident of build around on the kit!

There’s not much more to building the Daughtress than gluing the subassemblies together, sanding them smooth and ensuring that everything lines up. All of the subassemblies can be assembled quickly and easily. I had all the subassemblies glued together in a matter of an hour or so. I used Ambroid Proweld, and I was pleased to find that it worked very well with the strange plastic used on the Daughtress. Unlike normal Bandai palstic which is quite hard (and therefore difficult to melt and fuse with glue) the plastic on the Daughtress is fairly soft, and the glue fused the pieces very well.

Sanding was also made easier by the softness of the plastic, and I had all the subassemblies sanded and ready to go in record time. However, the fit of the kit isn’t great, and it took a bit of Tamiya putty to put things right. Due to the nature of the model, the Daughtress needed a number of details re-etched. This was particularly true of the lines separating the upper and lower chest from the ‘stripe’ in the middle. The head also needed a bit of work, and the machine gun was rough as well. Again, the softer plastic used in producing LMs made this job much easier than it normally is on a Bandai kit.

One interesting, and disheartening, feature of the Daughtress was the upper leg section. There was a hole straight through the upper leg, so that it could be attached to the ‘barbell’ in the waist. I’m assuming this was done for reasons of interchangeabilty and cost cutting, but it was a bad idea. While I coudn’t be sure, I got the impression that the hole would actually show through the side skirt armour, and would quickly serve notice on the kit’s low-class origins.

Thus, I cut out a small, round piece of sheet styrene and glued it into place on the outside of the leg. I also sanded down part of the ‘barbell’, to allow the entire assembly to fit inside the skirt armour. This plug needed a lot of filling and sanding, but it was worth it, since you can no longer see a dumb-looking hole in the side of the finished kit’s leg.

Here is a “before and after” shot of the legs. On the right is the ‘before’, with a large hole right through the leg. On the left you can see the patch I made using sheet styrene. This is a good example of how low grade LMs are!

The only other major problem was the gun on the Daughtress’ backpack. This was designed just to be glued into place. However, there was no means of supporting it once it was on. There were no locator pins, and the mating surfaces didn’t meet very well. Thus, I drilled two holes into the cannon mount and inserted some spring steel wire. I then removed the wire and painted around the holes with red paint. While the paint was wet, I held the cannon pack in place, and then pulled it off. The result was a transfer of the hole positions from the cannon mount to the backpack of the mech.

This view shows the two holes in the cannon mount surrounded with red paint. You can see the red on the backpack as well as the ‘holes’ that transferred, partially successfully. The mounting pins I installed really helped to ease the cannon pack installation during final assembly.

With the pin positions lined up in this manner, I drilled holes in the cannon’s base and glued the pins in with Zap-A-Gap CA. Unfortunately, the fit between the gun and the mech still wasn’t great, but I figured that since I was going to paint the base black anyway, it probably wouldn’t show up too badly. The good part is that there’s no way that the cannon pack is going to fall off any time soon.

Another problem with the shoulder cannon was that it came moulded as a solid piece! This meant that there was no opening at the front of the barrel! My original thought was to simply draw on a hole using either Gundammarker or black paint. However, I concluded that this would just look too cheap. Thus, I drilled out the barrel a bit using a small drill. This made a world of difference.

Painting and Finishing:

The Daughtress on the box is a strange inky blue-grey, and I wasn’t very fond of it. However, a search on the internet turned up an alternative scheme. Apparenlty, the shots on the model box are known as ‘alternate company colours’, although how that relates to the story of Gundam X is beyond my understanding. However, this implies that the other colour scheme I found, that of a light blue, medium blue and lavender, was not a ‘company’ scheme, and therefore I assumed that this paint represented a ‘standard’ Earth Forces paint. This not only looked better but is apparently an even more obscure paintjob, so I decided to go with it.

The paint I used is all mixed. The light blue (henceforth known as Daughtress Blue) is a mix of Tamiya XF-2 Flat White, Testors Model Master Acrylic GM Engine Block blue and various greys. It was made hand-paintable by adding a goodly amount of Future floor polish and water, although the paint still dried very flat and was quite difficult to work with.

The lavender colour is one I had left over from either the Relena figure from my 1/100 Serpent Custom or the Miharu figure from my 1/35 Ishtar Mk. II kit. I honestly don’t remember which it comes from, but in either case the colour is very old, and was nearly dried out when I went to use it. Almost unbelievably, I was able to resurrect it and it proved to be a great colour to work with. The medium blue is the lightened MM GM Engine Block Blue I use on all my Gundams.

To add a bit of variety to what is otherwise a rather plain looking mech, I detailed all the thrusters in MM Jet Exhaust and gave them a black wash. I painted both the machine gun and the shoulder cannon in Virsago Black and gave them a black wash as well.

This shows a closeup on the Daughtress’ legs and crotch thrusters. The use of blackwashed Jet Exhaust makes these details stand out on what is otherwise a somewhat plain canvas.

All lines were detailed using my standard black 0.04 Gundammarker. The Gundammarker was really necessary on this kit, as it serves to break up the fused foot/leg and shoulder/upper arm assemblies. Without outlining of some kind, these assemblies would look exceptionally plain and the kit would look like what it is – a cheaply cast lump of styrene.

I coated the entire mech, save the blackwashed areas, in multiple coats of Future. While the Daughtress is a general purpose suit, and probably would have been flat, I just can’t resist a shiny mech. The fact that the Daughtress is also quite rounded helped to justify my decision further. Gloss coat always looks better on rounded surfaces, and the Daughtress’ shield and legs are no exception.To get a really high-gloss shine, I sanded the Future with 6000 and 8000 Grit cloths, and the recoated the mech once.

The effect of using fine sandpaper with Future as a gloss coat is well demonstrated here. Note how smooth the paint looks: this was difficult to achieve because the Daughtress Blue was exceptionally recalcitrant to work with.

I applied one coat of very thin Tamiya gloss over the black washed parts. This essentially serves to ‘nail down’ the wash, and doesn’t make the coated parts much, if any, shinier. The effect of the flat weapons next to the high-gloss mech is pretty neat, and is definitley something I’ll try again.

Conclusions:

The LM Daughtress Custom is not the kind of kit to build if you’re really into effortless modelling or hate painting. It is not a difficult kit by any stretch, but it needs a lot of paint work to be made to look good. If you’re into action scenes or poses, the Daughtress and its other LM kin will definitely leave you disappointed. The best the Daughtress can do is a heroic ‘stand and look good’ pose. Thankfully, that’s usually good enough for me.

I built the Daughtress because I wanted something that was simple to construct but would be fun to paint. In this role, it served its function perfectly. It is one of the fastest MS kits I’ve ever finished, and it made a perfect side project to my Trumpeter 1/144 Su-34.

Despite its simplicty, though, it really wouldn’t be a good kit for someone just getting into modelling, or even into mecha, for that matter. It is an unimpressive little kit, and could turn some neophytes off. As an interesting note, I could not find one instance of this kit being built and reviewed on the internet while I was looking for paint schemes. Apparently, the LMs don’t get built often. Of course, given the nature of the kit, this isn’t surprising!

Still, the Daughtress builds into a nice display piece that certainly has a different visual effect from a traditional Gundam. I’m glad I decided to build it!

This rear three-quarters view highlights the roundness of the Daughtress’ shield and legs, one of the main reasons why it was so nice to gloss. The kit might have been basic, but it was still a lot of fun, and looks good when finished!