BLOGGIVERSARY SPECIAL: ROB's MARUI ULTRA MACH NO.2 BIULD

Woodsy,

Happy Birthday!

Here is my latest vintage Japanese SF model, dating (I think) from the early 1970s. It’s the “Ultra Mach No #2” by MARUI, an obscure company that had a small line of weird SF kits back in the day, including the infamous “Ultramobile,” a blatant ripoff of the Captain Scarlet SPV.

Ultra Mach No #2 is your typical SF toy model of the time, a streamlined flying vehicle with a clockwork motor and giant wheels to make it zoom across the floor - the original kit had options for flying the vehicle on a zip line, but I left out those parts. As was usual for these kits, the finished model looks very little like the box art.

A small model, maybe 4” long when finished, but it evokes that old-school SF design style I always liked. I mixed my own metallic blue out of silver and blue paints, and I think it came out fairly well.

Most of the supplied decals didn’t fit on the model in any reasonable way, so I grabbed some misc ones from the leftovers box.

Scalemates has most of the MARUI Ultra Science models bunched together under one listing - understandable as the kits look remarkably similar upon first glance - but there were probably half a dozen different vehicles offered in this line. 

To make matters more confusing, MARUI liked to reissue the same kit every few years under a new name and with a different box art, so a definitive list of this line would be hard to compile. Most of these kits also came with a full-sized, missile-firing secret spy wristwatch, which I did not assemble.

Rob C

USA