About - Dalong.net

About Dalong.net

Since it opened in 2003, the site has been updated every single day, without a break, right up to today.
Dalong.net is a non-commercial personal site. I build every kit, take every photograph, and write every review myself.
Every retail and Premium Bandai Gunpla kit released to date has been reviewed here.
Alongside those, a large number of other Bandai kits and most Kotobukiya kits are covered as well.
Every review follows the same structure: runners, manual and parts diagrams, followed by photos of the finished kit and my assessment.

For more than twenty years, visitors from around the world have asked for a translation. After six months of work, the English edition — with every page translated — opened on 19 August 2026.
To get past the limits of browser translation, more than 10,000 HTML pages were translated in advance using Claude Sonnet, the best translation AI available. (It cost a great deal.)
For translation and search, I built a database holding the name, release date and price of every kit. It even covers 326 kits that are missing from Bandai’s own official site — Dalong.net has the complete record.
English-speaking Gunpla fans can now read the reviews in comfort.
A Chinese edition was considered, but tracking down the correct Chinese name for every kit proved difficult, and since I do not read Chinese I had no way to check the results. It is still under review, but for now it is on hold — far too many kit names came out wrong.

I am an ordinary office worker living in Korea. I have never made detailed personal information public, and I do not think who I am matters much. I am simply a fan who loves Gunpla, the same as you.
I started building Gunpla in 1981 and have kept at it ever since, so it is fair to say my life has been a life spent with Gunpla.
People often assume I work in the model kit industry, but my job has nothing to do with it. For many years I have worked as an engineer at the Korean office of a technology company headquartered in Silicon Valley.
My current work is automation programming using AI — mainly automating the design and simulation of electronic hardware such as semiconductors and mobile devices.
The redesign, the translation, the search and the database behind Dalong.net were all built with Claude AI. Apart from building, photographing and editing, most of the work that produces this site is automated.
Working for an American company for so long means I get by in English, and I travel to the United States often. (Mostly San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Orlando.)

Even the best AI produced plenty of mistranslations in kit names and hobby terminology. Writing the code to correct them took over two months on its own, and some errors almost certainly remain.
Mobile suit names and character names are the worst offenders — now and then the AI renders one as something else entirely. (That one is not my doing.) If you spot a mistake, I would be grateful if you let me know at the address below.
I receive a great deal of mail from all over the world and cannot reply to every message, so I hope you will understand. I answer only the ones I judge to need a reply.