Dummy13 Kit

Welcome to the fifth review of Girlpla Guide Weekly! 

Starting the month of Temu Tat, we’ll be reviewing our first set of tat model kits, the Dummy 13 model kits!

Overview

You might have seen these kits around AliExpress or sold by various different sellers, whether they be called Titan13, T13, Lucky13 or the like. For ease of reference, we’ll be referring to these specific ones by the name that the original creator soozafone calls them, Lucky13, and these ones the Dummy13 kits.

soozafone (sic), otherwise known as Gabe Rosiak (per their website linked below), is the original creator of the design we now know as the Dummy13 printable action figures, dating back to 2023. He was kind enough to release the design under the CC-BY license – for those of you who aren’t copyright lawyers or familiar with this, this basically means that so long as the licensee credits soozafone, they may sell derivative works of their Dummy13 (and any other CC-BY licensed designs). The design was so successful it won Printables’ Award for 3D Model of the Year in 2024.

Aside from their Printables page, he also has a specific website for Lucky13 (and other projects) found here.

Since then, various companies and smaller sellers have produced derivatives of the Dummy 13 design in various ways, some less scrupulously than others, and with variants made to resemble popular characters like Goku and Satoru “broke up with his boyfriend in front of a KFC” Gojo. The reason we’ve included this in the month of Temu Tat is, well, you can find these kits all over Temu and AliExpress because of how easy the design is to get a hold of and create one for yourself.

We, however, are focusing on the Dummy 13 design proper; the faceless humanoid vaguely robotic design. As for our part, we bought like 10 of these to use for basically faceless mooks against whom our girls would have to fight and ended up decorating them to make them designs of their own.

Construction and Engineering

Given the nature of the fact that this kit can be produced by anyone with a 3D printer, we won’t focus on the material at all; with such a variety of filaments, printers and the like out there, it would be a little unfair. (For his part, soozafone recommends the use of PETG filament for printing the Dummy13 designs.)

We will focus instead on critiquing the engineering of the design from our admittedly amateur perspective.

In that regard, the designs are incredibly articulate, rivaling the Machineca template, Quankai Studio’s work and the Mobile Movementesses as some of the most articulate kits we’ve ever reviewed, especially for a design intended for use across any printer that can accept it and accounting for a wide variety of conditions. They are also incredibly easy to assemble; if you happen to buy one of these things printed as runners (soozafone having provided for them to be printed as plates, runners or individual parts), you’d really only need nippers to get them off the runners; no blades, files or glue required.

These kits are also fairly close to 1:12 in scale; while they’re not exactly kits that are compatible with kitbashing (except maybe with other Lucky 13 designs), you can use them as generic mooks or stand-ins given the ease of making (or printing) some of your own.

Aesthetics:

While the design is rather plain – we elected to decorate ours with some spare 30 Minutes Missions stickers and some gem stickers to simulate robot eyes and lights – this is by design. soozafone suggests and even encourages iteration on his work under the CC-BY license, even providing files for feminine bodies and accessories to do so. Depending on the seller, you may even find people having made hats, special accessories or special armor for the kits.

The point is, because these kits are basically wireframes or generic stick figures, you will really need to do a lot of work to make them look impressive, whether it is painting them, adding supplies to them or the like. Do not get these unless you have a general idea of what you’re expecting to make out of them.

Ease of Acquisition:

These, alongside some of the kits we’re reviewing this month, might have the distinction of being the only “free” kits we may ever review. Free in this sense meaning that you won’t need to go buy one or hope for a rerun; as long as you have the CAD files, a printer and filament, you can make your very own Dummy13 kits at home.

Of course, if you’re wanting special designs, such as the ones made of licensed characters, Amazon and AliExpress are your friends, and they may cost anything from pennies to rivaling the most expensive Megami Device kits.

Personal Verdict?

Honestly, soozafone isn’t given nearly enough credit for his work on the Dummy13 kits; open source action figures are just incredibly cool. However, if you’re looking for your model kit fix, maybe look somewhere else; these figures aren’t meant for the same kind of hobbyist as the ones who build Megamis and Sisters, but they’re cool nonetheless.

Overall score: As per our rule established in the GUST Anby review, we will not be scoring these. While Dummy13 kits are sold at retail, it would be unfair to rate them based on the variable quality of a random seller who might be using subpar filament and a crap printer to make a quick buck off someone, as the actual design itself is phenomenal.

Furthermore, as soozafone themselves does not sell these kits at retail (even if he does host some paid models on his site), it would be unfair to rate his design based on the output of other people that they do not have control of the quality of output over.

Up next:

“Lucky13” Skeletons, coming right up!

Tune in next week for the next Girlpla Guide Weekly!