Anasazi37
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Everything posted by Anasazi37
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The sets in 1/72? Those are small enough that I can probably squeeze them onto a sheet for another run. PM me if interested.
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That is painfully funny. Why would you want to put reversed modex numbers on the other side and compound the problem? Maybe they did that to appease the Bandai executive who thought the original reversal was a good idea and forced the company to defend it on social media.
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That's basically what you do with ALPS printers, too. The white designs are black in digital form, which indicates that you want a "solid" print of that color. Same goes for the metallic inks. Just to indicate how far I'm going to keep my printer alive, I now import cartridges from Japan, where ALPS changed the formulation for white. Something to do with how the most recent printer they made operates at a higher temperature. If you use those cartridges in the MD-5000, the white comes out faded. So, you have to trick the printer into thinking the cartridge is gold or silver foil, which requires more heat. How do you do that? You create cartridge barcodes for one the foils and put them on the white, but since the barcodes are black on silver, it's not easy. I ended up finding a picture of a silver barcode online, redrew it in Illustrator, and dropped that onto a sheet of silver foil address labels that I ran though my laser printer. Problem solved.
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I agree with this statement 1000%. The need for this kind of printing hasn't decreased over the years. It's actually gone the other direction, at least from where I sit as a hobbyist, but maybe there isn't a big enough consumer market for the technology beyond us--until you get to the commercial level. When you look at that class of printers, there's definitely been advances, but it feels like inexpensive color laser printers displaced dry resin and dye sub printers for the average consumer.
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You'd also have to do some color correction to account for artifacts tied to the scanning and background removal processes. Plus, when you remove the blue background, your white decals are now the color of the background and won't print, so you have to figure out how to deal with those (not fun). I've had to get very creative to keep my ALPS printing working, and to track down sufficient ink cartridges. Part of my ability to do so is that I've had my printer for a long time, so I cleared that entry barrier a long time ago when the prices weren't insane. The new printers in the range of thousands of dollars won't work, unfortunately. I spent a lot of time looking into that. They can't hold onto a sheet of paper over multiple print passes. You pass it through once to print white, pick it up, put it back in, then pass it through again to print color. That leads to misregistration, where the color layer isn't aligned with the white layer, because each pass is completely independent. For large designs, you might not notice, but for the scale we work at, you definitely would. I almost bought one until I realized that I'd be dealing with this issue. The only printers I know of that do it "right" these days cost tens of thousands of dollars. I never got a full quote, just a description that they "cost as much as a decent car."
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I've been wondering about the quality of the replacement decals. That looks downright decent. Hopefully this is the last time we get Bandai'd with reversed modex numbers. Bandai hasn't posted any pictures of a decal sheet for the Roy 1S, so this might be a one-off to appease collectors. For anyone who is interested, I still have a few decal sets available from my last run and can do another small run, if needed. $5 plus shipping. Each sheet has markings for up to four valks.
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After designing and producing Macross-related decals for 18 years, I can confirm that you'd make tens of dollars doing so. Maybe if you sold a lot of bootleg sets you could turn a small profit, but I think you'd probably have to bootleg a lot of different sets to make it worth the time and materials investment. That's probably what those guys in China selling sets on eBay are doing. That would be a massive amount of work. It's a great idea, but would require someone with all of the right equipment, and the time, and the talent, and the passion for Macross to do it. The scans are a great foundation, but you can't simply hit the "print" button and make a new set that would be worth using. Because of how the decals are created (usually some form of screen printing), you basically have to redraw everything if you want the designs to come out right, which takes a lot of time. There are some tricks to getting decent prints from scans (even ones that have the blue paper background that has to be removed), but that takes almost as much time to do well. I only reserve that approach for really complex designs where redrawing just isn't worth the effort and I'm willing to live with the degraded quality.
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Wow, that's only marginally better than what some members have experienced with third party sellers on AJ, where boxes are tossed into bags with no protection. I'm betting they pulled the item out of whatever box it came in domestically and just slapped the shipping labels on it. That's scary. Tenso always repacks if they don't directly re-use the domestic box and I assumed Buyee did the same, but I guess not. With that said, I did notice when requesting DHL shipping through Tenso that there's an option to use protective packaging. I've clicked yes every time, even though I thought it was weird that they would ask, because of course they're going to use that kind of packaging, right? Maybe this is what would happen if I clicked no.
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Their alert system works pretty well. I generally create alerts in both English and Japanese, as notifications for the latter tend to get sent out first and sometimes you need that edge to grab a rare/high-demand item. Scored an unopened VF-31S Arad at close to retail that way, at roughly 3am local time. Was traveling for work, couldn't sleep, saw the notification, bought the Arad, and the next day the armor set was announced and the valk price skyrocketed north of $400.
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And at a premium price! Arcadia lists it on their site, with tax included, for ¥38,280. That's a 10% markup. Not terrible, and you get the convenience of ordering through HLJ instead of dealing with shipping to Tenso and then having them ship overseas, but it might give some folks a reason to stop and think about it for a few minutes before purchasing.
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I'm always impressed with your work, @wm cheng. I feel like my decals reach their full potential in your hands. Keeps me motivated to continue making sets available.
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Oven cleaner in a bag does work, but the fumes can be difficult to deal with and the coverage on the parts can vary, so you often have to apply it more than once. For acrylic paint, I just drop the parts in a container filled with classic Windex for a few hours and it does a great job, but it only works on acrylic. That's been fine for my projects, where I might screw up on a part and just want to strip it back down to the primer and start over. I generally use acrylics because they are much safer to work with and much easier to clean up. Hadn't heard of LATA before, will have to give it a try.
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That looks really good! Very happy to see the decals being put to good use!
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Just bought one. Looking forward to having him bash in the head of my VF-1J Hikaru.
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They'll probably continue their pattern of displaying several awesome things we'd all instantly buy, of which they will only release one, for no logical reason. The backlog of HMR prototypes displayed at shows that have never been released is growing pretty long. This is a really fun line, and I hope it's not dying off, but at this point I am skeptical of anything they display. Will we see Max and Milia repaints of the VF-4 because they were displayed at a show last year? Maybe, given that the last release we have is a non-canon Roy VF-4 and repaints are easy, but I don't want another VF-4. I want them to go back and give us the canon stuff they've teased over the years.
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Which year? This one?
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Did Bandai ever reissue IMAI's 1/72 variable Hikaru 1J kit?
Anasazi37 replied to Anasazi37's topic in Model kits
Welcome to MW! I definitely have a soft spot for these original variable kits. Mandarake is pretty strict about their box grading, so even some minor dents or scratches on a kit that is more than 30 years old will cause them to downgrade its condition in a listing. With model kits in particular, given how they are packaged, I've come to accept that there will be damage of some sort. As long as the pieces are intact and the decals are fine, I'm good. It's always nice to see the work of fellow fans, so please post pics of your VF-1A when it's done. -
Appreciate the heads up! Since this is the first DX VF-1 that Bandai has done as a TWE, it will be interesting to see what happens to the price once it starts circulating in the secondary market. Will it hover near retail like the Max 1A because Hayao is a less popular character? Maybe, but the quantities will theoretically be lower than a mass market release, so that might increase its value. As others have said, here's hoping that we don't end up with another Kairos, both in terms of production issues and cost.
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It's surprisingly hard to find, given how iconic it is.
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Much appreciated. I'll have to see if I can find it at higher resolution. It's not in the Macross Variable Fighter Designers Note. At least I didn't see it when I flipped through it again right now.
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Thought I'd share a link to @Corrinald's recent post in the DX thread, where he talks about how he managed to crack open the shoulder
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Yes. A few of us, including @sqidd, ran an experiment recently to see if we could get AE purchases shipped to Tenso. The biggest challenge was filling out their "additional shipping address" form correctly. English translation of your address works best, but one of the three lines they give you on the form doesn't save what you type into it. I think it's the middle one. Cost me about $10 to basically ship something across Tokyo, but I was happy to pay $10 to get the item in to the hands of shipping professionals. You have to submit a support ticket to Tenso if you want them to use DHL, since it's not one of their regular options, but that is painless. For the experiment, we tried formatting our Tenso address a few different ways. All were successful. Mine looks like this, which is based on the Rakuten Global Market version of my address: Address: TSXXXXXX tenso.com, 42-4, Senjyuakebono-cho (all on a single line to avoid issues with AE's address form) City: Adachi-ku, Tokyo Country: Japan Zip Code: 120-0023
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Preorders for all of them have already happened. Those are estimated shipping dates.
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Something like this looks awesome, but is really hard for a vinyl cutter to deal with unless you make it big, on the order of 10-12 inches wide
