MacrossJunkie

A friend had recommended to me to try stretched sprue as well, but I just couldn't get it thin enough while not making the strand extremely fragile. I thought about using the filaments in a light bulb but those are pretty fragile as well and I'd have to deal with broken glass. What I ended up doing was a much simpler solution. I plucked a hair from my head and coated it with some gunship gray and cut it up into smaller pieces. It has a lot more flexibility and tensile strength than plastic or the filament while still being very fine so that worked out best for me in the end. Just an idea if other people are considering adding antenna cables to the masts.

I haven't noticed anything like that on mine. The pieces all seem to match the main body very well.

How did you do the caution stripes on the exit ports of the ARMD and do you think it would be feasible to duplicate on the 1/3000 version? I want to do that on mine but the only way I can think of is possibly making the stripes myself on the computer and printing them out on decal paper.

Oh nice. That's such an easy fix for the rail guns. They must have gotten bad instructions for assembly for all of them to be like that.

Man, I don't know how you managed to get those pieces apart. I tried for a good bit of an hour just trying to take the leg apart to get at the city based on the scans and all I really managed to do was get the gray piece of the front of the leg off, but couldn't get at the screws in the back of the leg. The turret and other piece covering the screws are glued in pretty good and I'm afraid I'm going to stress the plastic or break something entirely if I try any harder. I've pretty much given up on painting the city at this point which I would have loved to do.

Blah, mine has been sitting in NY since Jan 1st and there has been no movement since as far as I can tell... The wait is killing me.

Crap... I just looked at mine and noticed cracks have started to form too. And I was careful to not screw too tight. I only screwed in the disc enough so that the arms could actually hold a toy in place.

Yeah, bare plastic should be okay. I haven't seen the stands mar any plastic surfaces. Just the paints. I was thinking of putting electrical tape on the tips of mine to stop them from damaging the paint applications.

Well, if they only had rights to D7, they wouldn't have been able to make Max or Milia's 22S or the VF-11C since those only appeared in M7 as far as I can recall. So if they really wanted to, I'm sure they could make Milia's 1J as it appeared in M7.

I'm not sure what it is with the clear tips or what they're made of, but they don't so much leave residue themselves as they eat away the paints and clearcoats of things placed on them. The black rubber tips of the original types posed (no pun intended) no problem. I recently checked a couple of the toys I had on the original flexistands where the black tips were touching painted surfaces and I saw no residue or paint stuck to the tips. The new clear tipped versions are problematic. They don't grip well compared to the black ones and from my own experience they ate through the clearcoats I put on some of my toys and turned the coating into a sticky substance. Until now, I didn't know they also reacted with the paint Yamato uses as well. I wish they would go back to using the black rubber tips as they didn't really look distracting and they were more functional and not so detrimental to the paints.

I think that's still a prototype. The final product will likely be the same semi-gloss textured finish that we see in the most of their releases. The YF-21 prototype was also shown with a high gloss finish as well at one of the toy shows.

If previous weathering releases can be used as any indication, at least double the cost. Say hello to the $800 Weathering Edition SDF-1. That panel lined SDF-1 looks very good. Looks like the person used some thinned paint rather than a pen.

You might as well just list every single VF. There will always be someone out there that doesn't like a given valkyrie.

When you click one of the pics to view, just click the Save button/link below the bottom right of the picture.

Well, just do what the government does and toss the Quarter into da fence budget. With how much a new fence costs, an extra $100 won't be noticable The Quarter is pretty awesome.

Doh! Why spend money on the fence? A roll of duct tape should fix that right up >.>

I think you mean the Quarter, right? And as Radd said, it's not actually all that pastel as pictures make it out to be. The "robot lying down" opinion is due to the fact that it still has a vaguely humanoid shape with arms and legs and, to a lesser extent, torso still fully distinguishable as such. Where the SDF-1 is arms down, legs down when viewed from the top, the Quarter is more arms held out front and legs bent backwards like some sort of crazy contortionist. Fully understandable though. You don't want a capital ship that has a lot of people running around inside it to get spaced or smashed from a ton of parts separating or coming together during transformation. That said, the New Macross class carriers manage to look more like carriers while still maintaining a relatively simple transformation. They look a bit like Uraga class carriers on steroids. If one of those were made into a toy, I'd have a harder time deciding what mode to display it in.

It doesn't seem like the Quarter sold very well. It was heavily discounted so early on and nearly continuously in so many stores which seems to indicate that retailers were just trying to get rid of existing stock since it wasn't selling. I too am wishing for a Battle Frontier, but if Bandai uses the quarter's sales as an indicator, it doesn't seem very likely. It's a shame because I thought the Quarter was done fairly well with respect to the line art and design of the toy itself aside from suffering from loose joint syndrome that has been plaguing their frontier DX toys.

I just did my usual of using the tamiya weathering kits. I haven't done a clearcoat yet because I'm just not happy with it. I may clean it all off and try something else. Somehow it just doesn't look as good to me as my Max 22S. It may just be because of the color of the valk.

I am the same way. I use 100w equivalent CF bulbs, but I have the light reflecting off the walls and ceiling rather than shining directly on anything. I keep most of my macross collection particularly anything white in the glass display cases. A lot of my 1/48s are around 7 or 8 years old now and there's no hint of yellowing yet.

I had been searching around ideas for how I should detail it and thought the movie color edition of wave's sdf-1 was neat as well if not unsubtle. I've already been grabbing screenshots from DYRL and the macross plus movie for extra reference in anticipation. Haha, I think the shipment tracking sites will be thinking someone is doing a DDoS attack on them with all the people hitting F5 repeatedly.

Sadly, I think you're right in some respects. I used to be all "wtf" with price tags over $100, then I started collecting the 1/48s when they came out which were around $120 at the time for me (back when the exchange rate used to be pretty awesome). Then prices slowly climbed up to the $200 range for things like the original release of the 1/60 YF-21 and SV-51. Now I'm paying almost $400 for a frickin toy... A TOY. I need to get my head checked. I tell myself that this will be the one and only toy I will ever buy at this price since this is the titular ship of the Macross franchise and granddaddy of all that came after it (TV series version notwithstanding but basically supposed to be the same ship). But then I think what if Bandai came out with a same scale NMC Frontier or Galaxy (sans city)? Ok $300 for that probably... but no more than that!

I wish Milia's VF-22S in M7 wasn't so pastel pinkish red. If she stayed with the darker, richer shade of red as her 1J or her DYRL style Q-Rau, I think it would have looked much better. The toy just looks so out of place next to the other valks in my cabinets. Even Luca's mint green is not so jarring in comparison. I guess I just didn't think it would bother me until I actually put it in the display. I tried doing some light weathering on it to see if it helps my perception of it and now it looks even stranger to me Edit: Actually, by itself, it doesn't look too bad.

Just sent my payment. About ¥31330 which paypal converted to $388. What a crappy rate. After reading through Graham's review of this thing, I can't wait. It looks fantastic.

Haha, so much for "drawing the line". You drew that line and did a running pole vault over it