MacrossJunkie

That's interesting. The leg armor piece goes up higher and covers more of the leg in the pre-production pic. I wonder why they changed that. It would have filled in the atrocious gap a lot better and it doesn't look like it would have been in the way of anything.

NY shipped mine too. Will probably arrive by Mon or Tues next week.

Thanks for the offer! I appreciate it a whole lot. For now I'm going to give the styrene a try first. I already ordered some sheets of styrene and a pin vise from Amazon and hopefully I'll be able to do something with it. Hopefully it's not too hard to work with. I've never tried something like this before. I'm guessing I'll need to use some modeling putty as well to fill in the gaps between layers and smooth it out.

Thanks, guys, for the input! I think I may try going with the styrene idea and take the discount. The styrene may be the easiest route for me. I've got no knowledge or skill with how to make stuff for Shapeways. I toyed with the idea of epoxy putty, but that stuff is really hard for me to shape or use. I just don't think I could make it look right.

Yeah, they specifically said I could choose to get a "...full refund--meaning the cost of the item, the cost of shipping it from us to you, and your cost to return it to us."

Yep. A few pages back. Here's an additional pic that I sent to HLJ. I would have been happier if it had just snapped off in the box or something. That way, I'd have the piece and just glue it back on and be done with it. But the break is so clean, it's almost like someone just cut it off the sprue at the wrong point. I checked the inside of the box, inside the styrofoam tray and in the plastic trays to no avail.

So I have a dilemma. I can either return mine for a full refund including shipping costs or I can keep the one I have and take roughly $40 in discounts for my next purchase. Ideally, I'd prefer to send it back if I could find another one at a reasonable price somewhere else, but it seems like the prospects of that are extremely slim unless I opt to pay for the marked up price at NY (roughly $80-90 more than I paid for at HLJ after considering shipping). I really do like it and want to have a copy, but the one I have now leaves me dissatisfied with the broken head laser...

I'm upset because I wrote to parts@hlj.com about my defective head laser and they replied that couldn't get replacement parts and they had none to do an exchange with. Then here they sell some more a couple hours later... wtf?

I was under the impression or read somewhere that they worked with Kawamori (or was it Tenjin?) to determine the markings to use. In any case, my only real complaint about the markings is that some of them just look out of scale, like way too big. The ones on the nose cone for example look like they were meant for something at a larger scale.

Good catch. That is pretty odd since it now doesn't match the shoulders which are still red on top and black on the bottom. On an unrelated note, I'm going to have to find a match for the tan color they used so I can paint that grey block right above the knee. It just bothers me looking at it because it's so out of place. Arcadia's version also has it, but they managed to mold it in the same color as the rest of the surrounding area.

Just been busy. I'll try to pick back up soon!

I'm late, but wow, that looks great! The mottling from the salt weathering adds a whole lot to the overall realism. I can only hope to make mine look anywhere near that good. I haven't done anything since last year so I'm probably a little rusty. Saburo uploads and hosts his pics on Flickr. If you do that and add the image hyperlink to your forum post rather than uploading attachments, you can set whatever resolution you want and the pic will be as sharp as the original photo since it doesn't go through extra compression algorithms like pics uploaded to the forums do which causes the loss in detail and sharpness and additional artifacting. The forum hosting is nice and convenient, but if you want to retain the quality of your photos, you should try Flickr, especially since it's free to do so. I mirrored my albums in Flickr also since it lets me categorize my stuff much better. If you want to do that and have any questions, feel free to send me a PM.

Man, when I was looking at people photos, I noticed the head laser on mine looked a lot shorter than everyone else's. I thought maybe I mistransformed it. So I kept trying to pull it up and stuff thinking it was like the arcadia VF-19s where the lasers can slide forward and back. Nope, I transformed it to battroid and it's only got the pivot point. The reason it's so short is because I think the tip snapped off while it was being assembled or before it got assembled. I probably wouldn't have noticed and thought that's just how they designed it, but seeing everyone else's, it's obvious and bothers me now. Chances are pretty much nil for getting a replacement part also for Bandai stuff... This sucks. Crappy phone pic: Huh, well then. I guess I'll have to give them a pass on that, even though the CG model on the inside cover of the manual has it. I'll get around to it eventually. I still have so much other stuff to do and no time to do it. My VF-0D is still in pieces and covered in masking tape and I haven't even sprayed any paint on it yet.

I got mine this morning and just had some time to play around with it. My first impression is that I love the extra panel detailing this has over the Arcadia version. I hadn't been keeping up with things lately, so some of the gimmicks were a surprise to me as I discovered them while transforming it. I like that they tried to do something with the gunpod angle by having the gun bend in the middle so that it isn't pointed so downwards, although I would have preferred that the handle extended or something. I thought that the inner leg part was ingenious. I knew that the panel folded up before, but didn't realize that the lower part then pushed out as well when you extended the feet. Overall, it seemed to fit together pretty well without super parts on. with super parts, it came together better than the Arcadia did, although I don't like that a tab and gap is left visible between the wing glove and the leg. Transformation was surprisingly familiar, but it was like a mix of the Yamato and Arcadia versions. I was left a little disappointed with how the locking of the upper chest was practically non-existent or just very weak. Just trying to move the arms would cause the chest and nose to lift up. Aside from the boosters having a tendency to pop off easily, transformation from fighter to battroid and back was doable for me with the super parts on. One other thought... why is it that Bandai forgot to paint the gray stripe on the edge of the upper intake piece just like Arcadia did? I mean come on, they put all this extra detail in and then forgot something basic. It's even on the CG model so one can't say that it wasn't there to begin with.

This seems more along the quality of the Studio Half-Eye and Experten transformable valkyrie kits which never really impressed me in any way. Definitely not the sort of quality you would expect from Arcadia or Bandai. Reminds me more of a garage kit and the price seems about what you would expect from one also. The Experten made VFs ranged between 18,000 - 25,000 yen, were smaller at only 1/100 scale, and looked cruddy as hell. I'm not sure how much the S.H.E. stuff cost, but I'm sure they were expensive as well.

Nice. Is that the LN? Must be the angle, but the guns look so big on it! Hope you got your flood insurance. This could happen to you too...

The series had the benefit of using 3D models, yes, but the proportions for the Yamato toy were still off. It was already quite apparent given how much wider the Yamato VF-0's looked in battroid mode compared to the show. The 0D and the upcoming Arcadia 0A and S have proportions much closer to the show. For the pilots bouncing around, just stick a little putty under the pilots and that fixes it. The Yamato pilots were definitely too big for the most part. One thing about the Yamato made pilots is that the proportions for the pilots were vastly inconsistent, even between two releases of the same pilot (YF-19 Isamu vs VF-11B Isamu), which Arcadia seems to be doing far better on. Arcadia's Isamu, Shin and Edgar are proportioned much more consistently with each other at the very least.

That's a feature! To simulate Edgar banging his head on the console during the first dogfight in M0. He must have a penchant for that while Shin pulls off some high-G maneuvers Definitely nothing like that. I don't see the same gray component in the blue in that pic. That is from the first prototype, right?

Not really. I can see under any lighting in my house so far that it has a grayish component to the blue that is unlike any blue on my Max 1A, VF-25G, VF-19, YF-21 or GBP-1S armor, but very dark and very saturated. So I wouldn't call it a Max-ish blue. I would consider it its own category, but it's also just so far off the mark from what it ought to be.

Just got mine today and fiddled around with it a bit. Some random thoughts: First thought when I took it out of the packaging (aside from the color) was just how fiddly it was in fighter mode since the fins and canards aren't really locked in place in any way. Putting the pilots in, you'll see that they aren't secure in any way, but that's nothing a little putty on their butts won't fix. Transformation was simple. If you've transformed one of the previous iterations of the VF-0 or even the VF-1, there's really nothing here to surprise you except for maybe having to pull and slide out the heat shield before folding the chest down, which on the other VF-0's wasn't a step that had to be done. When I got it to battroid mode, I found the joints were a tiny bit loose and couldn't hold some positions, but wasn't completely floppy like the Yamato VF-0's. If I pulled the legs out for the full hip movement range, they somehow became completely floppy, but putting them at a midway point seemed to fix that. I guess when fully extended, the socket doesn't have as much pressure around the ball so the legs just flop around. It looked silly with the legs that far out anyway. The gunpod handle is not floppy (yay!), so it stays in place pretty well both when fully extended and retracted. I don't know if anyone else is experiencing this, but the T-bar lock doesn't work well on mine. It's constantly popping out of the locking mechanism under the nose cone and the grip on it when in place is very loose. I've never experienced this with either the VF-1's or previous 0's. As for the color, I might experiment with masking and spraying a light gray filter to maybe get it somewhere in the ballpark of where the color ought to be, because right now, it's not even in the same municipality. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how they got it so so wrong when it was blatantly obvious just how far off it was. Aside from that, it looks very very good in all modes and a vast improvement over the Yamato VF-0's. Putting it next to the VF-0S, the 0S just looks so much wider. I couldn't find my tape measure to properly measure it, but I would say just by eyeballing it that it's at least half an inch difference in width.

I've never had to do upfront payment at CDJ with any of my pre-orders there, but I always elect to pay by credit card. Edit: Geez. Replies keep coming in as fast as pre-orders are going. Anyway, good luck to everyone else still looking to get one.

I personally haven't bothered with Amiami in years. Even if you were able to secure one from them, their customer service is poor and if there was anything wrong with the toy at all, you're pretty much out of luck. They might offer you a slight discount, like $5 or something.

Takes a little while to show up. Don't worry about it. Happens every time I order too. 17000 17,100 yen, I believe.

Came to post that, but had to get my order in first. haha

Wow... lucky I decided to check before going to bed. I had no idea this thing was going on sale.