TMBounty_Hunter

My decision to paint the PLAMAX Gerwalk in TV colors led to a lot of suffering picking the color for the super parts. The large areas meant the only economically viable way to paint was with spraycans, so no mixing a custom color. I ended up deciding on Mr. Color's C115 RLM65 Light Blue, which is also available as a spray S115. The middle spoon is Hasegawa's recommendation, the two flanking spoons are C115 on top of different color primers. Sure it's brighter than what Hasegawa suggests, but as slide says in the post above, you can definitely find a TV series screenshot to back it up. Going through the TV series for research certainly was a lovely reassurance in lack of anything definitive.

Not since that announcement. I'm expecting the next news to be at Wonder Festival on Feb 10th.

So Hasegawa can do a resin chinadress Minmay in 1/24 for 3,200 yen while throwing in a whole eggplane kit.

Meanwhile, Max Factory's minimum factory 1/20 plastic chinadress minmay is 2,963 yen.

I guess it's another great example of having well established in-house production lines keeping costs down while the new guy has to charge more to stay in the green.

It keeps amazing me that the world keeps saying outsourcing will always be cheaper, yet when you look at model kit manufacturers like Kotobukiya, Max Factory and occasionally Wave who have to get their stuff made in China instead of in-house and their prices are waaay higher and development cycles much longer.

So while trying to figure out exactly how far I want to fiddle my own build I went back through the various development photos and found something interesting. All the way back for Wonder Festival 2017 Winter, almost two whole years ago Max Factory printed a giant banner for their booth showing the VF-1 parts layout. On the runner with the grey parts you can actually see two different plate for mounting the backpack thrusters, indicating intent for two different backpack thicknesses.

On the same runner you can also see the gap-fillers for whenever the legs swing forward, but they're a bit shallower than the one's we got so far.

I think it's safe to say that at least back in Feb 2017 there was already enough work done to do at least the plain VF-1 as well as the Super/Strike VF-1 in valk mode. That explains the shallower leg swing which is needed for super parts vs swung out farther for gerwalk. IMO the Super/Strike Valk is a done deal at this point, we just haven't seen the necessary new leg runner. 

I went a little overboard and made a table of future possibilities.

I feel like the skinny backpack is an artifact of the original Valk kit. While we know that on the Valk it'll be different parts on a different runner, we also know that Max Factory has committed to fudging the proportions between modes. They've given us two versions of the arm missile pods: one short and fat for the deployed arms on the Gerwalk, and one much skinnier and longer for the inevitable Super/Strike Valk. So I'm willing to bet they took the CAD model of the backpack that needed to be skinny to no interfere with the arms in Valk mode, but forgot to artistically adjust the proportions for the Gerwalk properly.

"Old" is from the 1/72 Battroid kit (65710)

"New" is from the 1/48 VF-1J/A (MC02) and 1/72 Gerwalk (65725)

Are you looking for the best color straight out of the bottle? Or a mixture?

Hasegawa and Wave both use Mr. Color for their color recommendations mixes

Hasegawa old = 40% C43 Wood Brown + 60% C1 White

Hasegawa new = 50% C43 Wood Brown +50% C51 Flesh

Wave = 80% C39 Dark Yellow + 20% C22 Dark Earth

As for the feet, Hasegawa always gives C28 Steel

Wave gives 80% C22 Dark Earth + 20% C42 Mahogany

Oooooh, I love seeing CAD (Cardstock Assisted Design)

Oooooooooh, here's what we do. The base is big enough to fit an arduino, the pipe is nice and hollow for wires, so all nice for brainy wiring. Put super bright LEDs in the feet, but also put a light sensor in there. So if anyone at a show gets curious enough about the internals to take out there inspection flashlight and point it there, THE INNER LIGHT WILL SHINE BACK! :P

Full manual scans for those that like to build in their head instead of physically:
https://imgur.com/a/VjcWEYc

This thing is super fun. Opening the box and looking at all the huge part filled me with so much child-like glee that it fully shut up my adult thinking about how much this cost.

Sure the detail is a lot softer than I would have liked, but this was never going to be on par with actual aircraft kits. For a giant cartoon robot kit this is more than fine. Definitely a fantastic accessory for the 1/20 scale pilot figure kit.

Now to try and rebuild the cockpit for TV version......

Yeeeeeeeep. $592CAD turned into $652CAD      ;_;

Hmm, that kinda makes me regret choosing EMS. I got horrendous fees from other carriers in the past due to their "convenience" fees at the border.

What was the total wallet damage? For me it was $593CAD.

8 hours ago, Mr Jones said:

Whee got my big box from HLJ ( via DHL ) -- quite exited -- took a peek inside and took some pictures because who could resist.

 

Did CBSA hit it?

Welp. amiami finally willing to ship mine.

Subtotal: 32,980 JPY
EMS Shipping: 15,600 JPY
Grand total: 48,580 JPY
 

Now let's see how long it takes to get through the Canada Post strike backlog....

For those that have theirs already, what's the outside diameter of the gunpod and roughly how long is it?

So what's everyone's plan for painting? Spraycans? Endless airbrushing? Mini sprayguns? HVLP guns?

Those look way too much like NACA ducts to be a molding mistake, they're facing the correct way for Valk mode too, but why they would be on the fins I have no idea.

I'm assuming that's just the only way they could mold the part, since if they made it solid you'd have horrendous shrinkage, which we've seen in some test shots all over the place

5 hours ago, GMK said:

I’m hoping that the intakes can be built “open”, as well, but can’t see the intake turbine face parts on the sprues that have been shown. 

Those are on the Valk-only runners

Which there will be at least 3 4 of, including the above, the following image, the straight legs runner we've seen a lot in the early days of development and wherever they put the rest of the landing gear bay parts we saw in the Max video a few pages back

You have to remember this is a minimum factory release, the 25th in the lineup and they've always put this much effort into the figures. The gerwalk is technically just an accessory for the pilot :P

8 hours ago, GMK said:

A set of separate heads paired with pilots would be sweet. 

A/J/S heads are already included in the kit. Pilot runners are entirely separate so we'll probably get extra ones as plain minimum factory releases.

From the looks of it the runners look laid out to only swap two runners to make it a VF-1D. 

Twitter flooding this morning with shops posting their stocks

EDIT: lots more unboxing and building on the internet now

Full runner layout

At least these guys have their stock

Thanks for the shipping cost info!

This lovely gentleman has an unboxing thread on twitter. The Box Inception keeps going it seems. There's three flat boxes inside the colorful box which is inside the plain cardboard box which seems to get an extra cardboard box all around by whoever shipped it to him (and presumably for international buyers too)

Now I just want complete manual scans while I wait for mine. Hobby Search doesn't seem to post PLAMAX manuals like they do with everything else

Kairos box art

Can whoever ordered from amiami report when they start sending out payment requests and shipping prices?

The worst news to wake up to

https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/information/2018/1115_02_en.html

It's only a rotating strike, it's not that bad, if only they had waited a week it would have shipped and arrived ;___;