fortynickel

13 hours ago, borgified said:

A member mentioned about ABS and POM plastics in a thread (don't remember which one exactly).

ABS - Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene 

POM - Polyoxymethylene

Gorilla and Crazy Glue contains cyanoacrylate, so it will burn the two plastics together and make the joints brittle and be easily broken into two. Does the name "Kragle" ring any bell if you have seen "The Lego Movie" 

Modeling Glue for plastic kits may work, however you might have to get a specific glue that is made to stick ABS Plastic together.

Plastic weld was mentioned too, however I have not used this method.

Edit: Here's something that @DewPoint mentioned on the Maintenance thread (page 5) that might be of use.

"Tamiya Extra Thin Cement (Quick-Setting) (Acetone, Butyl Acetate, Methyl Ethyl Ketone) was in effective.  Based on my research, that tells me that the plastic is not Polystyrene (PS), Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), or Polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

I just picked up a bottle of Plastruct Plastic Weld (Methylene Chloride (dichloromethane), Methyl Ethyl Ketone (MEK)). So far it seems to be working.  I'll try to apply a bit of pressure on it in a few hours.  If this fails, I'm moving on the the plastic specific super glues.

Going to give it a full 24 hours to cure before I try to reattach it.  You need to look really closely to see where it broke.

@slide (his response after @DewPoint's) - " If MEK doesn't do it for you, you're probably s-o-l [in my experience]"

@kkx - "Not sure if this is similar to what you have tried.

When I try to repair a few VF-1 1/60 v2 with broken/split shoulder hinges, I found this and it works great.

Loctite bonding system

The Yamato shoulder joint plastic is a bit smooth and oily (not sure what type it is), and nothing I tried works until I attempt this. The pressure on those hinges might not be as strong as yours, so not sure if it will work but worth a try I think.

You can also try to thin out the bar a bit to reduce some pressure on the hinge.

Good luck."

I greatly appreciate your insight. My knowledge of plastics and modeling is extremely limited (and by limited, I mean almost nonexistent) so your post is really helpful. 
 

I am constantly in awe while admiring the work people share on this message board and am usually a bit intimidated to post so I thank you for your response.

I recently picked up a Hi Metal VF-1J and I am amazed how it feels completely different from my HMR valks. The HM is a floppy mess and the backpack is splitting because it isn’t glued well. 
 

I didn’t know they varied so different quality-wise. Sorry, I know it is old news to everyone else but it was new to me.

Can anyone please recommend me the best glue to use because superglue doesn’t seem to be holding that well. Thanks.

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 It does a bit, in hindsight, doesn't it?

 

 

 

All told, isn't that premise kind of obviously untrue?

Clearly CBS, Bad Robot, and Secret Hideout were fervently hoping that Star Trek's audience had changed.  They gambled on being able to sell Star Trek as a brand they could slap on any generic or heavily derivative sci-fi/action "thriller" and lost... REPEATEDLY.  They took everything Star Trek out of Star Trek except for a vague visual aesthetic and tried to reinvent the story as a standard issue summer action movie, resulting in something that was a very poor Star Trek story and a very poor action movie at the same time.  Predictably, making it more generic in the name of broadening its appeal just made it forgettable and it ended up failing to launch a brand reboot AND failing to break even at the box office.  Discovery's bleak, lifeless take on Star Trek was celebrated by the industry press and predictably loathed by most of its audience and especially by Star Trek's merchandising partners.  It doesn't sell.  CBS had to play fast and loose with what counted as "subscriptions" to make the picture rosier for their stockholders, and there's almost no merchandising support for it.  They had to threaten legal action to stop Netflix from bailing on the show after its second season, and got a heavily slashed budget due to the show's poor performance.  They tried it all again with Picard, except they tried to cloak the same dystopian setting and garbage writing in familiar names and faces, and it did even worse.  The licensees walked.  The show did terribly even on CBS All Access, and gave Amazon Prime a hefty case of buyer's remorse outside the US.  The fact that none of these attempts to appeal to that changed audience were commercially successful is a pretty strong argument the audience didn't actually change much, if at all.

Really, the biggest and most telling sign that the audience hasn't changed is their latest and last attempt to save Secret Hideout's take on Star Trek is... to go back to the classic Star Trek formula.  It's a massive admission of defeat.

 

Oh, they're trying... the problem is that audiences young and old think this new take on Star Trek is crap.

The reason they're bringing back characters from older Star Trek shows in greater and greater abundance is that the new characters Secret Hideout dreamed up for these shows are testing INCREDIBLY poorly.  

The closest anyone came to investment in Discovery's characters was purely representational.  Sylvia Tilly got some positive press for being Star Trek's first (explicitly) autistic character and the duo of Paul Stamets and Hugh Culber as Star Trek's first openly gay couple.  Even that ended up backfiring, since a lot of viewers predictably put Tilly up there with Wesley for obnoxiousness because of her autistic behaviors and the studio got blasted with accusations of trying to bury their gay couple after they killed Culber off partway through the show's first season.  Bringing in Spock and Pike was an author's saving throw intended to salvage the series by diverting attention away from Burnham and onto characters the audience was already predisposed to like.  They tried the same tactic in Star Trek: Picard, and it got worse as the show went on.  You can see right around halfway when the studio clearly decided it wasn't going to be able to sell the audience on new characters like Rios, Musiker, Dr. Jurati, and co. and decided to shift the story's focus to established characters like Seven of Nine, Hugh, Will Riker, Deanna Troi, and yet another identical damn Dr. Soong.  The new characters don't even really contribute to saving the day... Picard, Riker, Seven of Nine, and Doctor Soong save the day while the new kids largely just sit around.  Their participation trophy is that they're planned to be pushed even farther out of focus as CBS plans to throw in more walk-on roles for TNG veterans if season two gets made.

 

Star Trek in general had pretty damned good ratings from around season three of TNG in '89 to the end of season three of VOY in '97.  You don't stay on TV continuously for fourteen years unless you're doing SOMETHING right.

If going back to the classic formula doesn't work, then they're screwed... because the last-ditch attempt to make Star Trek profitable again is Strange New Worlds, which is billed as a return to classic form in the most literal sense possible.

You make good points. I am just making conjectures on why the people in charge would make the decisions that they did. I just figured that the types of stories I grew up watching are no longer vogue.
 

I knew that the new Star Trek shows were unpopular but I did not know they had performed that poorly.

21 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

In my assessment, that the writers felt compelled to have every episode end in a cliffhanger to keep the audience watching is only a symptom of a much more pervasive problem.

Namely, that the writers currently working on Star Trek for CBS All Access are absolutely and demonstrably crap at their jobs.

They did no research or prep work at all.  Star Trek: Discovery's first season was a pretty amateurish offering all around, but it had some pretty severe continuity errors WRT the rest of the Star Trek franchise.  Putting aside the plethora of issues related to costume and makeup design, pretty much everything relating to the Klingons in Discovery is a mess... like there being a woman Supreme Chancellor when women aren't allowed to serve on the high council at all, the Klingons staging for an attack on Earth when Martok had previously asserted that his people had never been brazen enough to consider it, the anachronistic extent of surgical alteration of Klingon spies, the Klingons possessing cloaking techology that works in exactly the manner described in "Balance of Terror" years before the Federation first encountered in on Romulan ships, etc.  Fifteen minutes on Memory Alpha is enough time to poke dozens of holes in Discovery's first season just with respect to the Klingons.  Never mind that the whole tardigrade thing was plagiarized from an indie video game and the bit about it engaging in horizontal gene transfer was based on a scientific study that'd been retracted some years earlier when it was discovered their test results were contaminated and had led them to falsely conclude tardigrades engaged in horizontal gene transfer.  Zero fact-checking went into that season.

Star Trek: Discovery's second season's issues are rather more glaring and obvious.  Much of the plot was simply plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse's Section 31 series, and what wasn't taken from there was taken from Mass Effect.  The entire second half of the season is predicated on a massive misunderstanding of how computers work, as so many reviewers pointed out at great and tedious length, and the entire plot about Control wanting an alien data archive to evolve into an artificial sentience makes no sense given that the plot makes it clear Control is already self-aware and exercising self-determination.

Star Trek: Picard is probably the worst critical research failure of all.  If you've never seen Star Trek before, the premise of the series might seem sound... but as soon as you know that the Romulan Star Empire was a galactic civilization rivaling the Federation in scale and power it immediately stops making any sense at all.  Why is the entire Romulan Empire thrown into disarray and dissolved because they lost one of the hundreds of planets they control?  It's a bigger version of the same problem they narrowly avoided discussing at the end of the first season of Discovery... when the writers forgot the Klingon Empire was also an interstellar empire with more than one planet.  Why would the Romulans, whose starfleet is as big as the Federation's, need the Federation to handle evacuating their capital for them?  Why are they living as refugees in camps inside Federation territory when there are dozens of developed M-class planets under their control? 

The writing is sloppy, amateurish, and fraught with internal contradictions and continuity problems.  It reads like a bad fan fiction... and I think that every episode needed to end with a "To Be Continued..." cliffhanger is a product of that.  The Twitter-level social politics of the writing don't help either, the whole "humbling of Jean-Luc Picard" makes as little sense in context as the Romulan Empire's collapse.

 

 

Your criticism is on point but I believe that the audience has changed. I think the new Trek shows are trying get more younger viewers by having a less involved plot but still try to appeal to OG Trekkies by having characters such as Picard, Riker, Pike and Spock.

TNG had decent ratings but the studio executives were always trying to find a way to make it more mainstream. I don’t know if a TNG or DS9-type show would be able to net the kind of ratings that the studio require to stay viable.

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That is just classic.

I like the 1/48s because they are beautiful toys. Fun to transform but more solid without the Super Parts.

The 1/60 V2s are definitely better in terms of sculpt, proportions, and are solid in every mode though. But I am usually a little more hesitant to transform them back and forth.

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my Arcadia top 5 wish list..

1. 1:60 Regult kit or complete (preferably complete)

2. 1:60 HWR-00 MKII Monster! (hey I can dream can't I)

3. 1:3000 SDF-1 TV ver. or DYRL re-issue.. (preferably the TV ver.)

4. SV-51 renewals (but completely re-engineered!)

5. VF-3000 or VF-5000 (or both!)

of course there are plenty more items but this is the best 5 I can think of right now.. and I don't want to be too greedy!

That is a quite a list. That 1/60 Monster would be epic!

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That is an awesome set! Congrats.

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I am interested if there is another run of these.

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