intronert

On 7/18/2014 at 5:35 PM, Chronocidal said:

So, this is Part I of a two part series about how the VF-171 CF can completely explode from looking at it funny.

This is basically a photo diary of my adventures disassembling a shattered knee joint.

Before I get to the knee, here's what happens when you unscrew the hips. They come apart fairly easily, but as you can see, there's a ton of pieces that might fall out and go everywhere. For some reason, they felt the need to pad the lower half of the hip joint with extra plastic pads, instead of molding it to fit directly into the metal thigh. Could be for structural reasons, I guess, but it's a lot of little pieces to do a simple job (Bandai seems to take that as a trademark).


So, to start, here's how the leg looks when it's working fine.


Here's a second view, with a slightly rotated thigh swivel, and color coded parts.


This is the thigh section from my broken leg, still in decent shape, minus the pry marks from trying to get the darn thing apart.


Here's what you see once you get it apart (minus the swivel joint, I'll get to that in a minute).

Here, you've got a cover with far too much glue on it, holding together two large tabs. Get that cover off, and the thigh comes apart with a single screw, and you can access the upper thigh joint and hinge pin.

Here's what happened to mine.

I've color coded the parts so you can get an idea of how badly it actually broke. The side cover for the knee had the screw shaft shear off, and the red pieces all used to be the large central knee joint cover. Now, it's broken entirely, and you can see the spring ratchet inside the knee.

That pink screw cover is also a pain in the backside. It was overglued horribly, and was literally the only thing holding the entire knee together.


Now, why did it fail? Good question. I'd go ask Bandai what they were smoking designing this.


So yeah. I seriously doubt there is any hope for this leg at this point, unless I superglue the entire thing permanently into fighter mode (not sounding like a bad option, considering my hate for the 171 transformation).

Part II will be later this weekend. I've taken the shoulder covers and lower triangles off of two 171CFs to compare, and think I know why they break, but that's a long way from learning to fix them.

How do you release blue part from the green part? Yes

Saw this used cf unit cheap on YAHOO auction japan  so i decided to purchase it. I didn’t realise its missing the fist covers. Anybody want to sell theirs. I don’t think shapeways have them.