SteveTheFish

Yeah, that was me! I recognized you too, but I couldn't remember the name of that old forum. It was there when I had the idea of recording my progress of building a model car and uploading the videos to YouTube to get feedback on techniques. Little did I know that I had stumbled upon a whole genre of videos for the hobby and it went from there. I've continued to do so ever since. I was still living in Arizona at the time. I am considering attending the All-Japan Hobby Show at the end of September. It's been a long time since I could attend. I took photos for FineScale Modeler Magazine and they published my content, but I haven't done that since 2018.

Yes, on there is the link that says 採用に関する問い合わせ and it's that form I used to contact HJ last night. I received notice that my message was received. Let's wait to see if they respond.

Sorry for the double post. I heard back from my friend. He has no contact at all with the magazine department. He suggested I just try reaching out to the magazine's PR department. I'll take a look when I get home in an hour or so from now. Could you send me links to where you had tried to contact the company? If you only wrote in English, then I may have luck by describing the situation in Japanese. Perhaps it might help by mentioning that I already do translations for their model department a few times a year and that I could help with an article. I'm also really tempted to visit the All-Japan Model Hobby Show coming up in September. I used to cover this event for my YouTube channel as well as submitting photos to FineScale Magazine as a guest contributor. I haven't gone since 2018. Then my wife was hit by a car the next year, and then the whole Covid thing happened. Now that there are no more masking directives, I was thinking about going. If so, I can talk to somebody in-person from HJ. My friend works their plamo booth. If I go on press day, I have a better chance to talk with people without the crowds in the way. For now, I'll try contacting them via the website. Did you find an email? I'm excited if I can help out in any way I can.

Alright! I just sent an email to my friend Takahashi. We used to work together at Aoshima during the brief, 8-month stint I worked there. Model Graphix magazine did a several page article on him just before he quit. He is a big Macross and Yamato fan like myself, and I already showed him the article you did on the massive discovery of Showa-era anime plamo treasure. I'll see what he says. While he does not deal with the magazine division, he may know someone to get in contact with. I agree that it would make a wonderful article. I think perhaps I may be able to facilitate somehow if nobody in the magazine end of the company handles English. We'll see. All I do is translate Japanese into English, but I am not as good at the other direction. We'll see. Yeah, Vintage is sure fun. I have the Imai Meets Macross issue, the Super Dimensional series issue, the Artmic issue, and I just recently bought the Votoms issue. I think that Vintage would be especially interested in doing an article on the Wise Guys find. I'd think that such a find would be rare for Japan too. Even here these kits are HTF and demand high prices. I have never see in the wild kits like Arii's Monster, Imai's Zentraedi Recon Ship, Arii's Glaug, etc. I'm not home at the moment, but I have an older Yamato modeling book (by Hobby Japan, IIRC) which detailed the Starblazers reboxing of plamo kits back in the '80s. I'm sure Japanese readers would find it interesting to see how Imai's Mospeada kits were marketed under the Go Bots name, which is actually known as Machine Robo in Japan.

Hey Shawn, I'm new here. Did you have any luck with contacting Hobby Japan? I do occasional translation work for Hobby Japan. Not the magazine division, but their models division. I do assembly instruction translations for a friend I have there. So I sort-of have a connection there. As you might know, they have a mook series called Hobby Japan Vintage, which comes out about 3x a year. I would think that an article on this massive find might interest them.

Final reveal post: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/692264406831251456/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie And here is a quick video I made of the completed build. I posted this on the Macross Reddit at the time. https://odysee.com/Valkyrie-SFX:cb3ecb3771a128669033b77dfd6e6313f1b0d412?src=embed

Instead of posting a ton of images into this topic, I'll just provide links to the build posts I made on Tumblr. What I did was take this old Imai-tooled Super Valkyrie kit and modified it for lighting. The main thrusters in the fastpack are perfect for 5mm LEDs, and the smaller thrusters are perfect for 3mm LEDs. I created a mold of the cockpit's terminal (as inaccurate as it is), cast it in clear UV resin, and adorned it with custom-made waterslide decals. I cast the Hasegawa pilot figure in clear UV resin too, as well as the foot thrusters from the Hasegawa Battroid kit. The gunpod has a 3mm flashing yellow LED. I cut away the red laser sensor from the gunpod, cast it in UV resin, and placed a tiny SMD there. I also placed red SMDs into the fastpacks and the sensors in the nose cone. Actually, please help me out here... those are IR sensors in the nose, right? Post 6: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/676351665180377088/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie Post 7: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/692263848691089408/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie

Here is a build I'm particularly proud of. I'll see if the HTML can be inserted properly into this post as I had documented the build on my Tumblr feed. Post 1: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/164634393344/172-bandaiimai-macross-vf-1j-super-valkyrie?is_related_post=1 Post 2: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/167975787554/172-bandaiimai-macross-vf-1j-super-valkyrie Post 3: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/630418257033216000/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie?is_related_post=1 Post 4: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/654068348243574784/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie Post 5: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/671095149341884416/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie

Yes, that is my plan. Either that or use some clear UV resin.

I wish I had been following this forum all along. In July I made the mistake of buying this kit. I just assumed it had waterslide decals. Now it'll soon be re-released in September with waterslide decals. Son of a motherless goat. This week I discovered that there is no molded detail for the wingtip nav lights. They just expect you to put stupid stickers where they are supposed to be. The Hasegawa kit comes with clear parts for the wingtips, to the best of my memory. I'm not at all happy about the stickers. I have other Plamax stuff and they come with waterslides, so I didn't even think that this would be any different.

Does anyone here have the old Arii 1:72 Glaug? I've never seen it myself; only pictures. About three times per year, there is a mook series called Hobby Japan Vintage which showcases old kits from the Showa Period. There was one about Imai's Macross and another one about all kits from the three Super Dimensional series and that one showed all the Arii Macross kits. (No coverage for the Nichmo Macross kits, unfortunately.) The proportions on the Arii Glaug look decent. Proportions are often the weak points of Arii's kits, like the lame feet of their 1:72 Armored Valkyrie or the blockyness of their 1:100 Destroids.

Thanks. I actually hadn't spent a lot of time looking for it. Recently I looked on Yodobashi, Hobby Search, and Amiami and they were sold out. I actually just found it on Dejitamin (a Yahoo Shopping store) and they have it for 1,000 yen cheaper than Amazon. I'm looking at pictures of it now. I have the Arii version and I thought I might start on that one next. The Arii Scout Regult has the option for either an opaque or a clear center "eye." Does the Hasegawa one have this option as well? I'm not sure what is canon.

I already own the standard Regult and the Light Missile version. I didn't get the Scout and it seems to be sold out everywhere I have looked online. I live in a small city in the mountains and I do not get to visit the larger hobby shops very often. I'm hoping that they'll do a Glaug in 72nd scale as well, eventually!

I used to live in Shizuoka Prefecture and I taught English. The city where I worked at got a new supervisor who was over the foreign English teachers like myself and it was a case of "The Emperor's New Clothes." People were convinced that she was brilliant but she was actually pretty stupid. Her idea of proving her worth was to crap on us foreign teachers and she was gunning to get rid of me. The guys at HLJ told me that Aoshima was hiring when I talked with them at the Shizuoka Hobby Show in 2015. I interviewed for an import/export specialist position. They were looking for someone fluent in English to help break into the North American market. I interviewed for the job and was hired. Later that year they announced that they had obtained the Macross license, which covers everything Macross. I began in April 2016 working for the business department and the very first meeting the R&D guy Kaneda announced that the company would make the VFG kit. I thought, "Oh my gosh, this job is going to be so cool. Macross for the very first meeting!" I had taken a pay cut and was driving 40+ minutes each way, but I thought that it would be worth it in the end. Well, the job was crap because of the bosshole in charge of the business group. He treated everyone like crap and 8 months later I quit. It's a long story, but essentially they held my feet to the fire to increase their sales in North America but without having to cater to that market. My college degree was international business and marketing, so I sort of knew a bit about it. People in North America don't know what a Toyota Royal Crown Saloon car is, nor the name of some Japanese minesweeper that was sunk at Guadalcanal. And what's KanColle? Nobody cares about that. I pursued the license for the first two Alien movies, offered it to them, and they just gave up on it. The idea was eventually explored by Max Factory for their Moderoid series, and so they released that Ripley Power Loader model kit. My idea was to focus on the ships, APC, etc. It would help if the people running a plastic model company actually gave a crap about the hobby. Nobody in the business group built models except for me and my team lead. Anyhow, I can't badmouth the company too much. I was one of many who quit because of that guy. I made some friends. I haven't talked to Kaneda in a long time and I haven't been to one of the trade shows since 2018. I don't know if he still works for Aoshima. The initial character designs were done by some artist who makes character designs for Capcom video games, so the initial promo art was done by him. I don't know who ended up doing the final designs though. The catgirl thing is probably Kaneda's fetish or something. I'd rather see Misa or Minmay straddling a VF-1J, but he seems to focus on the more recent stuff. If I make it to the All-Japan Hobby Show in September and see him, I'll tell him that he needs to consider it. I told him to do that back in 2016. I bought the first VFG kit. The kind man who ran the parts department mailed me the updated ver. 1.5 parts when I showed him that I had a defective part. He was a kind man, but he's since retired. Anyhow, I never finished mine because of the stupid stickers. I will have to hand-paint some parts instead of using the stickers. It's ended up as a shelf queen. I really should get back to that model, but I'm more interested in other kits at the moment. I really thought that it would be a dream come true to work for that model company, but in the end it turned out to be just a sales job as my input as a business analyst was disregarded constantly. One perk was that I could take home model kits to build as "research" to familiarize myself with the company's products. The dope they hired to replace me didn't know crap about plastic models, but he speaks better Japanese than I could when I worked there. That's all the short-sighted bosshole cared about. He didn't care that I knew how to make the company successful in North America. Since I couldn't speak honorific-level Japanese fluently, he treated me like crap. So, I quit. Eventually the jerk got demoted, the last I heard. One friend of mine from there went on to work at Hobby Japan, and he has me do occasional translation jobs for him.

Hi, I'm new here. I've occasionally lurked for many years, but never created an account. I see a few familiar users from the Starship Modeler Forum (hi Thom and VF-1 Grunt), where I go by TurkeyVolumeGuessingMan. Anyhow, I'll share this build here. This is the old 1:100 Heavy Missile Regult battle pod by Arii. Proportions for the Regult itself are great, but the missile pods are a bit top-heavy. It makes the model look a bit awkward. I have a Toynami sofubi toy which I assume is 1:72 scale and with them side-by-side, the Arii's missile pods are nearly as tall. I used Wave's H-Eyes parts for lenses and Kotobukiya's MSG for the thrusters. I used Mr. Color 323 Light Blue and 311 Gray for the white parts. The gray was a mixture of 32 Dark Gray and 72 Intermediate Blue. the decals were still usable after all these years. They were a bit yellowed, but I taped them to my window for several days to bleach them. They went on fairly well. I also used my pinvise to drill out the cannons because out of the box, they had protruding parts that look more like bottle nipples than gun barrels. I believe I used a 2.5mm drill bit for the larger cannons. There is no ball socket articulation with the cannons. They must be glued into place. Comparing Macross models between Arii and Imai, the Imai kits had better overall proportions, but Arii implemented polycaps and has better molded surface detail and decals. Case in point, the red lenses on the top of the head are represented in Arii's molding, but these details are merely decals for Imai's 1:72 Regult. Arii has raised detail for the Regult's foot lamps, but they protrude too far. I cut them off and affixed those Wave lenses instead. I have a pre-order for the 1:72 Hasegawa version of this kit, which will be released next week.