captain america

1 hour ago, Gabe Q said:

Congratulations to every participant! It must have been impossibly tough to choose a winner as they were all excellent. 

I want YOU and everyone who has ever built one of my kits to make my (and Brett's) job infinitely harder next year!

6 hours ago, Boobytrap said:

Yeah I sculpted the claw like thing in the back, the partial disk in the front, and the city tower.

I also sculpted a couple of cannons but I ran out of time to finish and mount them.

The figure is on a thick acrylic rod. There's no chance of it ever breaking or falling. I bumped that thing more times and in more ways than I care to admit so it has been thoroughly tested 🙂.

And that diorama... 😵. While I agree that your figure is more than strong enough to stand on its own that thing is a whole other level of awesomeness.

Definitely finish that dio, I implore you!! You seem to have captured the look of the series in a way I wasn't expecting, and am quite taken by. 

2 hours ago, tekering said:

I've been anxious to see what you were going to do with that base, @Boobytrap.  You don't disappoint! 

It's wonderfully retro-futuristic.

Clay...! 

That clear support rod looks rather precarious... Will it handle the weight indefinitely?  What's it made of?

I don't think that qualifies as a diorama, exactly...

 

A diorama would be more along these lines, see.

 

I figured you'd appreciate this. 

 

Man, its a shame you posted those past the deadline!  I'm going to make sure you submit something AT LEAST that spectaular next year, even if I have to smuggle myself to Japan, break into your model room and take the pics myself... Promptly followed by my arrest, return to Canada, and stepping-down as a contest judge for my blatant conflict of interest. 

Also, I'm most likely going to tinker with the points system to incentivize early model submissions. Now that you all have a year's notice, there will be no excuse for last minute entries.

Submitted by Qhris S: my macross Atmospheric booster, made couple's years a go, always amazed me how big the booster rocket, so heavy and always be my favorite macross jets collection

Jonathan Botting

 1:48 scale Pinky Crab by MHM.  Painted in Tamiya acrylics and weathered with Tamiya’s panel line wash and weathering powders.  Base is a re-purposed 1/100 VF-1 stand with yard sand glued on top and silver paper on the sides.

It begins! 

Jonathan Botting 

Macross 1/72 Launch Crawler, purchased in three components; launch vehicle, boosters with launch rail and Hasegawa 1/72 VF-1.  Airbrushed with Tamiya acrylics and weathered with Tamiya panel line wash and weathering powders.  Decals substituted from surplus collection.  Custom made ladder, rail, display console and finished with a unique paint scheme.

8 hours ago, tekering said:

I've had setbacks of my own...

Word to the wise: DON'T use Tamiya white primer, even if you've run out of the usual grey and you've got nothing else on hand.

I've had excellent results with Tamiya grey and oxide red primers, but the white stuff is worse than useless. 😣

Ouch! I feel your pain, man. You know what, ironically, has never let me down? The cheapo store brand automotive primer. I've used lacquers, acrylics, enamels, and even automotive paints over it with no problems.

On 12/4/2021 at 4:04 AM, GMK said:

About 10cm/4” taller than the Hasegawa 1/72 VF-1 Battroid. That’s a good size. 

Not really. My sculpt comes out to about 26.5cm when I pose the legs the same way. If a Zentradi is anywhere near the size of a battroid, the pod has to be bigger. This is the pitfall of officially licenced kits: you have to do what the licensor approves, and follow their nonsensical numerical values, even when those values violate logic and reason.

I really like the tread on the motorcycle tires on the Hoquet sculpt, though admittedly, they would make for a very rough & uncomfortable ride.

*Dodges flying tomatoes*

41 minutes ago, wm cheng said:

I was hoping for a little more detail, like smaller panel lines and rivets more like their 1/72 VF-1 instead of just the lineart lines.  I wonder how tall it would be built?

 

22.5cm, apparently. 

Interesting parts breaknown after a few glances. I believe the sprue shown in the pic below is for the black/dark grey parts. The areas I hatched in red should be light grey, but if you look closely, there's a marked depression, indicating that the light grey armor parts will fit over the top of these. 

I hope you guys are almost done, cos there's less than 2 weeks to go. 

Hmm. The pod looks a tad narrow. I'll be curious to see how big it turns out to be, but I suspect it'll be on the small side. Price is good, though.

Tick-tock...

Those would make great contest pics. 

8 hours ago, tekering said:

In both your cases, guys, you're dealing with small parts that have failed under stress.  No attempt to repair these parts is likely to adequately strengthen them.

As Captain America has suggested, the only viable solution is to replace them with new parts.  As I've dabbled with silicon molding in the past, I've had success replacing broken joints in Transformers with reproductions made of more resilient materials.  It's a complicated process, but getting a replacement part designed and produced on a 3D printer is equally complicated.

Either way, you've got to remove rivets embedded in plastic, which is a pain in-and-of-itself.

That could hold the piece together for display, but probably wouldn't survive a transformation.

I wouldn't buy a broken toy, unless I had no intentions of playing with it.

You may be correct about rendering a broken part in 3D being equally complicated. Assuming the broken part could be successfully removed from the toy and temporarily glued back together with CA glue, a silicone mold of the part could be made and then new parts could be cast in a stronger material. Either way, the cost would likely be prohibitive, and while certain resins are made to reproduce the physical properties of ABS in the short-term, the dirty secret with some resin products is that they will eventually turn brittle themselves over time. 

2 hours ago, blackconvoy_D01 said:

 

@captain america, hi can you make a fix recommendation please?

 

 

 

 

That's a challenging fix. If you had the dexterity, a small enough drill bit and same diameter brass/steel rod, you could reinforce the snapped ball-joint, but it would still be very fragile. Ideally, I would push-out the rivet that's still on the fairing, have someone 3D print the broken part in a tougher material and use that as a replacement. At the core, this is a materials problem that Sentinel needs to address, because as you can see from the pressed rivets, the toys aren't made to be disasembled and if someone doesn't have the skills to perform that kind of repair, it will only make the problem worse.

Those parts look like ABS or something similar. Putty won't bond to it and it will constantly crack. Ideally the part should be replaced. I think this is something that 3D printing can do well, provided that something tough (nylon?) is used.

2 hours ago, Masked Aviator said:

Sentinel still uses plastic to connect the two metal parts. I'm afraid the cracking issue will persist. I wonder why they don't switch the material to metal. 

 

 

Or just a different type of plastic, which wouldn't necessitate new tooling and can just as readily solve the issue.

A month to go!

Put those modelling skills to good use and stand a chance to win a 1/48 Bio LLoyd kit. The parts for the green version were offered only once with the initial run, and will never be re-issued.

Bump! Y'all have until the end of the day on October 31 to make the Horizontal ship re-issue happen. 

Part deux.

Destructions are ready, and all kits have shipped. 

8 hours ago, peter said:

Sadly (for me at least), there are no life size Blue Thunder replicas apart from what's left of this:

 

I think the original filming helicopters modified back to their original form, sold off and eventually crashed somewhere.

 

Seeing as how it was a pricy and still functional piece of military hardware, it probably made more sense to sell it. That pic of the derelict bodywork is/was part of a studio tour somewhere, IIRC. Fun fact: the modded Gazelle also appeared in a mid 80s dystopian tv miniseries caked Amerika, where they had temporarily painted it black.