Deadzone

Not exactly show accurate, but I tend to paint things pretty close to the Television show then do my own thing here and there.

Darn, I can't get these pictures to post any smaller. Anyone have any advice.

Okay, at the end of this thread is the finished product for those of you who asked for pics.

meh, as tony and jason have said, the 1/55 is alive and well

i for one am sick of anyone drooling over a (insert scale here) stock valk

i'm declaring this now, if all you have is stock valks, you dont have a collection, you have "his" collection. congratulations, you paid all that money for something anyone can get and you have nothing to show for it because you have nothing unique, wahoo.

I think what he's saying is that anyone can go out and buy a toy, but it takes time and effort to actually customize one. Believe me, I've done two, and they both took about a month each. However, I think it is perfectly fine to collect stock valks especially if they are rare like the original Miriya VF-1J. I have a couple of stock reissues and have no intention of repainting them. They look great as is.

I guess the only problem I have with some collector's is when they show off their collections as if they are superior because they went out and spent five thousand dollars on rare toys. They have three MIB strike valks which makes them better than a guy who only has one. Stock valks are great to look at and display, however I try not to take personal pride in a toy I just buy since it is kind of silly. Big whoopy, I filled out an order form and sent it in. About a million other people can do the same thing. I can see taking pride in having an extremely rare toy that you had to seek out and find, but other than that....

In the end, I respect guys like Kid K more for customizing valks as opposed to someone who buys ten 1/48. But like I said before, "not that there's anything wrong with that".

I thought the thinner smelled just like rubbing alcohol. Damn, and I just paid $8.50 for a 250ml bottle of Tamiya thinner. That's why I come here, to learn about the cheap alternatives.

Funny thing about Tamiya paints is that every paint color within the line seems to be different. I think I have used different thinning ratios every time. I find the gloss white really hard to use. It either comess out too watery or too thick and does not cover well at all. The flat white is great except it paints kind of rough in terms of the finished surface. However, I accidentally mixed future with my flat white once. The result was a SMOOTH flat white finish ready to be glossed with a coat of future for a great shine. Hope this helps.

Yeah,

Airbrushing future is like trying to get water to stick on your model. I tried airbrushing it and was diappointed with the results. Your best bet now is probably to mask off the thing and hand paint future onto the canopy. Good luck.

Don't worry. I actually like the the 1/55 Bandai's the best still. The yamato's have a lot of bells and whistles, but I can't get past the fact that the 1/60 can't be transformed unless the legs are taken off. If they could, I would probably start collecting them. The 1/48 are very nice, but I can't get past the bony girl arms and the large torso that seems disproportionate in robot mode. Well, to each his own.

As a Bandai collector, I actually don't mind too much that 1/55's are almost being discarded. The price of a MISB Bandai has dropped to around $30.00 in many places. That sure beats $125.00 for the 1/48. This makes it a lot cheaper to customize. BTW, the Chunky Monkeys seem to be built like tanks. Strong construction is definitely important to me.

Spray paint is the only way to go from where I'm coming from. I tried brush paint. It always comes out lumpy for large areas. The best thing to do is use Tamiya paint through an iwata airbrush. That's the ideal set up. For lower budget paint jobs, buy some spray paint and practice, practice, practice. You won't have the control of the airbrush, but at least it will spray evenly for the most part, and it's cheap.

Hey Valkyrie 279,

That's a pretty sweet VF-1A Max custom. I like how you painted the tail fins blue and white. Wish I had thought of that. Where did you get the black wrap around sticker for the nose cone? I want to add that to my custom but can't find one.

Hey Jin Kun do,

Is that a 1/48 you transformed into a TV Max? Looks great either way. I thought I had guts customizing a $50.00 Unicron. Repainting a $125.00 toy is a bold undertaking. However, looks like you succeeded. I hope to see more Max TV customs posted soon. Keep them coming.

Actually, I thought the intake stickers looked better going the other way so I just stuck it the way I liked it. About the shoulder stickers, I didn't realize they were suppose to be closer to the middle and towards the body until it was too late. They cover up some small scratch marks too which are now undetectable. Good observations though.

These lo res pictures don't really do it justice, but I don't want to overload the system with large jpg files. Does anybody know how to post pictures and make it not show up so large?

One more!

And another.

Well, I spent a good two weeks on this thing. It didn't come out as well as I expected it to in some respects. However, I am happy with it overall. I used primer as paint which worked pretty well except it was hard to get a good gloss coat over it. I had to lather the future on, and some of it started to yellow slightly. I also didn't have all the decals I needed to make the thing really rock. However, nothing is perfect. I am learning to deal with life's small imperfections.

The blue is not an exact match, but I kind of like the darker bolder blue for this one. Every custom is unique in one way or another. I know several members (like Kidkorrupt) have made some pretty nice customs of TV Max. I encourage them to post pictures in this thread. I want to see everyone's own personal take on the subject. Thanks.

Here's some pics:

Here's what I found,

The reissues I've been pulling apart have been the VF-1S super valks. I never had problems with the back pack. I had some difficulty with the shoulder areas but was able to get them apart. I had major problems with the nose cone. As it turns out, they are not glued together. Actually, the fit is so tight that I needed to use a combination of a screwdriver and exacto knife. The fit was so tight in fact that some of the pegs broke while pulling the thing apart. This doesn't really matter to me. I can always glue the thing back together again. It was annoying though.

Thanks, I'll give both methods a try.

I saw Rob's head. What the hell does a stock head look like. Do you mean the one that comes with the regular VF-1A's? I thought the Chris head was suppose to be a recast of that.

As you can see from this picture, I have removed all the screws including the one behind the head.

For the most part, dismantling my reissue has been easy except for one part. The nose cone does not seem to want to come apart no matter how much force I use. Did Bandai glue the two parts together at the front. Included are pictures of what I am talking about. The back part can be separated. However, the piece starts holding together like cement when you get to the "001" decal. The nosecone won't even budge. What's the deal here? Can anybody help?

Will Rob's head fit on a reissue? Also, where is Rob's site. I can't seem to find it.

I read the instructions for the Chris Beretta head replacement but still can't do it. The big problem is that the hole in the head is not deep enough. Thus, the head sort of sticks out too much and this scrawny neck shows. Am I suppose to just sand down the neck to the size of nub then stick the head on. I hope not. That would mean sanding off a quarter of an inch of plastic. For people who have done the Chris Beretta head replacement please offer help. I'm too close for this custom to look this bad. Thanks.

Max2

Instead of bumping, why don't people just write some inane comment to move their topic up. That's what I do.

That's the version I grew up on too. That might have been my first anime, either Harlock or Robotech.

A while back I did find some fansub distros that claimed to have it, but I never got around to ordering the tapes. I lost my enthusiasm for Harlock over the years to other shows.

Captain Harlock and The Queen of a Thousand Years is a "Robotech" of Space Pirate Captain Harlock (or was it SSX?) and Queen Millennia. Unlike Robotech, the footage goes back and forth between the two shows instead of having them one after the other. It was produced by good ole anime butcher Unca Carl. Harmony Gold never put out any videos or products for it AFAIK. It's lost and forgotten about like their Dragonball dubs. Captain Harlock and The Queen of a Thousand Years, an agonizingly long title that filled up the whole TV screen, is not the same as the other Captain Harlock dub released by Malibu Comics. This is the one where the kid is named Christopher Jenson, the computer is Roger, the little girl is Maya, and the queen of the Mazone is Regina (hehe I still remember 15 years later). There are 2 other characters named Nora and Olivia.

http://www.angelfire.com/nh/eternalanime/

http://www.angelfire.com/nh/eternalanime/main.html

He says he's trying to sell all his fansubs. If this guy really does have them, he's got episodes 15-21 and 45-51 on this page:

http://www.geocities.com/amethyst_light/

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-...nd+the+queen%22

edit: I saw this show in 1987-1988 on The Cartoon Channel, a TV station we used to have here in Alaska that had cartoons 24 hours a day.

Thanks for the heads up! I checked the guy's site. He lists the quality as being B and below. That really worries me. Usually A quality is still pretty bad. I can't imagine B or C quality. The search goes on.

Screw that, let's hope someone releases the 2 series unmeshed together, mayhaps in a couple HK DVD box sets once they come out on R2 DVD.

The interesting thing is, I kind of liked the two stories meshed together. I think if I saw Harlock all the time or Queen of a Thousand years for an entire episode, it would get boring. That was one problem I had with Starblazers. It was always the same thing over and over again. Watching the space battles was fun, but there really wasn't much of a plot except fight off the alien attack episode after episode. By mixing it up, they could have the space battles with Harlock and a mysterious plot line with the Queen of a Thousand years. The biggest problem I had was just how they could not connect the two stories at the end.