Chronocidal
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Everything posted by Chronocidal
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That little mechanism is so stupid tiny, I can only call that an "our engineers are idiots" flaw. Could they really not come up with anything better that doesn't rely on a pair of tiny plastic clips?? Seriously... That entire structure should have been made of metal, and it should have been made with blocky pegs that fit into hollow sockets, not tiny little round plastic pegs that clip into equally tiny plastic clips. And here I thought we'd gotten past the pants-on-head designs of the 171... Edit: Oh, and joy of joys... the entire thing is riveted together. Where's the "slamming my face into a brick wall" smiley when you need it?
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Generally speaking, yes, I tend to try and seal and sand seams, but I usually don't go anywhere beyond sketchley's method above, just letting glue ooze fill the seams, and sanding it smooth. On older kits, this might not be enough, but more recent things from Hasegawa and Bandai barely need more than this. I will say though that I hesitate to use too much glue on transforming kits, or anything with lots of moving parts. Those seams may not look the best, but if they aren't horribly noticeable, they also leave more room for the kit to twist and flex as the parts move. I would hate to have a kit all sanded and sealed smooth, and then crack the surface when I try to move something.
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It really doesn't take much to make them stay in actually, I just added a single layer of scotch tape to the missile tabs, and they've remained solid ever since. If you're worried about the effect the glue might have on the plastic, you could even just use a small strip of paper. It only takes a little thickness to make them stay very well.
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Any 3D printed surface is going to need some serious cleaning and polishing if you want a smooth surface to paint on. Unless you really must have the NUNS markings on there, you're probably better off using black plastic, and just leaving the part its base color. I did have a thought for how to replace the lower triangles with something more similar to the Yamato VF-17, but I never got around to making them. It would require two parts instead of three, a new mount with a lengthwise pivot point that would screw in where the old longer pronged piece used to be, and a folding door that would rotate downward. I don't honestly know how well such a part would work. The green piece would need to pivot downward, out of the way of the arms. What I don't know is how much room it would take in gerwalk and battroid modes, and whether it would interfere with the legs, especially in gerwalk. Ideally, it might just rotate 180 degrees, and flip underneath the chest and out of the way for both modes.
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The kits have gotten simpler than the old VF-25s for sure, but I'm not sure that helped in the 31's case. The kit isn't bad, but there are a lot of parts that really need to be glued, and the mechanism for the weapons pod never seems to line up correctly somehow. I like the 262 kit better overall, but I wish they'd worked harder on at least trying to include some basic fists into fighter mode, and thought of some better way to lock the legs together than the removable bracket you have to use. The way the main wing pivots are attached is also really fragile, as I found out when I snapped one of the tiny cover plates in half. Why they didn't make that a single piece, I'll never understand.
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Just hope Mirage is as easy to get close to release as the rest of them have been. My collection basically came together as a combination of three things: a job, availability, and boredom. I found MacrossWorld somewhere during the latter half of high school, just in time to buy myself a 1/48 VF-1J for Christmas. I held off buying anything else until I graduated college and had a job though, which put me in the perfect position to gobble up every release from Yamato starting in mid-2009. ...Which, now that I think about it, seems odd, since the v.2 VF-1 came out in summer of 2008. I didn't realize I waited over a year to buy most of those early releases. Just shows how different things are now, I guess. I think the only v.2 VF-1s I actually pre-ordered were the M&M set. Everything else I just bought casually as I felt like it, or saw them pop up on one of HLJ's sales.
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Yeah, that was my first thought too, was worried they had a stock snafu, and weren't able to fill orders.
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Hmm, I wonder what it would look like if I mashed up the parts from a Keith kit to give the green one some gold highlights.. Wouldn't be accurate, but it might look pretty nice. I do find the advertisement for the kit funny though, for specifically calling out the "lock gimmick" for the legs.. which is literally a big removable bracket that you have to use to keep the thing together in fighter mode. I love how the kit goes together, but the parts swapping and lack of any hands at all in fighter mode are a bit disappointing.
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Macross Δ (Delta) - Mission 26 -Finale - READ 1st POST
Chronocidal replied to azrael's topic in Movies and TV Series
It was a pretty good series up through the halfway point, but I think by the time the last episode aired, everyone's expectations had dropped so low that any ending at all was seen as a positive thing. I mean, space tentacles notwithstanding, I think the last episode had more mecha action than the previous 4 or 5 episodes combined. That had to help somewhat. -
Heck, now that I know about it, just typing "Jenius" in there brings it up no trouble, but the standard search bar doesn't find it yet. Also, HLJ is getting fairly hammered, so their accounts are taking a bit for orders to show up. I got my email a few minutes before it ever showed up in my open orders list.
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This is actually a good point, the VF-25 renewals were actually pretty easy to get for Alto and Ozma if you started early, but once Alto's hit the streets, they all became insanely difficult to get an order in.
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HLJ's search function is absolutely nonsense it seems... even if I flat out copy the name of the item into the search bar, it will not find it. Guess I'll need to learn this advanced search-fu you speak of.
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I literally had 3 separate searches on HLJ open, looking for "Jenius", "VF-31C" and "Chogokin Macross"... the only almost relevant result I got was Messer's.
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Phew, got two in, CDJapan, and HLJ, I'm calling it good. Thank you for the links folks, my searches were failing miserably.
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Think that's the first time in a long time that I've actually seen the "add to cart" button at Amiami, so things are already looking up.
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lol amiami shot to hell by bots once more
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Sure, Bandai could just make everything web exclusives, and sell from their online shop. They'd have exact production numbers, and we'd have peace of mind ordering. That makes far too much sense for them to actually implement though.
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It's gotten much better after the first night really, everything's been available long after the open of preorders. Just hope it stays that way...
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I think I recall those barrel covers being retractable, actually. For the kit though, I can understand why they left them out, since it would further complicate the way the arm attaches behind the cockpit.
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I want to say that HLJ seems to have absolutely the best FedEx rates, but I usually order fairly big boxes of stuff. Small packages might be faster/cheaper with DHL. Either way, I'm going to be eagerly awaiting the refresh marathon in half an hour.. want at least two 31Cs so I can outfit one with packs.
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Wait.. did they not even bother to color the silver parts on the CF version? That's rather disappointing. Oh, well, makes it easier to make customs I suppose.
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So after messing with the parts alignment on my 262 some last night, I realized both what was keeping the arm from meshing properly under the back of the cockpit, and what was keeping the hips from meshing nicely with the intakes and wings. I also managed to find probably the most structurally troubling joint I've seen in a valk in a while. The fancy double/triple hinge that holds up the wing sections looks like a mess waiting to happen. Jenius pointed them out a little in his transformation video, where one seemed tighter than the other. Well, one of mine is insanely tight.. and the entire structure looks like it's made of plastic, with spring pins throughout. It took me a lot of massaging to shift around the wing mounts before they would nestle in closely to the forward arm and hips, and I was scratching my head the whole way over why the entire setup is made of little bitty plastic parts. I hope the materials they used there are incredibly strong, because with how much the wings move around, and how easy it is for them to get in the way of things, I can see those assemblies being extremely easy to break off. In fact, that's the same part on one of my 1/72 kits that broke. Caught the wing with my hand during a transformation, and the little cover panel that holds the wing in broke in half. It still holds together just fine, I just need to glue that panel on permanently instead of snapping it down.
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Wasn't able to get the model built up until this morning, but it looks ready to go. The curvature took a little bit of eyeballing, so I'm going to order one to test out myself, but feel free to grab one if you want to experiment with it. https://www.shapeways.com/product/YF9G9K2A3/yf19-neck-cover?key=69cf119ac3e49ba53dfa546c57da1d9c Might need a little sanding around the edges to fit properly, but it looks pretty much ready to go.
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So I tried something amusing, just to test. Assuming all the common components of the various VF-31s are the same, and they didn't make each of their feet unique (like the VF-25s were for some reason), it's fun playing around with color matching and seeing if things change. For example. Original Mirage photo. Similar Hayate pose, with roughly similar lighting. Look what happens if I edit the Mirage photo to match the tint of Hayate's feet. Now, that still isn't the right color, but it's more purple. I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, but it could just be general photographic shenanigans causing the colors.
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Hey now, I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a drunk. There's a difference, alcoholics have those meetings to go to, and that just sounds too much like work.