Chronocidal

Frak, what do you mean they don't accept free email accounts?? I don't HAVE a paid email.

Actually, I think the fix was to loosen the screw.. apparently tightening it pulls the hinge down somehow.

Oy... there goes another $400. But not now.. maybe late January, or February.

That's not a new sale, it's the same items as went on sale early in fall.. but the prices are all higher now than they were then. The sale v.2s used to be a little over $70.

Oh nice, the VT-1 is in the same size box as the regular non-super VF-1s Can't wait to get mine after I go home from vacation. I might have to get a normal TV fast pack set at some pont, but I've already got a strike pack, plus my M&M booster sets, so that's enough for the time being.. plus, I generally prefer plain fighter mode. I might get a cannon fodder next.. but I need to ease up for a while. Plus, I need to save up for the M&M VF-22s and VF-11C... and hope they go on sale.. hmmm... Maybe if the sale at hlj keeps going, I'll get something smaller first... and I don't have a cannon fodder yet.. grr.

Oh, ho! Do my eyes deceive me, or do I see painted metal parts? Looks like the gear and metal chest plate come painted white. I am happy. I wonder if I could get a deal for buying them in bulk... As for assembly, I'm not too worried. The standard v.2 VF-1s does depend on quite a bit of glue to stay together though, and I don't know what type of glue these will require. It might not be bad, probably just use superglue of some sort.. But putting together the internals of these may turn out to be a daunting task. What I do hope to figure out is how to file down the right spot on the tail section so that the tails actually lie FLAT when folded. That's something that continues to bug me about my all my v.2 Valks. The fact that they didn't fix the new Roy issue is beyond stupid however.. if these turn out to have the original thick pinned shoulders, and the subsequent breakages...

Actually, the VT-1 had a good amount of screen time in DYRL, I'd bet a lot more than the VE-1. The VE-1 is really unique, but I never cared for the look of the sensor dish on it. What I wonder is how hard it would be to make Misa figure for the VT-1.. Since the VF-1D comes with Miinmay, I think it's only fair Misa gets a ride too. I have to watch DYRL again, but did Misa wear the same type of suit as Minmay (guessing a different color), or did she wear something entirely different? If it's the same, I might just try and repaint the VT-1 backseat figure. I kind of have a soft spot for the VT-1, it hit me just recently what it reminds me of: the T-38. People have debated the differences between the VT-1 and VF-1D before, but it finally hit me that it's the same relationship between the T-38 and the F-5F. Same base design, just a dedicated trainer vs a combat ready two seater.

I'm just wondering what all this "HI-METAL" talk means. I see... a metal pin or two maybe? Yes, it's a prototype. But there's so much clear materlal there, I have a hard time understanding what metal has to do with that toy. At least they finally learned to put hardpoints on the wings, instead of using clip-on missiles.

I got my Hikaru VF-1J around early October I think, and it already had the shoulder fixes. The only thing it didn't have was the new nosecone hatch, and that really doesn't bother me at all. I can't say I have a favorite yet. Roughly half of the Valks I "own" are currently waiting for me to pick up at the post office (or will be by the time I get back to my apartment). It's gonna be hard to decide later.

Personally? 1/100 is too small for me to care about ... well, nearly anything. I don't have anything in that scale, and I'm not going to start another VF-1 collection just to have something similar. The VF-19 might be an okay size, but 1/100 VF-1s will be freaking tiny. While I'm sure there's a portion of the population that will buy the Bandai VF-1, and will gather a decent collection in that scale, they need to offer something more than another set of VF-1s. The market is just flooded right now. What I would like to know is how far Bandai plans to carry their VF-1 line.. Yamato has covered pretty much every canon scheme possible now, and they're even covering the customs market with their kit version. Bandai is playing catch-up at best here, and unless they have some massive gimmicks up their sleeves, I don't see any reason not to buy a bigger plane. Shoot, the VF-1 kit price is around $60 if I recall (not sure about that, need to re-check).. with the VF-19 coming in around $70.. If Bandai can't keep the VF-1 price significantly below the 1/60th kit, I don't know how they'll ever sell. Yes, it takes work, and some people like their planes smaller. But considering how people like Gundam kits.. I dunno. I guess what seems funny about this to me.. it's like Bandai is trying to sell Macross using the same methods it uses to sell Gundam. Smaller action figures, bigger kits, bigger still DX versions.. I don't know if it'll wind up working in the end.

That happens a lot to me, I usually chalk it up to the time difference. Being over a day late might happen, especially if this is your first order. My first one took a couple of days to appear. Once you have an account in their system it seems to go faster (did for me at least).

Correction... this HAS BEEN an expensive winter. This month: 1/60 YF-19, YF-21, VF-11B, VF-1D, VT-1. So.... 1/48: Still 1 1/60: 12 now Well, I hit my goal of getting one per month for the year.. I just didn't start buying until September. Oh well, something to work on for the new year.

*sigh* So a relative sent me a surprise for Christmas, and I decided to jump on the VT-1 before the deal disappears, along with a VF-25 kit I'd been planning to buy. So depending on the mail system, that makes this december a 5 yammie month: 1/60 YF-19, YF-21, VF-11B, VF-1D, and VT-1. And that's not counting several models. HLJ must love me right now. But hey, they were all on sale! So I actually saved money, right? Edit: Wheee, page 6. We oughta just retitle this thread... Oh you better watch out, There's so much that you'll buy, With a sale on Valks, You'll spend til you cry, HLJ is coming to town. You're filling your cart, Checking it twice, Shipping be darned You'll pay any price, HLJ is coming to town. With YF-19s, And Sturmvogel IIs, VT-1s, M&Ms, And model kits too, HLJ is coming to town. The valkaholics here now, Will be waiting at their doors We'll be in debt to our eyeballs If they ever make VF-4s! So you better stay safe, And hide all your cash, If you see the discounts, It'll be gone in a flash, HLJ is coming to town.

BLASHEMER!!!! STONE HIM! That trailer is no where NEAR long enough. I got chills..and that pic of Yuki's face, screaming, splattered with blood..... *shivers* wow. I can't wait. *goes to re-read disappearance with those images fresh in his mind*

Check back in my older thread, there are more details about what I did there, though it was simpler to do than I expected.. I was really planning on adding more tabs to hold the leg to the body, but just that one did the trick. Once the leg is held up to the wing section, the rest of the plane sticks together beautifully.

actually, I'm pretty sure that pink color is accurate to the anime. The VF-22 was always a much lighter shade than her VF-1J. There were a few screenshots from M7 a few pages back, and it looks close to me. Darn. There's another $400 yamato's gonna get from me. And the sale's over now? Double darn. I wanted to get a VT-1 in January.

Don't forget the nail clippers, I tend to use those just as often as sprue cutters for trimming things. Even better if the clippers have an attached file, so you can get rid of sprue bumps with a single tool. I keep finding new uses for nail clippers all the time. I remember finding a set in my backpack during a circuits lab, and finding out they're a great makeshift tool for stripping wire insulation.

There was another topic a while ago about the tabs I added to my VF-25G, they were a pain to make by hand (sanding tiny pieces to shape), but they've been very effective holding the legs up, and the wings down. Here's a picture showing the tab and slot, with the exact shape of the slot outlined since it's a bit hard to see (the rough cut I made needs some smoothing out).

Bumping because I just had a similar problem to the one above. I got a supposedly brand new YF-19 on Ebay (previous owner said he had only displayed in fighter and never transformed it), and the shoulders were a mess out of the box. I'm inclined to believe the seller about it never being played with, since he was more than willing to refund me, but he gave me a great deal, so I'd much rather fix it myself than look for a similar deal. My problem wasn't quite as external as the above pictures. I noticed that the shoulders would not lift at all, and noticed that the upper arm was very loosely held around the shoulder joint. On pulling up the shoulder covers and unscrewing the top joint, I realized that the shafts that the screws go into were both sheared off at the base. Once the screw was out, the arms just fell off, leaving the shaft still inside the hole in the shoulder. For now, I just superglued the screw shafts back where they belong, and reassembled the arms. I REALLY wish I could get the shoulder covers off, because they made this a pain. Btw, I did discover one thing.. the arms are MUCH easier to put together if you remove the lower arm. I just popped out the rotation pin for the sideways bicep joint, and everything went smoothly. The shoulder lifting motion is nice and tight on both arms now (the glue tightened the joints a little, on top of the screw being tight). Unfortunately, this thing has a host of other minor problems that I'm working on slowly (landing gear already fixed, working on the crooked gunpod). Two things I'm not quite sure about fixing.. well, three actually. First, the left upper thigh pivot (the "bendy" joint used in gerwalk) is extremely loose... It seems the ratchet tooth was molded too small, and it won't grip the joint. I've tried getting the area around the joint apart, but the area is really glued well. I might just add a thin layer of glue to the surface the tooth grabs onto, and see if it helps it grab better. Second, I can't for the life of me get the intake covers to stay in. It's like the pegs were molded too small, or the intakes are too big. I might need to beef up the pegs to get them to attach. Last, the upper shoulder rotation joint is just floppy. The arms will barely hold up their own weight, let alone the gunpod. I've been trying to get at the that joint to see if I can tighten it, but the amount of glue used on this thing is beyond frustrating. I might just see if Overdrive can ship me some spare parts at some point, and try replacing the arms and left leg, but that's a good chunk of the plane to replace.

It is looking darn good, and sooooo much better than the -25. One thing to be aware of with gerwalk mode though.. this one still doesn't appear to have any type of thigh swivel. So to get the pose shown, you have to drop the legs a bit, and swivel them out at the hips, same as the VF-25. You don't notice it as much, since the VF-27's intakes don't detach at the very front, but I don't think the leg posability has changed much, if at all. I'd love them to prove me wrong, and give this a thigh swivel, but something I realized a while back.. I don't think Bandai has ever made mecha with that type of joint. Gundams figures I've built have never had the sort of legs that would allow for that rotation, so the concept behind it just might not exist in Bandai's mind. On the other hand.. I'm not even entirely convinced that the VF-25 CAN swivel it's thighs. Sure, you see poses where it looks like it can, but I'm still not sure that the VF-25 has a spot on the leg where such a joint could even exist. I might need to just look harder. Based on the 1/72 kit, and the way the leg is assembled, the thigh pivot would probably have to be buried in the thigh extension hinge piece that you only see in gerwalk.

Ok, so I finally got a 1/60 YF-19 after convincing myself the gullet wasn't so bad.. then realizing, yeah, it still kinda is. Note, this is my own personal nit-picky thing, I know a lot of you have accepted the gullet over time. I might too eventually, but I still like playing with what-ifs. So I started thinking what I could do to fix it, and how much work it might possibly be. Somewhere along the way, I realized.. even though the gullet might look oversized, that's not the main problem. Comparing line art, and the overall lines of the fighter... the nose is just sticking way up in the air. Just fyi, I'm not going to bring up the Hasegawa kit at all, since it really is far too thin to use as a reference. But the overall shape of the plane should have the tip of the nose roughly on the centerline of the design, which continues through the engine exhausts. The thicker legs on the 1/60 makes that difficult, but Yamato exaggerated the problem by nearly eliminating the fuselage curvature, and the nose centerline pops out way above the center of the feet. Now, the nose angle isn't nearly the only problem.. the 1/60 nose is just thick. The canopy is really high, and the whole nose is just too tall on the whole, but it needs that space for the mechanism inside, so there's not much you can do about that. It's just missing most of the curvature of the forward fuselage, which should be much more arched than it is. So, I started thinking of how you could change the level of the nose, while keeping as much of the original structure and mechanism intact as possible. Essentially, it boils down to modifying one piece (maybe two): the back half of the fuselage Z-fold area, which shortens to go into battroid. Now, there are a couple ways to go about this. The simplest way I could think of is shown above. Everything that needs to change is outlined in red. The top of the rear fuselage portion would need to angle down till it was nearly level, and the entire z-fold area would essentially rotate so that the forward nose section would drop. The good part is that the leg joints, main body joint, and nose underside flap joint can all remain essentially the same. You don't even need to modify the landing gear area at all. The underside nose flap would need to be slimmed down a bit to match the new shape, but that's one of the few places where there's room to spare. Now, the big question is how this would alter the transformation. I don't think the effects would be terrible. So many of the joints in the nose are double jointed, there's a lot of flexibility in the positioning of the parts in battroid. On the somewhat unfortunate side, this essentially means rebuilding the mechanism of the Z-fold. This could be good in the sense that it can be strengthened, but it might be complicated to make the new joint strong. Best case? this would just require remodeling the front edge, and a bit of the sides of the rear fuselage area to match the new nose angle. Worst case, you'd need to make a brand new part for that secion of the fuselage (which would be no small task, since this is also the hip-joint). The end result would put the nose tip much lower than before, and bring back a bit of the arched shape the lineart has for the forward fuselage. Now, I've never done anything like this, and I probably wouldn't do it unless I had a spare YF-19 to do it on. What I'd like to come up with is an add-on part that could replace just the front upper half of the Z-fold area. Ideally, it'd be some sort of kit where you just swap a couple pieces, and the nose sits lower. I'm going to attempt duplicating the YF-19 CAD model at some point in the future, and use that as a test bed for the idea, checking to see if it changes the transformation any. It might even be possible to use 3D printer of some sort to make a new fuselage section with these changes incorporated, but I don't know what type of materials would be needed for that. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Would it even be worth attempting, or is it more likely to completely screw up the plane? Edit: It may not look like much of a difference, but here's what the end result would be, without all the extra colors and lines.

Darn, you beat me to it. Although, I'm sure there are plenty of boobs on HLJ too, depending where you look. They're all fake, and likely plastic, but sometimes you take what you can get. On the other hand, he should add a link to that pic in his sig. They most definitely fall under the category of fun things to look at when you're bored. Back to the VF-22 though, that looks awesome. It's a much brighter shade of red than the VF-1J (which really looks way too dark to me), and should look great next to Max's. I just need to hold off a few months for these, since I just got the YF-21 on sale instead. You know, I think I actually like the Yammie YF-21/VF-22 BETTER than the Hasegawa version... they're both sleek, but I like the Yamato style nose better (the Hase has a kind of lip on the nose edge, while the yamato nose is blended more smoothly).

I just remembered where those Sara and Mao pics came from... topic from way back in 2003, and it did have one big Nora pic to boot. I believe all those pics were drawn by Joseph, though he hasn't posted since April. Here's the original topic, as well as a couple of the pics from there. Macross Zero Fan Works I seriously thought some of those pics were official images at the time, but then he put up the in-progress shots of some things.

I just finished watching the THORA rip set on my 47" tv (HDMI out from a laptop) and I have to agree, the quality of the video was rather astounding. In fact, the CGI was actually a bit unsettling at times, it just looked too real. I watched the whole thing on media player classic, and had no trouble with it. My one gripe is that while the subs are fine, the karaoke subs seemed horribly mangled to me. Granted, I don't speak Japanese, but what I saw looked like a nasty case of reverse engrish. I've read the romanized lyrics for many of the songs in Frontier, and the lyric subs on the THORA set don't match up. It's like they shifted word breaks and syllables around, resulting in something like... well, imagine taking the lyrics for "Jingle Bells," and coming up with, "Jin gulbels, jin gulbels, jin gulal the way." It's definitely what the song sounds like, but they aren't real words. Again, I don't know Japanese.. but their lyrics don't match the lyrics I've read anywhere else.

My HLJ sale items just shipped in the past hour or so.. but I'm leaving for Christmas saturday. Unless they use some kind of portal system, I won't get to open my VF-1D, VF-11, or YF-21 till after new years. Oh well, something to look forward to in the new year.