Anasazi37

The gunpod is no longer available for PO. Not sure if the order limit was reached or maybe Arcadia just decided to stop taking orders after 24 hours.

Keep an eye on the pinned PO thread, as others have recommended. Also keep an eye on the Tamashii Nations site (https://tamashii.jp/item_character/macross_series/), which will usually give you the exact days when POs will happen. That info is usually on individual product pages. Make sure you have active accounts on several sites like Amazon Japan, HLJ, Anime Export, AmiAmi, CDJapan, etc. If you are comfortable storing payment information in those accounts, that gives you a bit of an edge because you don't have to enter that stuff during checkout. Practice quickly switching between browser tabs and hitting the F5 button to refresh product pages. You'll likely have to look at multiple sites simultaneously. POs for DX valks, like most Bandai products, open at 4pm JST. They often sell out in minutes or seconds. That's for general releases. For TWE releases like the Angel Birds, you have to be in Japan to order them, no exceptions. That means you need to work through a proxy service (FromJapan, Big In Japan, etc.) or go to one of the few stores that will act like a proxy but let you just click the "buy" button. Anime Export and a few others tend to do this, taking orders before Bandai's store even opens. Their marked up price is generally on par with the retail price plus proxy fees. Some TWE items have sold out in minutes as well, but what generally happens is that proxies run out of allotments and start refusing orders. At that point you need to find someone in Japan to order the item for you. Be comfortable living with disappointment. I maybe manage to snag a DX at retail about half the time. Some folks here have the luck of the gods and consistently snag multiples at every single PO event. I have no idea how they do it. Keep an eye on sites like Amazon Japan and Yahoo Japan right around release day (before and after) for an item. You can sometimes grab a valk at retail when scalpers realize that a large bill is coming due and they start unloading stock they haven't managed to sell.

Here's the official site: https://tamashii.jp/item_brand/tiny-session/ Looks like only Frontier and Delta for now. Hoping they come back around to SDFM/DYRL.

That's how I managed to sell it to my wife. It's completely impractical and fun. The weaker yen doesn't hurt, either. My wife suggested one of those machines that compresses memory foam mattresses down to tiny cubes for shipping. Surely those exist in Japan and what they have is likely super high tech and very efficient. That would be *much* better. Sure enough, on the Tenso site, in fine print, it says that only DHL and ECMS use volumetric weight for large, light packages. I entered 4000g into the Tenso shipping calculator and here's what I got: So it looks like ¥18784 for DHL and roughly ¥14230 for EMS. It's reminding me of shipping those large 1/20 Plamax kits. Unless the gunpod is packed in an extremely sturdy box, I worry that Surface shipping will completely destroy it.

Woke up early (3:45am here) and managed to snag a gun pod. They're still available, but probably not for much longer....

Public service announcement in regards to the plush gunpod. Given its size, I decided to run the numbers on what it would cost to ship it to the US. It's light, but large, so places like Tenso are saying that the various shipping services (DHL, EMS, etc.) will use volumetric weight instead of actual weight to determine shipping cost. Arcadia is saying that the package is 107 x 20 x 30 centimeters, which works out to 12.84 kilograms in volumetric weight. Below is what the Tenso shipping costs looks like as a result. I doubt that proxies will be more affordable. I'm going to have to seriously think about this for the next few hours. It's now in the "really stupid, but really fun" purchase category that I might be able to get past my wife, but it could also be the end of me.

Bandai just announced that there will be a reissue of the Hayate in 2023 and...drum roll...they're making a Ghost set for it: https://hobby.dengeki.com/event/1626483/

Sounds like all five of the Delta entries will be released at the same time: https://hobby.dengeki.com/event/1626483/

This is so ridiculous and fun that I just have to try to get one. I was hoping they'd post a time, otherwise it was going to be a long day of hitting the F5 button....

Edit: Just noticed that it's listed as "before sales start" on TWE, not sold out. I need more coffee. I'm still going to pass on this one, though. I think the Bandai-invented winged logo has no place on the valk, as it breaks up the clean red/blue lines of the scheme. You can't turn everything into Macross Delta, Bandai. SDFM and DRYL valks don't need logos stamped all over them. I'm a fan of Hasegawa's minimalist take on it, where the only markings are the stripes and "Angel Birds" on the legs.

If Bandai was making this valk, they'd create a TWE add-on set just for the speakers and charge $150.

Has this news been confirmed? I know that it's been a few years since the release of the last 1/20 VF-1 kit (Fighter), but was hoping Max would create the Strike Battroid version to finish off the line. He's been doing those Frontier and Delta 1/20 nose kits lately, which I'm not a fan of, but at least it tells us that he's still making new stuff.

I've been wondering the same thing since it was previewed earlier this year. I'm guessing it will show up on Arcadia's site within the next week since the sign says late July.

LOL. True. I forgot to include the "make everything so very, very wrong" option on the set.

In a word: resin. My printer (Elegoo Saturn 4K) has a max resolution of 0.05mm, which would be more than sufficient for this model. There are some 8K printers on the market now that knock the resolution down to 0.025mm. Some of the parts are large enough that they'd have to be broken into two pieces, though (at least for my printer). It would require a lot of resin unless you hollowed out the parts, which is not easy to do. More traditional filament (PLA) printers have max resolutions around 0.12mm, which is still pretty good for a model like this.

In addition to the Bandai sheet that @Shawn just mentioned, which only comes with the Kakizaki release, I produced this small correction sheet: It was also used by MW members like @RedComet to create custom DYRL Focker and Max variants.

Anycubic Basic Clear, printed using an Elegoo Saturn. I'm also experimenting with Siraya Blu Clear v2, but it's a lot thicker and since the Anycubic prints are coming out nicely, I haven't spent a lot of time trying to get it dialed in. Biggest headache for me were these small "champagne bubbles" that showed up in the prints. I had to switch my tank film from FEP to NFEP and slow down the lifting speed by quite a bit to get rid of them. I was thinking of using a Bandai Action Base of some kind. Worst case I can drill a small hole in the printed main body part, but I have digital calipers so it wouldn't be hard to measure the diameter of the peg on whatever stand I pick and just subtract a cylinder of the same diameter from the 3D object and then print that.

Would love to print the updated parts--please do send them! You make a good point about differences in resin and type of printer. The newer mono 4K/8K models are a different animal than the older models.

And for what it's worth, I can attest to the high quality of @Jasonc's work. I volunteered to do some test prints of his original files and provide feedback to improve the final version. Design, fit, and finish of the parts, even at that early stage, were exceptional. I basically just had to figure out how I wanted to orient and support them for printing, which is both an art and a science. @Jasonc, if there isn't already a plan to do so, offering STL files with the supports in place as an option, based on what you've determined works well with your printer, could save folks a bunch of time and guesswork. That way all they have to do is slice and print. Now for a little eye candy. Using the standard progressive wet sanding approach for canopies, and after a dip in Future at the end, this is what the front canopy section part looks like for me: I can post pics of the other parts, if anyone is interested, but they're basically standard grey versions of what's already been shared in this thread.

"I know that I took down most of the pictures of our family to make room for this new display, but valks have been a part of my life far longer than any of you and they deserve some space, too. Now everyone can see how they've grown and changed over the years, just like our kids."

It's not easy to pull of that design using PLA filament printing, so hats off to the creator. (It would look even better if it were printed in resin instead, but it would be a bit heavier, would require painting, and not everyone is set up to handle resin printing)

They didn't bother to double check that the tailfin numbers on the early DX VF-1 releases were correct, and then tried to pass off the mistake as "intentionally maintaining symmetry," so I don't have my hopes up....

If there was any remaining doubt that Bandai was responsible for the high price of the VF-0S outside of Japan, this picture should take care of that. I'm still trying to square the high price against what we know about prices for other toys that Bandai distributes worldwide, when tend to be closer to the MSRP in Japan. At the current exchange rate, $160 is a 55% markup. All I can figure is that (1) Macross-related production runs are smaller and more expensive because of the smaller fan base compared to juggernauts like Gundam and/or (2) Bandai knows we will pay a premium to not have to deal with PO Madness.

From what I've seen other MW members report over the past year or so, BIJ will charge you a large premium for shipping up front and then ask for more once they have the item in hand. It's why I've never used them and likely never will.