Anasazi37

Just received a "Now in your Private Warehouse" notification from HLJ for the Regult kit. It's still in stock on HLJ if anyone has been waiting to order one.

For 1/60 valks, that's generally true. For resin kits and other specialty items, not so much. Would love to be able to just push the PO button on AJ or another site for the plush gunpod without having to worry, because I'd like to reserve my worrying for how much it will cost me to ship it to the US. It's not the weight I'm worried about--it's the size....

Awesome! Here's hoping that it's not going to be sold through a PO Madness event on their website, but this is a pretty specialized thing, so it probably will require getting up in the middle of the night and repeatedly pressing F5....

I want the plush gunpod. Must have the plush gunpod.

A small part of me is kinda okay with the Sheryl and Ranka microphone releases in June because it does give our wallets a break (seriously...who wants those?), but only a small part. I want more DX valks as soon as possible. And more HM-R releases like the remaining Destroids and enemy mecha.

They've made some improvements to the VF-1 DX line over the various releases, but the only actual reissue is the VF-1J GBP and that's a special case in my mind.

But it's all about maintaining visual symmetry above all else, right?

In the face of Bandai's manufacturing and distribution decisions for Macross, it's the only way I stay sane I've been trying to get her to do that for a few years now. I'm slowly wearing her down. Soon now. Soon....

My wife tried to discourage my collecting by starting to order stuff from overseas as well (mostly yarn for her knitting projects, which can be surprisingly expensive). I was like, "excellent, now UPS/FedEx/DHL has *two* reasons to come to our house!" She was not amused. End result is that she now has some really nice-looking sweaters and blankets and I have even more valks.

You know...if you're trying to fill out the current DX lineup for the TV show, you still need to get your hands on the Max 1A...just saying.... (sheds can be quite comfortable to sleep in)

Or as my wife calls them, muttering under breath every time a new valk arrives, "stupid high-priced hunks of Japanese plastic."

That's great news! Very glad to hear that a simple wire inversion did the trick. I'm guessing a lot of folks with this kit, who are brave enough to mess with the electronics, would benefit from seeing a few pictures that show exactly what you did to pull this off.

001 is *exactly* the same as 100. What problems could you possibly be referring to?

My wife just mutters something like "stupid high-priced hunks of Japanese plastic" under her breath every time a new valk shows up, but that's about it. Took years of effort, and a lot of shipments, to get her to the point where she just accepts that my hunks of plastic aren't going away and new ones will occasionally show up. As others have said, the prices for both are not likely to go down and you get a two-for-one with the armored 1J. The TV Roy and the GBP 1J are iconic. I couldn't choose between them.

Ugh. Stepper motor. Forgot about that option. I have a quadrature rotary encoder driving a DC motor via Arduino for a project (when combined, it's basically a stepper motor) and keeping track of the high/low signal stuff in my code makes my head hurt. Yeah, theoretically you could swap the two encoder wires and that would turn low into high and high into low, which reverses the direction as the controller board's code understands it.

It's held up well for me. The wings on my SV-51 Ivanov haven't moved at all over the past two years--and they're fully-loaded with armaments.

Yep, that's exactly what AJ does for items shipped within Japan, I think because they assume the package isn't going very far. The item inside the box might slide around, get crushed, etc. Tenso generally just slaps an address label on packages sent to them by AJ, so I've seen that level of non-packing when Tenso forwards something to me. It's beginning to sound like it's a real gamble to order from LP. You might get a well-packed item or something that could have just as easily been sent by AJ + Tenso, and without the long delays people are experiencing right now. At the prices LP charges, if they are just sourcing from AJ, it would likely cost the same amount or less to just buy the item yourself on AJ and have a forwarding service like Tenso send it to you.

I can relate. BBTS has always come through, but one item I ordered was supposed to ship in October 2020, then the date kept changing to whatever the current month was. I'm pretty sure that delay was caused by some manufacturing problems, but once the item was released overseas it still took another 2-3 months for BBTS to receive it. Finally got the item in October 2021 (one year later). I just checked Amazon US and they're listing 15 July as the release date. I'm guessing all US-based retailers, even the really big ones, are waiting for the same allotment of VF-25s to arrive by ship. Since it will take 2-3 months post-release for that to happen (putting aside port delays), mid-July makes sense.

Here's hoping it's the second one. Really frustrating to hear that this is a simple programming mistake on their part. Probably one line of code that was copied and pasted without the small modification needed to change the direction of movement.

The picture definitely helps. So now I'm wondering if they used some kind of shunt wound motor, which would require four wires: https://www.4qd.co.uk/docs/motor-types-detail/ Two control power, two control speed, as you suggested. Reversing that could be tricky. I saw some posts in robotics forums about motors starting to heat up and smoke if you get it wrong. Huh. That might work. The mirror imaging would mean one of them is moving in the opposite direction.

You can usually reverse the direction of micro gearmotors by reversing the polarity (that's how you change the direction from forward to reverse with a controller board), but I'm most confident in doing that when there are only two wires, which is all motors of that size normally require. What does the connection look like at the foot motor? My main concern is that if you rotate the four-wire connector, controls meant for some other part might go to the foot motor instead. If you're brave enough to pull out the two wires that you know are going to the foot motor and swap their positions on the connector (or on the motor), that would probably work, but I'm just going on theory right now. Most manufacturers will tell you if a motor is "DC reversible", and some even stamp that on the motor casing. You might not be that fortunate, given the small size of the motor you're dealing with.

I shipped my Hasegawa GBP from HLJ at the same time and in the same way. Arrived one week ago, after a long delay at LA Customs. Stateside customs seems to be the big bottleneck these days, but yeah, you would normally see an "arrival" notification within a few days of the package leaving Tokyo. However, a friend of mine recently had an EMS package sit in Tokyo at the "dispatch" stage for a few weeks before it finally showed up in LA last week. I don't think he's alone in that happening. Holidays likely had an impact.

There are both yellow and white stripes in many places, not to mention the larger white markings like the number on the chest. Best way to tackle the stripes, for consistency, would be stencils or decals. They are pretty thin and have lots of angles. Since the underlying green is fairly dark, the yellow decals would have to be white-backed so they don't look dramatically different from the painted sections. Bandai has gone wild with the tampo on the SDFM and DYRL DX valks and accessories. They're a bit busy for me, so if you stick to the larger and more obvious markings, you might end up with something that looks better than the original.

This has been my experience as well. I was mainly running an experiment to see if EMS was even remotely back to what it used to be and...nope. Granted, the package left Japan within a few days, which is good, but once it hit US customs it just sat there, so the benefit of a rapid departure from Japan were completely wiped out. I'd rather continue to pay the same amount (or less) for FedEx or DHL.