Anasazi37

Well-played, sir

HLJ is getting a lot more pushy about shipping now. I ordered a few things before the end of December, using one of those unlimited discount codes they were handing out, and I parked them in my Private Warehouse because I knew that the Regult would be coming out in February and I wanted to save on shipping. Got an email or two in January that tried to nudge me to ship my stuff, then it felt like every few days this month they were bugging me. They even tried to fake me out with a "48 Hour Shipping Notice" email, which when you read it after thinking, "crap, they're going to automatically ship my stuff," was them saying, "we can ship your stuff in two days if you act now." I've been a customer for 20+ years and have never seen them resort to tactics like this before. Makes me not want to shop there.

Channel?

According to the Google translation on Dengeki Hobby Web, it's actually Borg Confart.

I just can't get excited about this release. I've tried. Giving my wallet a break.

Arcadia does tend to put a lot of thought into their designs, so I am optimistic as well. Hopefully we'll never see another production QC issue like the SV-51 Ivanov "two left feet" fiasco, but that wasn't a result of bad design--just bad execution.

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.