Anasazi37
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Everything posted by Anasazi37
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Exactly! I'm not thrilled about the 5200 JPY "fast" shipping charge, but it could have been much worse. The "economy" shipping option was only 200 JPY less, so it didn't make sense to choose that one.
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Just received my "item is in stock and ready to ship" notification from AE for the armor
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Thanks for doing that! I was going to wait a few more days then do the same, but I'll instead keep an eye out for a message from them on the 26th. Can't wait to armor up my Arad.
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Same here. I preordered from AE right after their listing went live. Radio silence. They had a banner on their site last week saying that they were closed for Obon, so they're likely way behind on processing orders. I did notice that NY finally changed the status of their listing to "Not Available," so maybe they received their shipment and are processing orders right now. Think I'll go back to using a proxy for TWE items. Price is about the same and you get your item faster.
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Yep, that's an option, too. Comes with it's own set of challenges. Generally works better for larger designs, but you have to make absolutely sure that there are no air bubbles or wrinkles in the decals after application and that you get everything aligned perfectly. It also doubles the thickness of the design you're putting on the surface, so it might stick out more. As @MechTech said, it's nice to see some affordable options out there.
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Thanks for sharing, @MechTech. Yes, I looked into that option a few years ago. If all you need to do is print white designs, it's a viable option. If you need to print color designs that can sit on dark backgrounds, which requires printing them on top of a white backing layer, you'll need a more sophisticated setup. You can try to achieve the same effect with this ghost white toner method by passing the same page through the printer twice (one for the white, then once for the color, maybe having to swap out toner cartridges along the way), but the registration will be bad for small designs, which is pretty much what we all deal with for scale models and customs. By registration I mean the alignment between the color layer and the white backing layer. It happens because the paper isn't held in place between passes, like you get with ALPS and higher-end OKI printers. This option is definitely cheaper than the $6000 OKI printer that officially supports white, but suffers from the same problem (hand-feeding the paper through each time). The OKI printers that can do it right are on the order of $30,000. So, I'm trying to keep my ALPS printer running as long as I can....
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This is what Plamax has on their site: Normal and DX Decals: Aug 2019 Fighter: Sept 2019 Armaments: Sept 2019 No specific dates yet. The Gerwalk kit experienced several delays, so I think we're all a bit skeptical that anything will be released soon. My wallet would like for the Fighter to be released before November, though. Too many other preorders are going to hit right around the holidays....
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I've only had one marginally bad experience with a used item on Mandarake, otherwise it's worked out really well and allowed me to flesh out my Macross collection with a bunch of stuff that I missed out on over the past 6-7 years (Frontier valks and the early HMRs) at reasonable prices. The one marginally bad experience was with a YF-25 Durandal Alto (the version with the shoulder marking misprinted, but the corrected part was included in its still-sealed bag). It was listed as opened and QA inspected, but unused. The cardboard top for the styrofoam insert looked like it had been through hell, but the toy looked pristine. Turns out the parts of the wings that can spin all the way around were loose, which made it impossible to attach the super pack in fighter or battroid modes. Previous owner must have transformed it at least a few times for that to happen. Two tiny dabs of super glue later, to create a bit of resistance, and the problem was solved. So, "bad" with Mandarake is a relative thing. Their warehouse location, Sawara (SAHRA), is really good, too. When you buy from them, the item ships immediately and is generally packed way better than what the storefront locations do.
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Next week? I keep seeing "late August" everywhere I look, so sooner than that would be great.
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I'd print them myself, with white-backed designs on clear film. I've been making waterslide decals and stickers for Macross collectors and customizers for the past 17 years.
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I never applied the stickers to mine, they're probably still in the box which is tucked away in a closet somewhere. I could scan those in. I could also potentially turn them in to custom stickers, but I'd have to seriously look at how much time that would take.
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He was listed at "not available" on NY for most of today. Guess they found a few more from third party sellers....
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I think I grabbed the last affordable MIB Arad, when it was still around $200 USD. I'm usually not that lucky, getting punished by DX Chogokin PO Madness and subsequent scalper price hikes like everyone else here, but I lucked out this one time. I suspected that the armor was going to be announced in March, so I started monitoring Mandarake at the beginning of the month, hoping an Arad would show up. I happened to wake up in the middle of the night during a business trip, saw an email notification that one was available, bought it without hesitation, and later that day the announcement came out. Price jumped immediately to $400+.
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- macross delta
- vf-31 siegfried
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I have space set aside on one of my display shelves for at least five more releases (Tomahawk, Phalanx, Q-Rau, TV Max, TV Hayao)
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Wow, I completely forgot about this. takatoys and I were making competing aftermarket sticker sets for the Yamato valks at the same time, around 16(!) years ago. Different designs, different printing methods. Definitely necromancy.
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Hooray! Nice catch, @Xigfrid.
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Yeah, it's great to see a fellow MW member knock it out of the park
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Just a heads up that the SCI-FI 03 set is sold out. I was hoping to buy 5-6 of them. Does anyone know if they plan to make more?
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Agreed! And they're also compact enough to fit in with other scales on the same shelf if you plan things right. (If anyone is curious, the 1/60 Blue Roses and Angel Birds in the front row are customs that I made a very long time ago)
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Not for my wallet....
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That was exactly my intent. I never bother these shops, even though I've been regularly buying from some of them for 15+ years and they occasionally frustrate the hell out of me, but in this case, I wanted to know if AE actually had secured stock or was still aggregating POs in autopilot mode and hadn't been paying attention to the madness. I also figured that I was asking on behalf of everyone here who ordered from them. It's been four days since I contacted them and...nothing. I did notice that by the next morning AE showed the SSP set as out of stock, so I'm not sure if they finally woke up and shut down POs or folks cleaned out their remaining inventory. While I was waiting to hear back from them, I missed the opportunity to get a PO from NY because they sold out. Luckily, I woke up early this morning, noticed that they were available again due to the second listing on Bandai's site, and grabbed one. It comes down to trust. Do I trust that AE will fulfill my original order? No, especially since they haven't responded to my inquiry. Am I happy that I have to buy a backup set from another site to make sure that I get one? Definitely not. The only upside to this situation is that, assuming both sets do show up, I'll have a spare one that I can make available to a fellow MW member who needs one.
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I just sent a message to AE directly asking them if they were able to secure the SSP set that I pre-ordered. I'll let you know what they say.
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I got cartjacked on every other major site in the time it took for HLJ's spinning wheel of death to tell me that the item in my cart was no longer available....
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My thoughts exactly, but I guess we're in wait-and-see mode. Hopefully they'll put up the product page with enough advance notice so we can figure that out before buying too many or too few.
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MacrossCentral is now saying that the armor will only work for the Hikaru 1S. Last week, after we poured over the magazine pics, the consensus seemed to be that the armor would work for all Skull Squadron variants, possibly by being able to swap out the roundels on the FAST Pack. Is Bandai really going to release a different armor set for each valk? We've seen them do this with the Super and Armor sets for Frontier and Delta, but in those cases the color differences were "significant." Here we're talking about two small colored circles. Makes me want to fire up my ALPS printer and crank out "conversion" sets consisting of stickers/decals for all variants that you can put over the red ones (or whatever color you happen to buy).
