eugimon

It's hard to take the ankles apart because you have to pry the feet apart in order to separate the two halves of the foot/socket assembly. The problem with the loosening isn't with the ball portion wearing down or not having enough friction but that when you push the foot too far forward or backwards, you end up prying the two halves apart at the seams. I'm not sure what is causing this since the socket looks like it was designed to accommodate the range of movement. I was thinking either it was because the paint was welling up in the bottom of the socket, or the plastic half of the ball wasn't being glued on properly, either way, causing an ovaloid shape the pushes the socket apart rather than allowing the ball to rotate freely

Oh, FYI, you mention in you review that the ankle is an all metal ball joint. This isn't the case. The "ball" portion is actually a metal post with a metal half hemisphere with a plastic half hemisphere that is pegged and glued on. The socket portion is metal though. Just for comparison, the new dx 25/29 has a similar design but they also try to work in a plastic pad into the sockets as well.

COOL! I was right about the fore-grip on the gunpod collapsing in for fighter mode...

Trust me, no one is breaking that swing bar because they're using too much force. It's a thick piece of metal and the ball joint is on a thick peg as well. They're breaking because there was a flaw during the casting process and there's really nothing you can do about that. No amount of careful handling will save it if the metal was flawed to begin with. The only thing Bandai could have done better was to use steel for that swing bar instead of diecast.

maybe he's talking about the hinge pins. Some people suggest that if you have one of the first releases with the scalloped knurled hinge pins, that the knurling itself is too wide and it's causing the hinge to fail. So, to remedy that, you carefully tap out the pin, file down the knurling and re-assemble the hinge. But... ff the idea that the knurling itself is causing the cracks is 100% true, then nearly every shoulder would have failed. I have 6 valks that have the original knurled pins and only 1 has had the shoulder hinge fail and that was only in one shoulder, not both. So I'm not convinced that the knurling itself is the culprit. My personal opinion is that the cracks were caused during the manufacturing... in part because the knurling is too big but also because the hinges were being assembled incorrectly, either poor alignment, too much force or some other reason.

Well, it wouldn't have the speakers in the shoulder pauldrons.

dude, this blows away the work in the master file vf-1 book. outstanding

nice! But giving it new hips is a going to be a little involved...

Yeah, get on them about that. They released the awesome CF 1j that had all that great, crisp, tampo printing but then backed away from it... why? More tampo printing is always better!

Pacifists can and do work to effect change, but waging war isn't one of them. There are various schools of thought on pacifism to be sure. Including one group that believe that as long as they didn't start the violence, they're free to respond in kind... which is kind of like saying I'm a vegan on the days I don't eat meat. Keith is right when he says there's a difference between pacifism and passivism but the response to aggression and hostility of a pacifist cannot be war. If we look at the most famous, historical examples of pacifist leaders of the common era, Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., none condoned violence, not when their own followers were being attacked, beaten and killed and not even when their own personal safety was at risk. That's pacifism. that's why it's a frakking hard row to hoe. edit:: There's actually a famous case of a WWII pacifist, Desmond Doss, who still served but served as a field medic and refused to carry a rifle and save the lives of countless soldiers and earned himself a Medal of Honor. So it's entirely possible to be a pacifist, still serve in a war, save lives and not be a total douche bag.

what? No, being a pacifist doesn't mean you just prefer not to fight, it means not fighting, that there is no moral reason to fight, ever. Not to help others, not even to defend yourself. That's pacifism. It's a strict, hard line definition. I don't know how you can interpret pacifism any other way. A complete rejection of war. Not as a last resort, not if you really, really, really, feel like it. EVER. A pacifist will try any other means to end the conflict and work towards resolution but war and fighting are not ever one of those means.

I never trust animation (especially older) when it comes to black or darker colors. Too often they used blues to substitute for it so the viewer could still make out definition. Just look at Superman's hair, if we're going to be 100% faithful to the way he's drawn and colored, then suerpman has blue hair and obviously that's not the artist's intent.

yeah, you're overthinking it. The cockpit swivels in the vf-1, 19, 22, etc, because the fuselage is no longer oriented horizontally but vertically, so the cockpit rotates so that the pilot is oriented horizontally within battroid mode. In the vf-17, the whole cockpit section flips up into the chest so that the pilot is still horizontally seated, so the chair doesn't need to move independently because everything moves.

The underlying revelation and idea is fine. It fits nicely into the morality play of the UC... it's just the execution...

don't do that, it's much more fun to just make stuff up. I'm going with, "look at how easy it is to rip this hinge assembly apart! Why would we even make it like that? Because we hate you, that's why! We do this sh!t on purpose. BOOM!"

Man, you can't give a straight answer, can you? Go ahead, keep living in your butt hurt, fanboy fantasy world. BTW, all you people who are sooo up in arms over this, you guys do realize that a big part of the target demographic for this movie are people who weren't even born when the anime came out? This bemoaning of, whatever it is you're bemoaning, is blown so out of proportion. The number of remakes to original properties doesn't hold out and you guys go on and on about all these other remakes, like True Lies, like The Thing, as if they were the greatest thing ever.. newsflash, those were someone else's favorite movies when *they* were growing up... so in order to preserve their fragile sense of childhood, should you have been denied your chance to experience the same story, told for your generation? Get over it. Stories get retold, it's what keeps them alive and culturally relevant.

wow... that's really lame.

and why is that? The shape of the head clearly looks like the bridge and even the main camera sensor mimics the shape of the main viewport.

I don't know why people don't like the S type head. It's the SDF-1 bridge...

sorta, Graham mentioned that they caught the issue half way through production. So some have the old, faulty materials and some have the new shoulders

I have to admit. I don't even care what the story is and half the time I find I have no idea what's going on... because I don't care. But then the mecha porn starts up again and it's all good.

no, I didn't know that! That's actually really, really cool! Though, seriously... yamato could step up their game a bit on the value adds. I was just thinking about how my shoe shine kit came in a nice box that had a suede top and bottom and that wasn't even the kit itself, just the box the kit came in and the whole thing came in a nice bag.

Oh, I was talking about the actual toys. Hand stitched leather pilots chair, wood trim for the console. Maybe a nice handwritten note from the people who made it

seriously, if they're going to charge premium prices, at least load up on premium materials, like fine grain leather, Japanese maple. Go the extra step Yamato!

word of advice, bandai uses cheap, brittle screws. I've had the heads sheer right off while I was trying to get inside to apply nail polish. Be careful