Salamander

@arbit Are you sure your screen's pixels are perfectly square? If they are slightly taller than wide, that might also cause the effect.

FFFFFFFFFFF... Warning to anyone who has still laying around event-only Japanese mecha garage kits that are not from a big manufacturer like B-Club, Kotobukiya, Volks, or Wave, and that need the use of aftermarket poly caps: It appears that Kotobukiya has quietly discontinued their older poly cap joints, meaning that whatever stock you can find is what is left available. Now I'm left with a bunch of high-end, rather expensive garage kits that need specific Kotobukiya joints - that I don't have, and likely won't be able to find...aaargh! Edit: Hmmm, Kotobukiya's site still shows them as not out of production...did HLJ.com drop those products?

I like the ones where it looks like they said "Hey guys, let's be lazy and make a new one where we double the engines by just flipping the warp drives UPSIDE DOWN".

Clearcoat the decals with (for example) Tamiya clear from a bottle (apply with a brush). Then go SLOW on the decals. Don't try to move them off the sheet until the sheet looks positively soaked and the decals look like they're lifting off the backing sheet. Just last week I completed a mid-1990s kit where the decals would not budge until I soaked them in water for over an hour (each)...

I even didn't have to log in again.

Strange, I have an older release of that kit (not build yet) and I don't remember the fit being that bad. In fact, I just checked and the front end fits together really well. Maybe the molds are wearing out?

Yes, the quality of the master is going to be the problem with casting resin copies of 3D printed items. I've seen some resin kits based on 3D printed parts at a recent model show (which would be in 2019 due to COVID-19 banning all subsequent shows around here), and their finishing was "fuzzy" at best :o, not smooth at all. The problem was sanding off the printing lines on parts with lots of detail...

Personally, I use a small handsaw for the cruder jobs, and photo-etched saws for finer work (these literally come as a fret of photo-etched parts, and typically include saws you can hold between a few fingers and also versions that can replace your modelling knife blade)

It's not that hard, because you have panel lines along which you can scribe/saw. You saw through the wings at the short edges, and then use a scriber to cut through the long edge. If the wings actually use separate parts for top and bottom half, you can cut out the flaps on each halve and then fill up the remaining space with plastic card. The only real problem occurs when the top and bottom half of the wings are not properly aligned with regards to the panel lines, and the wings are a single piece.

For some products, especially toys, that only started to be properly enforced in the early to mid-1990s. For example (non-Macross example :P ), Bandai sold the European version of the Machine Robo DX toy Porsche 930 Turbo in their Robo Machine line under the name..."Porsche 930 Turbo", for at least several years (including in a box that mimicked the official Porsche advertisement style) with all logos intact until the toy was finally released in the Challenge of the Gobots style packaging renamed "Baron von Joy" (still all logos intact). Then in 1993 Bandai could not get away with using "Porsche 930 Turbo" anymore, and when doing their Robo Machine Generation 2 release simply called it "Sports Car II" with the copyright altered to remove the "Porsche 930", generic stickers removing all references to Porsche, and colored like a red Datsun 280Z T-Bar roof to avoid any further suspicion that it, in fact, was a Porsche 930 Turbo (despite looking like one ). The reason might have been these treaties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement Copyright in Europe in the 1980s was a mess. Also, many European countries have exemptions in international copyright law, where local law trumps the international laws. An example is the right to own a personal copy of a recording, which money- and power-hungry US-DMCA-style predators would love to have struck down, but that fortunately keeps failing in court.

Hmmm...maybe going by today's standards. Back in the 1980s things were a bit more lenient in various European countries, and it also depended on the product category whom to license things from (model kits, for example, were a bit of a gray area). For the Benelux, I know of the following: Orguss and Macross kits made by Arii and Imai were sold in shops, in Japanese boxes, with crudely translated instructions in Dutch/French/English and also the original Japanese instructions included. These have a BigWest licensing sticker. Bandai also sold Japanese kits with Dutch/French/English instructions. The ones I own are two Xabungle (of all things) kits. Various toy retailers had parallel import of actual Japanese toys, with an import sticker slapped on. They also had parallel import of US and Canadian toys. Doing that was not illegal (AFAIK, it still isn't).

You can always try tracking down some of Kaiyodo's old 1/35 vinyl kits, which can still be found for decent prices on Y! Auctions Japan. No articulation though. B-Clubs old 1/35 vinyl kits have some limited articulation, but are harder to find. You can see some of those kits in this picture of my stash:

Italian toy? Be careful, that could very well be legit. Various Italian toy manufacturers produced and sold Japanese toys that were actually licensed from the manufacturers (be it Diaclone, Transformers, Saint Seiya, Gobots...) during the 1980s and 1990s. Sometimes the quality is less good than the originals, making them look like knockoffs. Similar business practices happened in some other European countries and China and South Korea. I own a UK released VF1J with Takatoku copyright. IIRC, it has some minor differences from my Japanese Takatoku VF1J... I'll check that.

I just took five pictures that cover about 80% of my stash (total: 830 kits). It's not as bad as in those videos, because the stacks are tidy. I'll post the pictures later... However, one of our club members, in his 60s and happily married, has a standard size Dutch house (approx. 140 square meters) that apparently is stacked floor to ceiling with model kits in every room, and it's impossible to move much in most of the rooms. At the last model convention I went to before the virus hit, I overheard a discussion where a reseller explained that his stock had literally grown massively overnight after he was asked to empty a deceased modeller's house. What he had taken to the con not even half, he still had three entire rooms of kits from the deceased guy in storage...

Those Robot Museum kits are pretty small in general, no more 7-10 cm tall. @ChristopherB: I haven't build a Valk since ages, although I should try once again. I've build quite a few 1/72 WW2 planes lately and am finally getting to the point where handpainting with Tamiya acrylics gives the proper result (it's all a matter of properly thinning colors and mixing them so they give a semi-gloss finishing...). What's annoying about those Wave kits is that whatever they used as a mold release agent hardens over time and is near impossible to get off the resin by now.

I don't think I ever posted pics... Here's one showing most of my Macross stash: Missing: Yellow Submarine Macross, 2x Wave 1/72 soft vinyl kits, 2x Hasegawa plamos, B-Club Gilgamesh. Oh, and here is my Patlabor stash:

Battle damage? Time for a diorama titled "Feral space kitten strikes back: the return of the bite mark"? It might be salvageable if you reinforce it from the inside using plastic sheet and then fill the dimples and holes.

And the end of a project: Someone seems to have pimped their grandparent's old three-wheeled truck in their garage... Base kit: Arii Daihatsu CM-10T diorama kit. Scratch: garage, minor improvements to kit including wooden truck bed. From the spares box: Some chromed bits left over from an Aoshima kit. Other bits: CMK/Verlinden/AK/Yen Models/etc. Paint: Tamiya spray cans for the main truck colors, everything else Tamiya acrylics by hand.

Usually these kind of companies don't fold. Their business model is entirely based on ensuring customers are ensnared in it and pay lots of money for something that should not cost that much...ever.

A project...

Hasegawa made the transition from wooden prototypes to resin/machined prototypes to 3D modeling/3D printed prototypes starting around 2003/2004, and seem to have used their Virtual On line-up as some sort of test-bed for new production techniques and materials (e.g. polycaps, POM joints, advanced gating techniques for injection plastic machines). At one point the team behind that product line even overshot their budget, and still managed to get the funds to complete the product in question (likely because it was Hasegawa's first product that could technically be assembled without painting and give a decent result). Since a few years a lot of the stuff that premiered in that line is showing up in many of their new products, including vehicle kits lately. The VF-1s are from before those developments.

Just wet-sand everything (also gives a smoother finish). You only need a small bowl of water to dip the sandpaper into now and then.

The Runabout is nice and big (you're talking about the 1/72 one, right?), but unfortunately lacks an interior. There's an aftermarket resin kit to fix that, but A) it's expensive and B) the pictures I've seen of the parts don't make it look good (mediocre detail, limited section of the interior, very little parts for the price). So when (or is that "if I ever"?) I build mine, I'll likely scratch the interior...

The series was licensed for US release, but that never occurred. A HK bootleg DVD of the first 13 episodes with pretty awful subs exists. Otherwise there are the Japanese region 2 DVDs, which can be followed quite well without knowledge of Japanese if you forfeit the discussions between characters of what it is to be a hero, being good and bad, and the like. The series starts off pretty slowly, and is more of an animated tokusatsu show than a regular anime. However, starting about episode 20 things get darker very very quickly, including character deaths and the heroes being beaten into a pulp and having to retreat, getting chased by the bad guys etc. as it turns out the TV idol aspect of the plot is well...fake... The show is virtually blood-free, and also features very little fanservice. It also manages to have a truly heart-breaking resolution of the love triangle between the mysterious waif "bad guy", her protector, and the hero. The toys are awesome, if somewhat plagued by premature joint wear and other minor quality control issues on the first waves. They can be seen as the predecessors of Busou Shinki (minus the sexy minigirl aspect).

Some of the copyrights and trademarks have not yet lapsed, because they were renewed in the 1990s in Europe, and for Machine Robo they've been used time and again in Asia since 2001. So this comic is pretty much America-only... Now that depends on the jurisdiction, because the situation is different in Europe. In Europe, Bandai marketed most of Robo Machine and later Challenge of the Gobots including Rocklords and various Tonka-designed toys, and in some countries the cartoon was dubbed with some modifications. France also got Machine Robo Revenge of Cronos, renamed "Revenge of the Gobots", with Gobot names somewhat randomly distributed among the characters. The video tape I own of that show credits Hanna-Barbera/Tonka and Bandai... Infodump: It says "Future Machine" because that was its Robo Machine name (which is also the only European release of Psycho that ever was). Future Machine is a modified release (neutered launcher but still includes missiles in early versions) of the Japanese Psychoroid version, which was not exactly a Machine Robo toy but tied into the Cobra anime. Robo Machine is Bandai's attempt at marketing Machine Robo (the original Popy version, not Revenge of Cronos) in Europe, starting 1983. The early DX Robo Machine boxes are literally almost exactly the same as the early DX Machine Robo boxes, just with translated text. That said, some of the later Gobots designs, both Super Gobots and regular ones, are pretty complex, blowing away most pre-Beast Wars Transformers...