SteveTheFish

I just opened the Kei kit and took a picture of it for you. https://stevethefish.net/photostream/#16039252457827/16943140794097

Package from Amiami arrived this evening!

Hey, there is Kaneda! He has gray hair now. Well, apparently he is still working at Aoshima. He had a plan to produce a kit of the police spinner from Silent Mobius several years back but I imagine that plan must have been abandoned by now. I really wanna go to the All-Japan Model Hobby Show at the end of the month and see people I haven't seen in many years.

Nice!

I never noticed any cosmetic differences between the show and the movie. For the male power armor, though, it is very different. The movie version looks way better while the TV version looks clunky. This has inspired me to start working on the old Bandai repop of the Imai kit I own. I bought it over 18 years ago and all I did with it was paint the figure. Last night I did assembly on the legs and such, but I'll have to paint many of the parts separately before assembling, then do touch-up painting.

Oh man... I am so tempted to attend the All-Japan show. I haven't been there in years, especially because of the mask requirements. Now that that's over, I'd like to attend again. I'd have to take a Friday off from work though to attend on press day.

Last night I started working on this old kit. The decals have aged poorly and they maybe unusable. My plan is to use my sheet of Autobot decals and build it as Jetfire from Transformers. I don't forsee spending a ton of time on this, hoping that it might be a quick build. I'll post pics later as I go along. I never noticed this until last night, but while the box art looks nice, the artist made a big mistake. Look at the central thruster pod. It's facing the wrong direction! That's supposed to be an intake, but the thruster nozzles are pointed forwards instead of being in back. Oops!

I have an old Macross pencil board that advertises Imai and Arii kits. Here are scans of the front and back. That Macross fortress in Storm Attacker mode looks pretty blocky and dumb.

Thanks for sharing. It was clever how he used those Wave support parts to modify the leg joints. That way the parts can be painted separately, then assembled. The joint can now pivot, too. I liked what he was doing with the UV resin to do the eye. Unfortunately, he didn't show a close-up of the part after the UV resin had cured. My idea is to cram Oyumaru into the camera eye to make a mold, cut out the center, then put the mold into place and backfill it with UV resin. I could maybe create a socket for a red 3mm LED to go behind it to light it too. I should put in a good word for a YouTube modeler in NZ who goes by "Duck Playing Chicken" who lights up Macross and Yamato kits. He lit the Hasegawa Regult kit and showed how he had also done the same for the old Bandai repop of the Imai Regult. I think the next one I wanna light would be the Defender kit by Bandai/Imai. Have the AA guns blazing and the spotlights on.

Thanks for the pics! That resin kit looks considerably larger for sure. Is there a clear part for the mono eye lens? The 1:100 scale Glaug by Imai did not, but I believe their Regult came later and it had a clear part for the lens. Some of the Arii kits have nice surface detail, but once built they look off. Their proportions are not as nice as the Imai kits have. BTW, what is "HMR?" Sorry for the newb question.

Thanks! I managed to accomplish a lot with this old kit, drilling holes and inserting SMDs for the sensors on the fastpack, etc. Nav lights are disabled during combat, and with the flashing gunpod in an attack pose, it was my excuse to not try to light those up. I'm currently working on a non-lighted Hasegawa Valk (I plan to build it as Kakizaki's Valk) and I'd like to start on the Plamax Valk soon too. I also have the Hasegawa Armored Valkyrie left unfinished, and yesterday I started on three Zentraedi ships from Arii. But someday whenever I tackle my 1:48 Strike Valk by Hasegawa, I intend to have nav lights, collision strobes, and the wing lamps lighted as well. This old Imai mold kit was practice!

Yes, some commenters are hoping that the appearance of the fighter pod would be foreshadowing. I do believe that Hasegawa has done this in the past. Maybe with the Crusher Joe kits. I cannot remember.

I got to know a man at Won Fes in Chiba several years ago who made garage kits of Zentraedi ships. I didn't buy any, but rather I bought his Lovely Angel ship from Dirty Pair. He introduced me to the founder of Studio Nue and his wife since he knows I'm a Macross fan. I felt unprepared because I hadn't known the founder's name prior to meet him, and I forgot his name soon afterwards.

Thanks! So many things went wrong with this build, but I managed to rescue it. The suit glows in the movie, so that's what gave me the idea. However I only managed to make the shoulders glow and not the cuffs. After he crash-lands with Minmay, Hikaru turns his suit's glow lights off and her glow-in-the-dark dress lights up.

I'd like to see them do the Zentraedi fleet ships. I have all of the old Arii kits besides Kamjin's ship. Breetai's ship is too short and not proportional. It would be cool to see these as kits, but I've no idea how profitable they may be.

Yeah, that was me! I recognized you too, but I couldn't remember the name of that old forum. It was there when I had the idea of recording my progress of building a model car and uploading the videos to YouTube to get feedback on techniques. Little did I know that I had stumbled upon a whole genre of videos for the hobby and it went from there. I've continued to do so ever since. I was still living in Arizona at the time. I am considering attending the All-Japan Hobby Show at the end of September. It's been a long time since I could attend. I took photos for FineScale Modeler Magazine and they published my content, but I haven't done that since 2018.

Yes, on there is the link that says 採用に関する問い合わせ and it's that form I used to contact HJ last night. I received notice that my message was received. Let's wait to see if they respond.

Sorry for the double post. I heard back from my friend. He has no contact at all with the magazine department. He suggested I just try reaching out to the magazine's PR department. I'll take a look when I get home in an hour or so from now. Could you send me links to where you had tried to contact the company? If you only wrote in English, then I may have luck by describing the situation in Japanese. Perhaps it might help by mentioning that I already do translations for their model department a few times a year and that I could help with an article. I'm also really tempted to visit the All-Japan Model Hobby Show coming up in September. I used to cover this event for my YouTube channel as well as submitting photos to FineScale Magazine as a guest contributor. I haven't gone since 2018. Then my wife was hit by a car the next year, and then the whole Covid thing happened. Now that there are no more masking directives, I was thinking about going. If so, I can talk to somebody in-person from HJ. My friend works their plamo booth. If I go on press day, I have a better chance to talk with people without the crowds in the way. For now, I'll try contacting them via the website. Did you find an email? I'm excited if I can help out in any way I can.

Alright! I just sent an email to my friend Takahashi. We used to work together at Aoshima during the brief, 8-month stint I worked there. Model Graphix magazine did a several page article on him just before he quit. He is a big Macross and Yamato fan like myself, and I already showed him the article you did on the massive discovery of Showa-era anime plamo treasure. I'll see what he says. While he does not deal with the magazine division, he may know someone to get in contact with. I agree that it would make a wonderful article. I think perhaps I may be able to facilitate somehow if nobody in the magazine end of the company handles English. We'll see. All I do is translate Japanese into English, but I am not as good at the other direction. We'll see. Yeah, Vintage is sure fun. I have the Imai Meets Macross issue, the Super Dimensional series issue, the Artmic issue, and I just recently bought the Votoms issue. I think that Vintage would be especially interested in doing an article on the Wise Guys find. I'd think that such a find would be rare for Japan too. Even here these kits are HTF and demand high prices. I have never see in the wild kits like Arii's Monster, Imai's Zentraedi Recon Ship, Arii's Glaug, etc. I'm not home at the moment, but I have an older Yamato modeling book (by Hobby Japan, IIRC) which detailed the Starblazers reboxing of plamo kits back in the '80s. I'm sure Japanese readers would find it interesting to see how Imai's Mospeada kits were marketed under the Go Bots name, which is actually known as Machine Robo in Japan.

Hey Shawn, I'm new here. Did you have any luck with contacting Hobby Japan? I do occasional translation work for Hobby Japan. Not the magazine division, but their models division. I do assembly instruction translations for a friend I have there. So I sort-of have a connection there. As you might know, they have a mook series called Hobby Japan Vintage, which comes out about 3x a year. I would think that an article on this massive find might interest them.

Final reveal post: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/692264406831251456/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie And here is a quick video I made of the completed build. I posted this on the Macross Reddit at the time. https://odysee.com/Valkyrie-SFX:cb3ecb3771a128669033b77dfd6e6313f1b0d412?src=embed

Instead of posting a ton of images into this topic, I'll just provide links to the build posts I made on Tumblr. What I did was take this old Imai-tooled Super Valkyrie kit and modified it for lighting. The main thrusters in the fastpack are perfect for 5mm LEDs, and the smaller thrusters are perfect for 3mm LEDs. I created a mold of the cockpit's terminal (as inaccurate as it is), cast it in clear UV resin, and adorned it with custom-made waterslide decals. I cast the Hasegawa pilot figure in clear UV resin too, as well as the foot thrusters from the Hasegawa Battroid kit. The gunpod has a 3mm flashing yellow LED. I cut away the red laser sensor from the gunpod, cast it in UV resin, and placed a tiny SMD there. I also placed red SMDs into the fastpacks and the sensors in the nose cone. Actually, please help me out here... those are IR sensors in the nose, right? Post 6: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/676351665180377088/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie Post 7: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/692263848691089408/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie

Here is a build I'm particularly proud of. I'll see if the HTML can be inserted properly into this post as I had documented the build on my Tumblr feed. Post 1: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/164634393344/172-bandaiimai-macross-vf-1j-super-valkyrie?is_related_post=1 Post 2: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/167975787554/172-bandaiimai-macross-vf-1j-super-valkyrie Post 3: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/630418257033216000/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie?is_related_post=1 Post 4: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/654068348243574784/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie Post 5: https://stevethefishdotnet.tumblr.com/post/671095149341884416/bandaiimai-macross-172-vf-1j-super-valkyrie

Yes, that is my plan. Either that or use some clear UV resin.

I wish I had been following this forum all along. In July I made the mistake of buying this kit. I just assumed it had waterslide decals. Now it'll soon be re-released in September with waterslide decals. Son of a motherless goat. This week I discovered that there is no molded detail for the wingtip nav lights. They just expect you to put stupid stickers where they are supposed to be. The Hasegawa kit comes with clear parts for the wingtips, to the best of my memory. I'm not at all happy about the stickers. I have other Plamax stuff and they come with waterslides, so I didn't even think that this would be any different.