captain america

A very quick update... Just a few teaser pics of my chosen paint scheme for the buildup Valk + Booster. I've looked at Valkyries done up in a multitude of schemes, ranging from the original colors, to Minmay guard, to digital camo, and everything in between. While all these schemes are nice, in my mind, they didn't really convey the realism that I wanted to portray in my model. I simply wanted to make a Valk look as though it could be real, with real-world weathering. Essentially, to allow it to leap from the world of fiction, to looking almost feasible. The results are below.

Hi Felix. The tooling (dies) are usually owned by whoever paid to have them tooled. In 99% of the cases, that would be the toy company/liscensee (Toynami.) Toynami most probably own the tooling, so it's just a matter of taking it from the current factory to another; this actually happens a lot in manufacturing. However, taking the tooling to another manufacturer and then having them learn all the ins & outs of properly pigmenting the plastic, assembling things in a specific order, painting, etc, etc can be more of a headache than it's worth ( longer ramp-time.) The quality on subsequent releases will most probably be better (as was evident with the VF-1 series), simply because after you produce so many, you eventually work-out the little bugs during production and "get the hang of it." This is why I personally never buy first-run items. Early releases are ( as we've all seen) usually plagued with horrible QC. I really can't understand why lower numbers are worth "more", when the higher serial-number items are usually much better quality...It pays to wait, you see

Hi Felix. Absolutely true. The good thing is, if you take a typical HK toy manufacturers catalog (it's litterally the size of a LARGE phone book) and are willing to make a few calls and request a few samples, they could most certainly find a manufacturer that could deliver the quality at a reasonnable price and deadline; they really DO have the pick-of-the-litter in that respect The tooling portion of the toy actually seems reasonnably-well executed, it's really the carelessness in the assembly and painting that ruins the toy's potential.

JS: I couldn't have put it better myself. As it turns out, I got to play with an Alpha POS just today, as a retailer/buddy of mine was able to put his hands on some. My own impression, as someone who works in the toy industry, is that the toy was done on the cheap(and I mean cheap!) I wouldn't say that Toynami were trying to do TOO much with the engineering, they simply let the lowest-bidder (manufacturer) run amock and unsupervised throughout production. As a rule of thumb, manufacturers in china want to get through production runs as quickly as possible; they don't give a rat's a$$ about quality; they just want to get the stuff out as fast as possible, get paid, and get some other banal item out just as quickly, etc. The plant managers "pocket" most of the money, and hire the absolute cheapest workers they can. They'll litterally hire someone wandering aimlessly at a train station. "You, you, and you. Come with me, I have work for you" bellows the foreman on his quest for cheap labor. You then have assembly line workers who, just the day before, were janitors, now building toys on an assembly line for the first time....Aaaah, the beauty of cheap, commie labor In the end, the factories do this because it's in their best interest to make money. The true blame lies with Toynami for approving the production samples, and/or most probably NOT adequately supervising the production of the merchandise they paid to have done. You REALLY have to watch the factories like hawks, or they'll turn out garbage by the truckload the second your back is turned... And just as quickly sell extra units on the docks for cash to a shady guy in a pickup truck. Why do you think there's such a flood of "cheap" toys coming out of HK? Alas, whether Toynami will keep making money with their flawed business plan depends on how much longer people are willing to pay top dollar for sub-standard merchandise, It may work for now, but I have a feeling that it'll run its course pretty fast.

http://www.macrossworld.com/macross/mwat/j...scato/valk2.jpg

Here are the feet/exhaust nozzles. The camera won't seem to pick-up the wonderfully-subtle heat-discoloration I painted onto the Testots Metalizer finish. They essentially have a "mottling" effect painted on with clear blue, yellow and red, thinned with rubbing alcohol. I actually have more parts done, but nothing worthy of camera-time, so I'll save the pics for when things get interesting again.

The assembled cockpit. Sadly, a lot of the nice detail will be obscured when it's all encased within the fuselage.

The tub from the pilot's view. The cockpit displays are the kit decal, but in stead of using it as a whole piece, which didn't look right, I cut it out into placards and mounted them individually. I then coated them with some FUTURE floor wax to make them shiny... Essentially a "glass" cockpit. Also, the tub was initially painted in Zinc Chromate yellow-green, and then overcoated with grey. I then scraped off a bit of the gray in the footwells & on the corners of the consoles to make the tub look like it's seen its fair share of action.

Pic 2: cockpit tub. More or less stock, but after painting it initially, I was left rather flat by the bare side consoles, so I pulled out my Perfect Memory, and sure enough, there are supposed to be placards in there, so I just made some out of styrene and added a few little switches & buttons with paint.

Hi guys, update time again. Basically, this will be a catalogue of highlights involving the actual Valk/Booster model grand prize build-up. WM cheng already did a fabulous step-by-step article on the VF-1, so I won't bore you with the same ol' "glue part A to B, and putty". Rather, I'll just hit the highlights. Pic one is of the ejection seat. Painted up in a more real-world military scheme of black frame & olive cushion. The cushion was made to look worn with some black/brown chalk pastel, and the frame recieved a few little nicks of silver to simulate chipped paint. I also added a few hand-painted warning symbols.

Last pic. Lower fuselage, rear view. Very nice detail capture.

Lower fuselage, foreward view. This is about the only part I was a bit disappointed with. As you can see in the pic, the foot holes have extra resin in them. Though these can easily be ground-out and sanded, I also took some steps to correct this in the molding process on Jesse's end; basically re-positioning the part to better release entrapped air in the mold material. The part is a bit more complex to mold than it appears, as it has detailed indentations fore and aft. However, this should be remedied in the actual production parts.

Same part, rear view. Excellent casting

Upper fuselage. The flash in the pic looks worse than it really is; you can strip it right off with a sharp knife. The airflow grill holes were casting-up a little bit rougher than I care for, so before I sent the masters to Jesse for casting, I re-worked the part slightly to eliminate that problem.

The rear bulkhead. Again, no problems

Airflow grills. Perfect castings, and molded separately for easy painting.

This pic makes the part look fairly rough, but in reality, there are only a couple small bubbles to fill at the top.

Hi all. Yet more pictures to share, this time of the actual cast resin parts. These are actually the test-shots made in a low-shrink resin; the final castings made by Jesse will be of a more conventional resin, which is notably easier to sand and grind. As you can see, there are still the obvious mold lines to contend with, as well as a bit of flash, but the detail is excellent overall. All the scribing and rivets reproduces perfectly. I also tested the castings for fit, and everything fits as it should.

Unfortunately, I can't share any photos or diagrams of my firearms projects, as they are still development prototypes and haven't been patented yet. Legioss: aside from the obvious casting hurdle(metal parts, not just resin), I'm simply not anxious for another potentially messy showdown with Harmony Gold's legal arm. I tend to like the position I'm in now with the booster project, where I'm simply a subcontractor for a firm operating outside of HG's jurisdiction. Simpler for me.

As of this week, I'm tasking myself with the finished Macross Valkyrie booster, as well as plotting some initial drafts of the launch vehicle. In between those two, I have to work on a second-generation design of my firearms project... My life is like a never-ending arts & crafts session

All of the sculpting was finished a while back, but the only way to truly "finish" it was to mold everything and cast it. I just don't have time for that in the forseeable future.

http://www.macrossworld.com/macross/_main_menu.htm The upper right-hand corner box clearly says "project canceled"... And yet people still ask me when it's going to be available

Hi Radd. The biggest problem with all that is reallya lack of space. I had actually wanted to try something with reflective mylar acting as a mirror to project the light more effectively, but the inside of the bridge is just so small, and the lighting "hole" must be so very small as well, that as soon as your light source is more than a mm away from the projection hole, the light beam becomes so narrow as to become useless. David: if I understand you correctly, then I need an adapter in the range of 4.5 volts, which would be an identical replacement for the three 1.5 volt batteries that the kit uses as standard. Having said that, might you have a clue as to what my safe threshold of voltage is for 15 LEDs? Also, since an adapter, as you said, regulates voltage, then I wouldn't really need a resistor...Or would I? My biggest failing at this point is that I don't know the difference between volts, watts and amperage, but I do know that the milliamp rating on a battery determines the "duration" of power that it'll provide, and that if a device consumes 1200 ma/hr, and your battery provides 1200 ma/hr, then you'll only have an hour of battery life, and so on. I may yet eventually get the hang of this

Hi Stamen. Yes, you're right, my diagram above was flawed. This one is accurate to the actual model, with the power switch clearly between all the LEDs and the power source. I'll re-read the above comments again... Hopefully to understand them this time. I really appreciate all the help offered thus far

Hi Stamen. I can get access to the wires that are coming out of the ship, as well as the contacts to the power supply (batteries), but not the wires inside the vessel itself. In essence, based on my diagram above, everything "below the ship" is hands-on, but everything inside is not accessible. Am I screwed?