Chronocidal

What the... lol.. well, so much for that idea. I was counting on the restock to happen later, so I'd get charged for my YF-21, VF-11B, and VF-1D in January... but you just HAD to get your restock today, and charge my paypal account this morning, didn't you?? Curse you again HLJ! This makes December my personal highest number of valks ordered in one month, and one heck of an expensive Macross month... and it means I really shouldn't order any more for a long while. Another bad part about that is that I won't be around when it gets delivered (unless it arrives by friday, which isn't likely) since I'll be leaving to visit my family this weekend. So, unless HLJ pulls a warp speed shipping job on this, I won't get it till next year anyway.

I could be obnoxious, and say that if you have to look for a good deal, you're not a true Macross collector... but I love discounts. Considering before this september the only valk I had was a 1/48 Hikaru 1J from ebay, I didn't really have a collection until recently. In the past months though, I've mainly stuck with HLJ and Overdrive, picking up on sales when I could. I think the only valks I paid full price for were my 1/60 v.2 M&Ms. The rest have been free shipping deals or discounts. You just have to keep an eye out, and hope you catch deals on things you want. Best deal by far is the YF-19 I am getting though (supposedly later today), and that came from Ebay. While it is possible to get burned if you aren't careful, it can be a good idea to keep an eye out there for good bargains. My 1/48 came from there too, and even if I may have overpaid a little at the time, I don't regret having a set of 1/48 TV fast packs.

As of tonight? In the past year... Macross 11 assorted Valks 1 model ~$1600 (oh boy do I wish I hadn't bothered to add that up ) and that's in the past 4 months alone.... That's leaving out about $600 worth of Legos (yay for the giant Millenium Falcon), $150 worth of model kits... And considering how I use my laptop, yeah, that qualifies as a toy I think... And the 47" tv... and the 360... Yes, this has been an expensive year. Screw the economy, I'm having fun dang it!

I think combining items helps cut down on shipping a little, though I have no idea how much exactly... and I can't speak for SAL, since I don't trust shipping with no tracking number... plus, it gives me an excuse to check my email for shipping updates constantly. On the downside, I ruin more F5 keys that way. GAH.. aaannnnd.... I added another valk to the order. Funny, this all started when I wanted to buy JUST an orange VF-1D this month, everyone was out of stock, and I found that YF-19 on ebay... it was a chain reaction. This is the perfect time to get one though.. so my order just hit over $400 with shipping. Oy. At least now, I think I can call my little VF-1 collection relatively finished. Not nearly what many would call complete, but I've got the main characters, and major iconic VF-1 variants all covered within 6 valks (orange -1D, red white and blue -1J trio, and DYRL Focker and Hikaru -1A). If I get anymore VF-1s, they'll probably be the kit versions, since I love tinkering (that, and I want some VF-1s in F-14 markings). ...And maybe a VT-1 eventually, because it's so unique. Maybe. Next year. So I basically completed my SDFM and Mac+ collections in one fell swoop. Bring on the M7 stuff! (just not too fast, my wallet needs time to recover )

Curse you HLJ, I'm almost considering giving up on the M&M VF-22s and VF-11C for now, and getting the YF-21 and VF-11B. I wish I could count on sales like this later... I already spent this month's toy allowance on a cheap YF-19 on ebay, and 2 Fine Molds 1/48 X-Wings, all of which I should be getting in the next few days. I blame the YF-19... as much as I want to hold out for the 22s... Ahhh, screw it. I just got paid, and these might not ship till after Christmas anyway due to the restock.. I'll just call this my monthly valk purchase for January. I waited 3 years to get a YF-19, I can wait a while to get the 22s too. Maybe by then, they'll get this kind of sale too. What I want to know is why the frack they aren't discounting their VF-0s yet?? The SV-51s were frankly superior in every way to the VF-0 releases, and those things are going for almost half off. If they would mark those down, I might actually consider buying one, problem shoulders and all.

Sheesh.. here I am trying to convince myself to sit down and watch MF again on bluray, and you have me wanting to watch 7 again I might have to catch up and join in at some point.. been a while since I've seen M7, and forgotten most of it by now.

Actually, with what I know now, I'd like to redo that tab system better. It's a good secure attachment point, but I did a half-assed job of cutting the holes, and should have measured to make the tabs/slots more precise. And I'm sure with enough tweaking, there'd be a way to push those legs higher... or maybe the solution would be to just extend the backplate a bit so it matches up with the legs. If I could find a good sale, I'd probably buy at least 3 more of these, probably 2 alto and 1 ozma (RVF never did it for me really). I would buy them now, but I've bought 8 Yammies in the past 3 months (), and I need to stop for a while to recover (and build up anticipation for the M&M VF-22s ) The shipping from HLJ just kills me.. I wish I'd gotten more than one kit in that HLJ VF-25G sale, because when everything got screwed up from stock problems, they shipped the dumb thing alone, and I wound up paying more for shipping than the kit cost me. I do plan on painting mine eventually (possibly by hand, I've done it before) though I probably won't do a canon Michael scheme.. I might tweak it a little into a 2059 Max version. Shoot, if Chuck Yeager can keep flying 50 years after he started, I'm sure Max can. A VF-1J variation scheme would be a lot easier to mask and spray too, so I could do all the main markings with paint, and use spare Hasegawa decals for the kite logos (screw continuity ). I don't mind leaving one version half-assed as long as I have a spare or two to really finish nicely. My first one was kind of an experiment that I wasn't worried about screwing up.. now that I know what I'm doing, I'd love to do more.

So I was browsing my old posts a while back looking for something, and came across this picture from 2004 (forget what I posted it in originally, but the topic is long gone). Anyway, I'd love to get a closeup of the buno on that plane, and see if it's meant to be the same one... This one looks very close to the JSI. I'd need to find my original Flying Fighter poster to check, but the only differences I see off hand are the gun vents... doesn't mean there aren't other differences. I imagine the front gear doors are still wrong, unless that sensor bump on the door came along with the others under the wing glove. There's also no way to tell which chin sensor is on this plane either, but I think the single TCS chin pod was in use by this time.

I kinda wondered if you might've glued it. Looks really good that way. I think the shading hides the gap ahead of the legs, I can't get rid of that on mine either. It's much better than default with the new tabs, but I'd like to make another someday, and see how far I can really get the legs to mesh with the backplate. For now, mine's just in "just out of the box" mode, no painting or gluing anything. In the end, I might skip the decals altogether (except for logos and such) and try to handpaint the stripes and such. I'm worried what effect the overall paint will have on the fit though.. right now, the fit of everything is nearly perfect, it just takes a good squeeze around the hip gun area, and everything fits beautifully. I just wish Bandai had put a bit of thought into the colors of some pieces.. the big blue hinges in the white underside look stupid.

Looks really good to me. What'd you do to get the legs to stay up that high? The legs on my VF-25G stay up solidly thanks to the tabs I added (funnily enough in roughly the same place Bandai added tabs to the VF-27 ), but the little vents on the back of the thighs don't pop up quite that high, and there's a noticeable gap ahead of them. Did you file down the pieces to allow the legs to move higher?

Shoot, $70 for a professional costume? If I looked anything like Grace (and were a girl), I'd probably pick one up myself. What's really weird about that is that I have a sister named Grace... and even though she has no interest in anime, she might like that outfit for the style alone. She could pull it off too. Even has the glasses. As for the price... while it might be a simple outfit to make yourself, it'd probably cost that much or more to do it at home.

Good grief.. I ordered two 1/48 Fine Molds X-wing kits from HLJ back in august... I just got the shipping notice.

omgomgomgomgomg....win. If anyone can offer these for a good price, I'll probably pick up an entire squadron's worth... well, maybe. But at least a few. I've got a huge stash of 1/72 F-14 markings, and only one F-14 in 1/72. C'mon Overdrive/HLJ, make it happen.

Not really, you have to lower the legs and pull the arms part of the way out to gerwalk before you can get a good look at the problem hinge.

I'm pretty sure this is partly why the early Roy and Hikaru 1A releases have been on sale at HLJ (Overdrive too). Even over a year after the release, these two seem to come standard with broken shoulders. They're probably trying to run out their stock of the first run before a re-release hits. It does seem to be a time related issue though, rather than careless transformations.. I remember that early buyers mostly had good shoulders out of the box, and they cracked over time. Since that time, the unsold ones have been slowly cracking in their boxes. My Super 1A came the same way, shoulder entirely split.

On a lighter note.. I'm tempted to set up a streetcorner booth selling Hasegawa VF-1 kits on Christmas Eve. And I actually really want to learn Silent Night in Japanese... of all the tear-jerker bits in SDFM, that one always gets to me the most.

The shoulder tab scratching is going to happen no matter what you do really.. it's a key attachment point for the chestplate. What I did was file down the tabs on the inside of the chest plate some. They were rather jagged, which probably wasn't helping the scratching, and they were big enough that detaching the chest plate was tricky. The way the back boosters mount though... I have a mini-rant I need to post about this system. Yes, it's sturdy, but the way it's mounted scares me. It looks like it's seriously compromising the tail structure, not to mention scratching the tail paint on my Roy. I'll post pictures of this later, but I'm actually afraid the booster system is eventually going to lead to the tails snapping in half. I might be overly concerned.. but those tails should NOT be bending as much as they are.

*sigh* Once upon a time, I told myself I wouldn't get a 1/60 YF-19, cuz I thought it was ugly... Some time in the past couple weeks, I realized I might never get anything better, and decided to get one if I ever saw a really good deal. Today I saw a really good deal. I looked at HLJ earlier and paled at the $200 +shipping (Overdrive's been out of the original YF-19, and I like it better than the repaints).. Then I decided to check Ebay, and happened on one with about 30 min left for $130, with free shipping. It went up to $150 before it ended, but considering HLJ would approach $250 before I got it.... yeah, good deal. All told, got it for almost the exact same price as each of my M&M VF-1s. *does happy dance* Now I just have to resist the urge to get a YF-21 and VF-11B so I can focus on the VF-22s and VF-11C.

The feet look like they might actually have internal details this time as well... the connection between the toes looks like it's a round-ish nozzle shape. I'm not gonna get my hopes too far up, but so far this is looking leaps and bounds ahead of the DX VF-25. It might be the effect of not being painted shiny yet (the dull finish looks good, I wish I could get one in those colors ), but already this is making the 25 look incredibly sloppy by comparison. Reminds me a bit of the changes between the 1/72 and 1/60 YF-19... ok, maybe not that big a change. But the crispness of the detail here doesn't even look like it was made by the same company as the 25, let alone the same design team.

See, that I wouldn't get though... one run of such an icon? Heck, the whole arm mounted removable cockpit was made specifically with the orange VF-1D in mind, I can't imagine they'd stop producing it so soon... Anyone have any inside info on this? Maybe a tidbit from the Yamato site about it? I mean, HLJ lists it as backordered, not discontinued, so it seems they're expecting more.

Gah, being the first of a new month (almost) I was gonna go order my VF-1D from overdrive, but they're sold out. Anyone know how long they usually take to restock? Or if they even will? I can't imagine something that popular lasting only one run, but you never know... Edit: Sheesh, HLJ is backordered too.. oh well, hope they restock by Christmas so I can get myself a present.

That red looks better and better on the Milia every time I see it... I wish they'd used that color on the VF-1J actually; the color of mine looks more like a red wine color than actual red. It's just reaaalllly dark to me.

Better yet, the rear landing gear don't look like complete crap! More than that though, the actual physical detail looks about an order of magnitude sharper and more refined than on the VF-25. The details on the VF-25 always looked.. blurry to me. The contrast looks almost like the difference btween the v.1 1/60 and the v.2, it just looks.. sharp. Now, they need to take the lessons learned, and re-apply them to the VF-25. I might even consider buying one then, but it'll take a lot of improvements to make me prefer the DX over the kits.

I thought that was what MW was all about... I dunno about intentionally, but I know plenty of people have had multiple valks go to pieces on them. And I can imagine some people collect the broken ones cheaply, intending to fix them up. In any case though, it doesn't require broken planes to make. It's easy enough to remove the arms from the v.2 1/60s, or barring that, just dress them up in bandages. I don't remember which Valks tended to lose their legs.. but I have this picture in my head of a v.1 1/60 walking around with a crutch.

And here I thought he used sheepskin, and glued it together with his own blood.