DX Chogokin VF-171EX Alto - Revival ver. WWM Release

[Raikkonen]

5 hours ago, davidwhangchoi said:

This toy should be called the VF Nightmare, what a headache it was. 

Bandai should be punished for every crumbled arm 

LOL - That bad?

I missed it as I stepped back from collecting during that time. 

Edited August 31, 2023 by Raikkonen

[26662]

5 hours ago, davidwhangchoi said:

This toy should be called the VF Nightmare, what a headache it was. 

Bandai should be punished for every crumbled arm 

I bought one from Mandarake maybe two years ago but have never transformed it.  I take it I should leave it in fighter mode.  Are the arms the only trouble spot?

[Mog]

6 hours ago, davidwhangchoi said:

This toy should be called the VF Nightmare, what a headache it was. 

Bandai should be punished for every crumbled arm 

Well, it is named a Nightmare Plus. 

But if it didn’t have so many problems and issues, I’d be so all over the teal CF.

[Chronocidal]

1 hour ago, 26662 said:

I bought one from Mandarake maybe two years ago but have never transformed it.  I take it I should leave it in fighter mode.  Are the arms the only trouble spot?

The 171EX never seemed to have too many issues, but for whatever reason, the teal CF variants tended to explode catastrophically.  No, I'm not even exaggerating.

Yes, all of those parts are from one disintegrated knee joint.

Between this, the constant issues with shoulder triangles cracking/shattering, and what I'm going to call the general engineering incompetence involved in the design, it's amazing the EX didn't explode just as often.

I remember hearing that both this and the Yamato VF-17 were designed by the same CAD design team, but it is insane to wrap my head around that idea.  While the 171 tended to break apart like a frag grenade, you could pretty much use the VF-17 to bludgeon someone.

Edited August 31, 2023 by Chronocidal

[MKT]

I'm reminded of the old 171 tread, where someone on these boards procured quite a number of the teal CF 171s - I believe close to 20 units in total and reported the number of exploding black triangles on transformation. Failure rate was pretty abysmal, with something like about 70%? Those are some really bad odds..

Still, the triangles durability issue should be more likely to have been solved than not, since the 2 releases after the teal CF had no problems on this front unless Bandai have selective amnesia and decides to Bandai us again.

I'm now thinking the wing peg issue may not be an issue even if they retained the old design, since the wing with hardpoints should already installed out of the box and there would be no reason to take them off at all (except for clear coat, panel lining customizing works etc)

So the biggest question mark would be the exploding knee joints, and I'm not too sure about this, but does it affect all releases and not just the CF 171? And it's something about, from Battroid to Fighter, not rotating the legs in the reverse direction as Fighter into Battroid? My RVF-171 was the only 171 I had ever put into Battroid, but it never went back into Fighter, so I have not encountered this problem yet.

 

[Mog]

Didn’t the pointy bits of the VF-17 once draw blood from one of our board members?

[derex3592]

Yes.....probably more than "one"...

[Chronocidal]

1 hour ago, derex3592 said:

Yes.....probably more than "one"...

I know it did from me  

4 hours ago, MKT said:

So the biggest question mark would be the exploding knee joints, and I'm not too sure about this, but does it affect all releases and not just the CF 171? And it's something about, from Battroid to Fighter, not rotating the legs in the reverse direction as Fighter into Battroid? My RVF-171 was the only 171 I had ever put into Battroid, but it never went back into Fighter, so I have not encountered this problem yet.

The exploding knee joint issue was something much less common than the triangles being broke, but it's far more catastrophic, because there's really nothing to do except try to glue everything back together to be in fighter mode forever (provided you can even collect all the pieces).

I've posted comments about what causes this issue in the previous VF-171 threads, with some pretty extensive examinations of what exactly causes it, but fixing the issue would require a complete redesign of the knee joint.  That in itself wouldn't even be hard to do, if Bandai had not glued, screwed, and then glued again, turning the entire lower leg into a sandwich that you will very likely destroy before you ever make any progress trying to disassemble it.

The short version is that Bandai made the knee rotation joint a hollow plastic tube with a metal friction pin in the center of it, and the shiny metallic plastic they used has the rough physical properties of obsidian.  It shatters into shards along flow lines.  BE VERY VERY CAREFUL ROTATING THE LEGS IN ANY WAY.  There is a longer description for how to "safely" transform the legs in my previous posts, and I'll look for them in a moment, but the reality is that it's never really safe to transform them, because the joint Bandai designed is just incomprehensibly terrible in execution, and desperately needs to be replaced with something that doesn't suck.

I would be absolutely thrilled to see them fix that garbage design in this release, but I also have absolutely zero expectation for them ever to do that.

[Mog]

Not only do they cost an arm and a leg, but our Valks require an occasional blood sacrifice as well! 

[Chronocidal]

Found my original post describing the leg issues.  It's a combination of bad design, bad materials, and bad instructions.  Not easy to sort out, and close to impossible to fix without a completely new leg design.

As a side note, I did see someone in one of the older threads (Duymon I think) state that out of 12 VF-171 CFs they bought, 4 of them had at least one knee that exploded.  One-in-three odds is absolutely insane.

To think, the entire thing would have been rectified if Bandai would have just done what Yamato did on the VF-17, and give the knee a simple stupid twist joint.  The ENTIRE problem is due to their stupid unnecessary interlocking pivot.

Edited August 31, 2023 by Chronocidal

[sjoebarry]

If they do a reissue if the 171 nightmare plus I’d only get it if I knew the knee blowup was fixed. I love the 171 and have all four versions but I’ve never transformed the nightmare plus for fear of the knee disintegration 

[26662]

11 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

The 171EX never seemed to have too many issues, but for whatever reason, the teal CF variants tended to explode catastrophically.  No, I'm not even exaggerating.

Yes, all of those parts are from one disintegrated knee joint.

Between this, the constant issues with shoulder triangles cracking/shattering, and what I'm going to call the general engineering incompetence involved in the design, it's amazing the EX didn't explode just as often.

I remember hearing that both this and the Yamato VF-17 were designed by the same CAD design team, but it is insane to wrap my head around that idea.  While the 171 tended to break apart like a frag grenade, you could pretty much use the VF-17 to bludgeon someone.

Yikes.  I appreciate the heads up.  Do you still have all of the fragments?  I’m wondering if I can one-off a replacement part.  I’d need all of the fragments to test out my idea though.

[Chronocidal]

20 minutes ago, 26662 said:

Yikes.  I appreciate the heads up.  Do you still have all of the fragments?  I’m wondering if I can one-off a replacement part.  I’d need all of the fragments to test out my idea though.

There's really nothing to fix.  I kept all of the parts, but there's no way to replace the knee without destroying the lower leg.  I wasn't kidding when I said Bandai made a glue sandwich out of it.

Best you're going to get is a solid knee for permanent fighter mode.

Maybe someday I'll do surgery and break open the lower leg to replace the broken bits, but I just don't care that much anymore.  I parted out the busted one to cobble together two good copies out of four broken ones I got cheaply.

[MKT]

6 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Found my original post describing the leg issues.  It's a combination of bad design, bad materials, and bad instructions.  Not easy to sort out, and close to impossible to fix without a completely new leg design.

 

Wow the knee joint is really a big mess of a design.. That said, I can't seem to find much info on exploding knees on the other 171 releases. Did Bandai change the internal knee design of these other releases? Maybe not, as Alto's actually came out before the CF, so the most likely culprit would be bad materials in the CF knee joint just like its shoulder triangles. The other 171s, despite the problematic design, probably have sufficient toughness on the parts to not explode even if the knees are incorrectly rotated.

 

6 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

As a side note, I did see someone in one of the older threads (Duymon I think) state that out of 12 VF-171 CFs they bought, 4 of them had at least one knee that exploded.  One-in-three odds is absolutely insane.

Ok found one of his posts.. Of the total 12 units CF, 9 units have breakage mainly from triangles and knee joints. That pushes the failure total to 3 out of 4. This is a valk that suffered the combination of being the most fiddly Chogokin to transform, I think even more so than the 262, and horrendous QC lol.. But still gotta love the teal and angular cockpit design, at least for me.

The 31AX arm cannons is a non-issue now in comparison lol

 

[26662]

1 hour ago, Chronocidal said:

There's really nothing to fix.  I kept all of the parts, but there's no way to replace the knee without destroying the lower leg.  I wasn't kidding when I said Bandai made a glue sandwich out of it.

Best you're going to get is a solid knee for permanent fighter mode.

Maybe someday I'll do surgery and break open the lower leg to replace the broken bits, but I just don't care that much anymore.  I parted out the busted one to cobble together two good copies out of four broken ones I got cheaply.

It sounds like a lost cause, but I like a challenge and I'm tempted to pull mine out of storage to get a better understanding.

[davidwhangchoi]

23 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

LOL - That bad?

I missed it as I stepped back from collecting during that time. 

you dodged a bullet with the CF 171

18 hours ago, 26662 said:

I bought one from Mandarake maybe two years ago but have never transformed it.  I take it I should leave it in fighter mode.  Are the arms the only trouble spot?

i'd leave it alone. cause once it crumbles at the common points mentioned by the above posters, it'll potentially end up a spare parts junker.  

17 hours ago, Mog said:

Well, it is named a Nightmare Plus. 

Nightmare Minus, Negative, Subtract, Fatal, Doom, Gloomy, Cancer, Weak, Abrogating, Unpleasant, Detrimental, Bandai'd, Nickle and Dimed, Rip-off, Trash, Waste...   

[MKT]

No prizes in guessing what the CF would be named when it gets reissued lol.. it will give PTSD 

[Lolicon]

Bandai would never release a shoddy product. 

[Chronocidal]

5 hours ago, MKT said:

Wow the knee joint is really a big mess of a design.. That said, I can't seem to find much info on exploding knees on the other 171 releases. Did Bandai change the internal knee design of these other releases? Maybe not, as Alto's actually came out before the CF, so the most likely culprit would be bad materials in the CF knee joint just like its shoulder triangles. The other 171s, despite the problematic design, probably have sufficient toughness on the parts to not explode even if the knees are incorrectly rotated.

There was never any change that I know of, and while I don't recall any complete explosions, I do remember one or two cases where either Alto's, Luca's, or the Maruyama release had a knee twist joint go floppy, which is the precursor to these failures.  It just indicates that the friction pin/plate is loose in that plastic shaft, either due to wear or structural failure.

After the legs started falling off, I think people started being more careful with them.  There really did seem to be something amiss with the CF production, in terms of materials and assembly, because there was such an overwhelming amount of failures, but I do recall seeing the same sort of cracking along a plastic flow-line start on the knee of my Luca copy a couple of years after the CF mess.  Left it in fighter mode forever after.

[blackconvoy_D01]

https://premiumlunapark.com/products/dx-chogokin-vf-171ex-armored-nightmare-plus-ex-alto-saotome-revival-ver?syclid=cjov9aiusvis73e8fkpg&utm_campaign=emailmarketing_145398464697&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email

 

Any US sites posting yet since it's WWM? I've only seen premium luna so far.

[DownIsUp]

12 hours ago, 26662 said:

It sounds like a lost cause, but I like a challenge and I'm tempted to pull mine out of storage to get a better understanding.

If you do decide to try splitting the glued leg apart for repairs, maybe try freezing it for a few hours. I'm not sure whether Bandai uses an epoxy glue or not, but if it's a CA glue instead; that should freeze trapped water molecules in the glue, weakening the bond. Again I'm not entirely sure what kind of glue they use, but it's worth a shot

[Mommar]

Have had the exploding knees had them on all variants or on one specific release?  I had the triangles issue on the teal fighter but not any of the whites ones.

I also tedn to buy one for each mode so legs exploding during transformation is highly unlikely.

[Sanity is Optional]

6 hours ago, DownIsUp said:

If you do decide to try splitting the glued leg apart for repairs, maybe try freezing it for a few hours. I'm not sure whether Bandai uses an epoxy glue or not, but if it's a CA glue instead; that should freeze trapped water molecules in the glue, weakening the bond. Again I'm not entirely sure what kind of glue they use, but it's worth a shot

If you do this, try to let it come back up to room temperature before separating. Cold temperatures will also make the plastic more brittle.

[ArchieNov]

I hope they update the packaging of this release so that it no longer uses styrofoam. I've noticed that all my valks that I've kept in styrofoam packaging have yellowed a lot quicker and more severely than those that were in non-styrofoam packaging.

[jenius]

They seem to be moving away from Styrofoam so there's a good chance of that. 

[Chronocidal]

Fortunately, it does look like Bandai is aware of this, and has been putting all of their newer releases in plastic shells.  Both YF-29 bundles, all of the VF-1 releases, and the new VF-25 releases have been in plastic, so I think we're past the era where we see them packed in styrofoam.

I'm going to miss how sturdy the styrofoam made those boxes, since they tend to stack much better than the plastic shell ones.  It's a small price to pay for keeping them from yellowing though.

[jenius]

Yeah, I appreciate what Styrofoam does for box stability. Lots of toys have come in Styrofoam without yellowing for a long time (Takatoku for example). I wonder if it's just something new about how Styrofoam is made? Maybe it's also Styrofoam + something else (like heat) that's the issue. 

[MKT]

Even the reissue 31AX Hayate's in plastic, rather than the styrofoam of the first issue release.

[sjoebarry]

9 hours ago, jenius said:

Yeah, I appreciate what Styrofoam does for box stability. Lots of toys have come in Styrofoam without yellowing for a long time (Takatoku for example). I wonder if it's just something new about how Styrofoam is made? Maybe it's also Styrofoam + something else (like heat) that's the issue. 

Plastics “bleed” out stabilizing agents over time, and even though it’s at a very very slow rate those chemicals can react with oxygen and also the chemicals in styrofoam.  ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) is the main culprit. ABS is combustible, but cheap so manufacturers use it to save money. To deal with the combustibility of ABS, they include flame retardants in the plastic mixture. One of the chemicals that is used frequently is Bromine. Bromine reacts with the UV rays and oxygen in the air. A chemical reaction starts and continues indefinitely until the plastic has changed color.  Exposure to high heat can also exacerbate this since it’s thermal oxidation. 

Edited September 4, 2023 by sjoebarry

[MKT]

1 hour ago, sjoebarry said:

Plastics “bleed” out stabilizing agents over time, and even though it’s at a very very slow rate those chemicals can react with oxygen and also the chemicals in styrofoam.  ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) is the main culprit. ABS is combustible, but cheap so manufacturers use it to save money. To deal with the combustibility of ABS, they include flame retardants in the plastic mixture. One of the chemicals that is used frequently is Bromine. Bromine reacts with the UV rays and oxygen in the air. A chemical reaction starts and continues indefinitely until the plastic has changed color.  Exposure to high heat can also exacerbate this since it’s thermal oxidation. 

I am wondering, if you would know anything about Bandai’s model kit plastics? I’m finding them extremely resistant to yellowing..

[DownIsUp]

17 minutes ago, MKT said:

I am wondering, if you would know anything about Bandai’s model kit plastics? I’m finding them extremely resistant to yellowing..

Generally they're made mostly of Polystyrene, but they can use a variety of plastics, notably Polyethylene for the polycaps that many models use for joints and sometimes ABS for structures like Inner Frames.

[PointBlankSniper]

2 hours ago, DownIsUp said:

Generally they're made mostly of Polystyrene, but they can use a variety of plastics, notably Polyethylene for the polycaps that many models use for joints and sometimes ABS for structures like Inner Frames.

only older kits and their very regular reprints, or candy toy kits that aren't made at their japan plant, still use ABS. in terms of new designs, they started phasing that stuff out like 10 years ago, iirc starting with the MG Nu Ver Ka as the flagship to kickstart that project

since then, they've been honing their rubbery PS mix for use as inner frames throughout the IBO line.

starting with the WfM line, they've also managed to do away with polycaps, so they don't even have PE in their latest kits anymore. they are just pure PS kits now

next on their schedule i believe is to replace PS with Limex for everything produced in their new factory being built beside the current one, and is coming online next year. iirc, Limex is some sort of PS, or something similar, with about 30% limestone mixed in. part of the reason is obviously to reduce plastic to get that good environmentalism karma. the other part is supposedly for resource sustainability and cost. the explanation is that the oils that the plastic is made from is finite, but limestone is extremmely abundant. it's basically padding plastic volume with chalk

the recently released gunpla-kun model kit is a test run using that material. the general consensus from reviewers seems to be that Limex has slightly different material properties and quirks from PS, but all the usual modelling tools and techniques still work on it.

in terms of yellowing, i guess you replace 30% of the averge kit's yellowing properties with that of chalk lol

[Mommar]

Is this actually a world wide release?  Looks like an exclusive to me.

[PsYcHoDyNaMiX]

56 minutes ago, Mommar said:

Is this actually a world wide release?  Looks like an exclusive to me.

The 171EX Alto is definitely a WWM release. Probably not showing up in any of the US based sites yet since we're just finishing up the Labor Day weekend.

[Chronocidal]

Confirmed, I just got the BBTS link.

https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/251910?o=10&utm_source=Marketing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=marketing&utm_content=