hello Before i begin i would like to say that i have owned the subaru mold several times, once as Smokescreen and twice as alt silverstreaks, only this is the first time it has been a KO of the mold. sorry a few of the pics are blurry but i could not tell they wereblurry viewing them back on my camera. I will not be going into detail on the features of themold as everybody must have at least one version of it. in packaging and packaging shots: the packaging is pleasing and shows several other K.Os on the packaging, Smokescreen was the only one there, if he wasn't i would of gotten a sideswipe, red alert or hound. it's not bad packaging and displays the robot well within a fitted plastic tray. Interestingly the numbers on the front suggest that there are 13 of these K.Os overall with this being the first one and Shockwave being the last. shown on the packaging are 9 of these including the yellow and blue dead end. The instructions: The instructions are printed on each side of the paper. they seem to imitate the bt instructions and feature a nice black and white lined picture of the official robot mode alt box artwork. Robot mode: posed when it was taken out of the packaging several things came to light that i couldn't notice through the packaging, the arms were placed wrong but not misassembled so he didn't need fixing right out of packaging although his right hand drivers door kept falling off at every available opportunity. i also found out it was metal rather than plastic like i expected, this was a nice suprise and there isn't too much of a difference between the painted parts and the plastic which can only be a good thing. The plastic feels oily and horrible, i had to go wash my hands after touching it! It felt that nasty. there was residue plastic in the waist that stopped his torso fixing into the waist. i removed it but it was still an almighty struggle to get it to lock into place. as for the joints themselves, the wrists, arms in general and neck are very good and tight. the head so much it is hard to move. unfortunately the knees, waist, doors, car roof, and feet were all loose, combined with the diecast metal it took a while for me to get him to stand properly without falling onto his back. Comparison with Alt Smokescreen. here we can see a clear difference, the K.O actually looks nicer with it's painted metal, such a shame that it's quality problems ruin it's potential. also of note is that the gun is sturdy and can only be told from the original by it's smoothed over autobot symbol. Something on it which is very cheeky is that the hastak copyright has been replaced by the company who made this. I'm shocked by the boldness of it even though they replaced the decals thatsay subaru so they either say, winner or subaro. Vehicle mode As you can see he is not the same rally car as the alt version and his decals point towards the BT varient. the rubber on the tyres feels cheap as does the steering wheel as they are cast out of the same stuff. Something to note is that the steering system lacks the magnets and is instead deep enough for the mechanism to work, which it does. I found that the right foot bumper wouldnot go in so i tightened the screw seemingly solving the problem even tough it was still a struggle. The card oes not roll freely like the alt version does and looks better as a display piece unlike the alt which can easily be played with without parts falling off. This KO is alright for what it is and cost half of the reccomended retail price of the alt. only problem with that is i got my Alt smokescreen for half price on clearence. bearing this in mind and taking all things into account. i would rather have another alt version than this K.O.
from a shop called "The Yorkshire Trading company" they mainly do tat, i think i saw some predator jet kos as well
Good review and comparison. I've never seen this guy before. Very interesting. Although, I definitely prefer the real one.
This is a very nice KO. And concerning that oily feel, it could be that they didn't wash the plastic parts prior to assembly. Every plastic part has it's mold greased with some special liquid that prevents it from sticking to the mold after being cast. You're probably not familiar with it, but everyone assembling plastic models or miniatures has to wash the parts before assembly, because paint won't adher nicely. There is always some ammount of that liquid/oil still present on the parts after casting.
In a lukewarm water with a splash of Fairy. Your best bet would be to disassemble the bot and rinse all the plastic parts.
Sorry to butt in folks, Im new and stumbled across this topic when looking for the original Smokescreen stamps. I too have one the KO's in the pictures shown and a Sideswipe KO, and for KO's they are pretty good. 7 quid from JTF in Warrington.
