How to tell the new KO Reissues apart from authentic toys.

Stickied for your pleasure.

agreed with Draven. i placed 1 sticker on swops chest, peeled it uff cuz it was crucked, and the paint came right with it. you can almost see the dicast grey under the very thin coat of red. the hands on mine are very poorly cast, and teh screw does not hold it together very well, mine has a face, unpainted, and grimlocks sword. the box however is perfect. glued well and sturdy. the plastic IS very rubery, but unfortunatly, on ebay, it will be very difficult to tell.

mine is for a kitbash anyway, and i have a junker swoop to use the better parts from.
and YES, teh beaks are darn near PERFECT quality wise, and do fit with G1 parts for replacement purpose. you may need to clean a bit of flash off the pin hole however.

I got the unpainted face, but I did get the right sword. The screw in the right hand striped the first time I put the sword in there, though.
The quality of the stickers, BTW is not at all good; they're well cut, and fit pretty well, but they lose their ink really quickly. I'll be ordering Reprolabels for him.

I got the weapons for swoop today and compared them to the originals. Here's how to tell them apart:
The sword - on the original sword, the edges and tip of the blade are rounded off whereas the KO sword has a flat edge and sharp lines, some of the other details are a bit less rounded as well.

The Missiles - these would be identical if not for the one issue mentioned previously about the ends that go in the launchers. The inner post is almost twice as thick as the original missiles, giving the launchers less to hook on to. Mind you, the reissue missiles work with the original launchers without any problems, but I don't have the reissue launchers to test them with. Even the original US releases of most of the Transformers toys had certain springs removed or weakened (compared to the US reissues which had them removed altogether), so if the reissue had the extra springs that may make it harder for the launchers to hold the missile. As far as the US launchers, every single original Swoop launcher I've found has the screw on the same side, it's a pair of identical parts, so there was no point in wasting the money for extra tooling just to move a screw. This is common with most of the original Transformer toys.

Another thing I noticed is that, while some of the toys like Lazerbeak have the country stamp of "Made in Japan" or just "Japan" on them, others are missing this part altogether. I've yet to find a country stamp on the Frenzy/Rumble figures. I lost the broken wings to the Ratbat I got before I could check to see if there was a country stamped on him, though.

Cool thread. I had been eyeing a KO Swoop for a couple of weeks, but was too suspicous of it to take the jump. Thanks to you guys, i think i'll pass.

The Knock offs are usually Cheep plastic, Hollow, Look Real shitty, ect.

In general, yes, but I started this thread because there are a series of new KO Transformers that are using the original molds (supposedly) and are produced in the same quality plastic as the original toys with packaging that is near identical to the original US packages. They even have fake Hasbro and Takara copyright stamps. I wanted to document the differences so people could hopefully avoid being duped into thinking one of these fakes was legit.

I know Beachcomber, Beastbox/Squawktalk cassettes and Backstreet have good quality knockoffs out there.

Be aware of Chinese lettering on the front and back of the package. Also see that part of the copyright stamps under the tech specs have obviously been blacked out. But, you can still read the faded out white text underneath.

Not all TFs with the Chinese name in the front top corner have the blacked out CR information. It seems likely that those that do not have the CR blacked out on the box are part of the original 1990's Chinese release. Those that do have that part blacked out are part of a later run made without Hasbro's permission.

If you go on taobao (Chinese Ebay) there are tons upon tons of G1 toys that have the Chinese name sticker. People only know the ones you listed (and Ironhide and Cyclonus) because those are the ones that people found cases of and sold on Ebay in last 10 years. But there are many, many others. For example:

http://auction1.taobao.com/auction/2...2d6bbced.jhtml

Since there were so many of them, that supports the idea that those without the CR information blacked out were made with Hasbro's permission.

Not always. The plastic quality on KO Ratbat is pretty good.