No airbrush? Make sure your primer and rattle cans are good. I recommend Tamiya stuff here. As far as primer goes, I've been having a ton of success with this stuff called Tamiya Fine Surface Primer. It's great stuff.

Have a well ventilated area, watch out for excessive humidity and heat. Hang or stand the parts. Spray from about 6-8 inches away, spray the paint onto the part in swiping motions. Do multiple layers instead of one thick one. You'll fuck it up and muddy any sculpted detail if you lay it on thick.

Remember that painting is largely an exercise in patience and time. Take it slow and get it right the first time, otherwise you're gonna have to strip the paint off your part and start from priming all over again.

Play friendly? Might be tough. Multiple layers of a matte varnish or gloss varnish depending on how shiny you want your project to look.

 

Unfortunately I think that is why I think you're never charged until it's out. There's no real contract since they didn't take your money anyway and you can always cancel anytime.

 

What about disassembling the hip and shoulder joints? Unlike the others, they don't seem like I can just punch the pin out normally.

 

Couldn't tell ya unfortunately. Haven't tried to take them down myself.

 

That's what I'm hoping for. Otherwise I'll be waiting years for the next version in that size.

 

How'd you paint the shield cannons? I can't seem to disassemble them, unless it can't and you had to paint them assembled.
Same question for the inner shoulders and pelvic joints

 

Had to patiently paint using a fine tip and letting layers dry over several hours

 

Got it about the cannons. How about the shoulder joints within the armor and the pelvic pivots that allow the splits?

 

It's not just collectors. I am trying to get main G1 characters in the WFC line for my son, so if they don't make enough and my pre-order is cancelled (it was), I'm fucked.

 

This one in particular reminds me of one of the episodes of those business apprentice "reality" shows I caught several years ago. This one I think had Jack Welch (of GE) as the host or guest boss (I don't watch this stuff often enough to know). Anyway, the projects they put these people on were at Pepsi and one of them wanted to relaunch the Pepsi Throwback line (soda with sugar instead of corn syrup). And an executive they were working with at Pepsi said, no lie, something to effect of "you can't just make what your customers want to buy." If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about market dysfunction, I don't know what does.

If I were Scott, I would've stopped with "toys and distribution aren't designed to work."

 

In a sense that is true.

If a toy manufacturer saw the toy-buying public as their customers they would constantly be caught between different customers conflicting demands.

One customer wants the product to have more paint deco hits, another customer wants decals instead of paint, one customer wants it to be cheaper because they don't have a lot of disposable income, another says they would pay a premium for additional heads and accessories.
It's enough pull in every direction to make anyone lose perspective of what they're doing anymore!

Fortunately toy manufacturers actual customers are the retailers, who are less personally involved.
Retailers buy product that fits their budget and can be sold for a RRP that fits their brand.
In the case of a customised program a retailer can even request a product that will be sold for a predetermined RRP and the toy manufacturers will work backwards from there to create a product that will meet their customer's needs.

Currently toy distribution is in a challenging place. Toys R Us, and other large toy dedicated retailers, were instrumental in keeping product available, because as customers of the toy manufacturers TRU bought a lot of product and stocked a lot of variety.

Without dedicated toy retailers out there driving product range we are seeing a massive reduction of range and distribution.

Big box retailers have shifted from being supplemental toy retailers to being the primary supplier of toys in most communities. And those big box stores have restocking policies that don't meet the needs of toy buyers who buy more than the occasional toy once in a while.

I'm not sure what solution is going to fill the void left by the loss of dedicated toy stores. Manufacturers have tried making more product exclusively available at select retailers, but we know that isn't fixing the problem because in so many cases buyers aren't able to get the product under reasonable circumstances.

Making more products available directly from the manufacturer, such as via Hasbro Pulse, helps collectors to an extent, but it isn't financially sustainable to manufacture toys to only sell them to collectors online, the Transformers product line needs retail sales to continue.

The bigger difficulty is that, while collectors see distribution as a problem, the manufacturers and retailers don't. The manufacturers are selling their products to their customers (the retailers) and the retailers are selling through their orders of toy products, so the retailers are satisfied.

On paper it's all working perfectly, even in circumstances where only a small percentage of collectors are able to get their hands on the toys they want.

I highly recommend the Spector Creative YouTube channel. Scott explains all these things better than I can sum up. His videos answer a lot of questions that come up on this forum.

~L~

 

It isn't even working for the 8+ year olds they were designed for (WFC for example). Getting some of these things is as big of a pain as buying retro Jordans and new video game consoles, and these are not obscure characters I'm talking about. The solution is simply making more, just like with the PS5. You have people out there waiting to give you money and you can't take it.

 

I agree with you.

It does appear Hasbro are hearing buyers concerns and they seem to be taking steps to make certain hard-to-buy exclusives available again (I've got a pre-order with Big Bad Toy Store to get Earthrise Thundercracker and Skywarp because American Target exclusives aren't available in Australia,) but making more product takes time.

The vendors Hasbro likes to use to manufacture their toys have a schedule set years in advance, they can't just make more of the Paradron Medics 2-pack without upsetting their workloads.

Obviously there are a lot of potential buyers who want to see another batch of Ratchet produced, so we just have to hope Hasbro have put plans in motion to make another run of that toy.

~L~

 

Here here!

Everything is a year in advance right? And last year it was C19 that mucked everything up. Not to mention no mo' TRU. So Hb is indeed in a pickle too that they have to recalibrate the outputs from Vietnam. Not to mention dealing with Vietnam lockdowns due to C19.

 

It's a Lottery with Amazon - if something is also on Hasbro Pulse I order it on there too (as Amazon has an earlier release date) and if I can get it then great - but considering the terrible luck I've had with "key character" exclusives I think Amazon are very much on the naughty step & I had Siege Skywarp on pre-order on 2 different Amazon sites and still didn't get one. The Japanese one wasn't exactly easy to get either - I'm kinda loathe to pay £100 for him tthough.

Heck knows what is going on with the possible re-issue or repaint of Siege Ratchet - It's kinda ironic that they have that Buzzworthy Bumblebee line stacked with often unwanted re-paints and re-releases and yet there is a pretty long list of things from the last few years that are essentially impossible to get.

 

That and its Amazon. Amazon very likely didn't shut off preorders after selling through what they knew they'd be getting, because they figured "we're Amazon, we can get more" and couldn't. Amazon doesn't care about how many orders they cancel or how many people they piss off because they are so big, they will still end up earning your business. If they sell all of them and cancel like 300 orders, they are just happy they sold all of them and theyre not sitting in their warehouse.

 

Yeah that’s how crazy powerful Amazon is. No matter what bad rep they can get, at the end of it all more people will rely on them for business.

 

1) Rumor from the Reliable Leakers is that a new Ratchet is coming in the post-Kingdom toyline (tentatively titled Legends: Evolution).

2) Not that Amazon needs defending, but as far as I can tell they were good about meeting pre-orders before last year, which can probably be explained via COVID. Even then, there were just three sets that they had trouble filling orders for - Autobot Alliance, Paradron Medics, and Seeker Elites - all of which contain "core" G1 characters in a line that exploded in popularity at the same time the factories were having trouble filling orders. I totally understand the frustration, but I am far from ready to dump Amazon in with the likes of Target or WalMart.

 

Thanks for the tip about Ratchet! I didn’t want to buy an arcee clone just to get him.

 

This is the best post on this topic I’ve seen. Very informative for those that want to understand the retail space better.