Mine is slightly misaligned, but hasn’t been a problem. As someone else already mentioned, it’s just two pieces of plastic.

The port you mentioned was too tight for me, too, and needed opening up with a needle file.

It’s cool that Takara wants to absolutely litter these figures with 5mm pets and posts, but not if they aren’t going to QC them all.

 

Every time someone makes a statement along these lines, I can tell instantly that they have no clue what the QC process actually is.

 

You’re right. Regrettably, I never had a chance to become familiar with the quality control process of overseas toy manufacturing as part of my career in software development. Perhaps instead of being snarky, you could just fill me in on what’s relevant to the topic at hand?

 

I can't speak for him, but speaking from my experience having worked in a plastics factory before, QC is done in house by factory employees, not by any contractor representative.

 

Never

 

Not part of my work profile either, but it's pretty easy to pick up on that stuff if you're even remotely curious about it. Shows like How it's Made on Discovery can net you a pretty solid understanding of general factory processes like that.

To put it shortly, unless it's absolutely critical for the manufactured item to be in perfect working order everytime (like for say, automotive parts, where a defect could easily mean the difference between life or death), no company is going to invest the resources to make sure that each and every single item coming off the assembly line is up to spec. It's a total waste of time and money. Think of how long it takes you, personally, to inspect your brand-new toy, top-to-bottom. Anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour, I'd assume, depending on how complex the toy. Now multiply by 2,000, for a limited-run product. Up to, say 100,000 for mass-release. That's a shit-ton of man-hours to run a full inspection. Man-hours better spent manufacturing more product instead. They could hire a bunch more staff, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars annually, to make sure that every toy coming off the assembly line is immaculate. Or they could replace a small handful of defective toys at the check-out counter at $20 a pop. This is known in the industry as "acceptible losses", and is fully accounted for in the financial plan.

Stuff like toy tolerances are handled far up the chain, during the test shot process. These are probably the last times the actual toy designers handle the product before it's full-steam ahead at the presses. They'll give the A-OK to proceed, but there's no guarantee that the final toys will end up that good. Because of the time it takes to ship samples back and forth, factory-level employees are given some degree of autonomy when it comes to problem solving. There may come times when they deem it necessary to field-adjust the molds to account for stresses not caught during the test phases (take, for example, the structural cross bar in Siege Skytread's feet that prevent the tank mode from closing up completely. The toy designers would have caught that problem instantly, which point to it being a last-minute field adjustment devised to correct some other issue). Lots of unforeseen complications can arise when pressing thousands of toys, over one finely-tuned sample. Beyond intentional (but misguided) molding changes, the steel molds simply warp and degrade subtly with repeated use. Not enough to render the toys truly defective, but enough to create tolerance variances within the batch, such that no two toys of the same type will necessarily function identically.

Quality Control sees none of this. Quality Control represents the final phase of inspection, before the product leaves the factory grounds. In most cases, the procedure will be conducted largely at random, or perhaps periodically. Every X items off the assembly line will be checked, or just grab whatever sample's in front of you in a given interval of time, or something like that. During that check, it's probably a certain checklist of criteria they're looking for, rather than full-scale inspection as we are wont to. This whole process is optimized not to catch defects, but merely to minimize them. If the worker grabs 100 random items, and only one or two items come up defective, than law of averages states that the entire batch is "acceptible". If you get halfway through that process, and then suddenly 3 of every 4 toys you sample is coming up flawed, likelihood is that something wrong has happened higher up on the assembly line and needs to be addressed.



And that's why blaming the QC inspectors for those failings is wrong. A very frequent criticism goes along the lines of "I paid $100 for this thing. What am I paying these clowns for?", and the reality of the situation is that not only did you not actually pay anybody for that job, the exact job they're demanding to be done doesn't even exist.

 

So, Nautilator and Seawing were originally scheduled to be delivered today.
Then it changed to tomorrow.

Now it's changed once again.
Seawing has been rescheduled to Monday.
WTF?

Considering they're both in Florida now I highly doubt that.

 

Coincidentally, two of my Seacons (Overbite and Kraken) have had misassembly issues, both on their right arms either being assembled backwards or with the opposite forearm. It doesn't ruin either figure completely, and may be a case of bad luck and not be terrible enough to scream about QC, but 2 out of 6 is certainly irritating enough to look at that "premium" pricing and raise an eyebrow at Takara.

 

See? That wasn’t so hard, and you almost made it through without being condescending again. Thank you.

 

Sorry if I came off as testy about the subject. It's just a peeve I have, that people are often too quick to criticize, in an unconstructive and often abusive manner, about things they've not given a second thought about.

For the most part, these people are just doing their jobs, and aren't "idiots".

 

Got my Overbite today. He's a very faithful replica of my first Seacon, fitting that I got him last. His clown shoes in robot mode make him surprisingly able to stand on his own two feet.

He is VERY much a lot like Rippersnapper (coincidentally the only Terrorcon I owned back then), but they are both based off the same animal so I can let that one slide. His shark head in particular would work better with the custom I'm working on, but Rippersnapper's torso actually works better for that, and... well, Rippersnapper was way cheaper to use as custom fodder.

ED: as an addendum... I find Overbite's head likes to pop off at the drop of a hat, and his shark fin hinge is really awkward to move around compared to all of the other Seacons.

 

everytime someone (myself included) asks when tf source is getting their seacons, the delivery driver pulls over to the side of the road and takes a ten hour long break.

at this rate its gonna be fucking Christmas by the time they arrive.

 

Yes over 10 images. I couldnt figure out how to split it up and post them without double posting and getting it merged anyways

 

You win the thread for today  

 

The secondary market is absolutely crazy for a full set they have already hit 600+ for a complete set, insane!!!

 

Holy moly!

 

Completed sales, or just hopefuls?

Because people always speculate and jack these things up by 100% right after, but there's no guarantees they'll actually have any biters.

 

Technically, it's USD $700+ for the full set of Seacons.

 

For about that price you can get the 3p one!

 

Yikes!!