Well, if we look at the Cyclonus mold and how it's been fairly reused for Metalhawk, it's a possibility but I find that Metalhawk looks like he suffers for it. Not a fan of the way you can see how he's just folded up and from underneath you can see the robot, something that Cyclonus doesn't do at all. Odd how they took such an amazing mold and somehow couldn't remold it into something as good.

 

Because Cyclonus’ mold layout is garbage and Metalhawk makes the issue even more apparent

 

Still I dont think he was made for him

 

I mostly feel the same about the comics, but that Tarn mold feels good in hand, so I'd accept a Bludgeon retool from it, as I'm less inclined to go after the older toys due to the vintage engineering and aging plastics, though I do want a Bludgeon figure.

 

that's a very unpopular opinion.

 

I!!! LOVE!!! CYBERTRONIAN WHATEVER ALT MODES!!!
I think they're fun and cool! Siege Soundblaster looks beautiful in robot mode and spaceship mode! Its like a brick with angled thrusters, underside guns??, missle pods in the very front? Its fun! I think its silly to pick em apart! "Whats the orange thing in the back of the Siege Seeker alt mode?? false parts r lame" who cares!! its a cool spaceship! "siege shockwave is upside down" okay flip him over! boom! flying giant space gun! There are no rules! The Fallen looks like an insane flying death cathedral let's GO!

 

So after seeing the massive gaps in Legacy Prowl's bike mode, I've come to the surprising conclusion that the transformation seen on Legacee is the better one. I remember the TFA Prowl's transformation pretty fondly and images still tell me it's pretty faithfully recreated, but without the skewed proportions it just doesn't work. The damn bike is so full of holes it's less convincing than even ER Optimus's alt mode at side view (thanks for pointing that out because now I can't unsee it and am waiting for that normal colors Volvo Prime.) I remember thinking that they should've just readjusted this style of transformation for Arcee, but now I'm very glad that they didn't. Oddly, looks like the best transformation for a bike bot out there is Crashbar's... sadly it wouldn't work for either character. Seems at the moment there's only really two good bike bot transformations going at those two unless we're looking at alien bikes which are pretty much cheating.


About to get really unpopular here, but would really like them to release more obscure characters as fembots like they did with Road Rocket. There's a severe lack of fembots, especially ones who can fit in on Earth and since we know Hasbro barely does new characters, this seems like the second best option to me. Don't even need to completely change their appearance, seeing as how Burnout and Road Rage exist as well as a female Scourge who presumably looks identical to the normal one (although there's a too low number of Earth mode fembots who look feminine... it does very little to add to the design variety in my collection.) Hasbro should also make new fembots about 90% of the time if you ask me. As much as like those new Junkions, it feels a lot like they're just going to make my collection and Transformers as a whole even more lopsided than they already are.

In a similar vein, some Voyager and above sized fembots would be great. It's just wonky how they're at most average size most of the time.

 

this might be the most stupefying thing i've seen in this thread. kingdom cyclonus' altmode and robot modes are both pretty perfect in look and proportion (except for headscult perhaps).

 

I assume they're referring to the arrangement of the hollows on the steel mould used to manufacture the figure. Perhaps it's inefficient, and wastes space? It's the only way I can make sense of it.

 

(Watches review)

...eh. It's okay. It's doing the leg wheels alright (that should be standard in some way imo), but the extra bits holding the bike mode together is the straw for me. I like my toys having as few things to keep track of as possible, so it's a me thing rather than the toy itself.

The new prowl certainly is full of holes, and the animated deluxe handled some things better, but the new one doesn't have a street light swinging around with nowhere to go but in a bin. Provided there isn't some plastic catastrophe waiting to happen (like the internals of my copy of legacee), I'll personally say that legacy prowl will probably receive the much coveted "best bikeformer hastak designers are allowed to make without bogging down in nonsense" award that I just made up.

 

I haven't actually watched a review yet, which is why I didn't phrase that with 100% certainty but looking at images of the toy it doesn't have the huge holes that Prowl has or some of the robot mode compromises that Legacee has (which honestly I am not bothered by at all), which is what led me to that conclusion. Usually there can be something mildly annoying about a transformation but so long as it's not atrocious like Kingdom Rhinox's flaws I'll forgive it if all modes are good and mark it down as a good transformation.

 

I'm referring to the steel mold layout, not the quality of the figure itself.

 

Giving another watch at the transformation, crash bar is pleasantly clever. And the accessories kinda remind me of rid01 X-Brawn (a figure I enjoy for the Ratchet repaint from the Universe line) now that I think about it in that light. I like a toy that doesn't have a lot, but I also like a toy that makes the most of what it's got. So crash bar looks pretty good.

 

what does "mold layout" mean for those of us not in the plastic industry

 

Well Mould can be made in an individual maner using s smaller mould in a single run say all black parts.
Or the mould can be a bit bigger and have a feed in multiple colours.

The problem with Hasbro and sometimes Takara and why people get bend out of shape about it is that there is ways to manage it better so you don't even end up doing what happened with Buzzworthy Cliffjumper.
where many of the parts are moulded out of entirely the wrong colour.

there are a number of work arounds depending on how much effort they want to put into it. Now things can sometimes have an excuse like the different materials needed to make things out of meaning they are to lazy to use multiple plastic colour runs.

It would be "theoreticallly" possible to prevent the mould from filling certain sections and then runing the mould twice, Hasbro are just to lazy to do this.

If you wanted to be efficient about this there are other ways to do it like with the Micromasters say where they share a mould across multiple products.

It really isn't that Hard Bandai has been doing way more complex things with their Gundam kits for years as has Tomy with Zoids.

Go Look up "Gundam injection mould" or similar to see what we mean. You will often see multipl feeds into the parts that can be shimmed off inividually or small groups to alter the colours. Which Hasbro doesn't do.

 

the injection mold process involves a two part steel mold where the plastic is “injected” into the mold and the parts cut off of the sprue.

(Half of a gundam mold as example)


with transformers Hasbro typically makes multiple sets of molds, with each set being a specific color. If parts are on a specific sprue they will be that color, so this often means that certain parts have to be painted so that they are the right color. or they’re stuck the wrong color (ie clear weapons or the recent clear plastic cassettes with Blaster)

 

thank you both- I knew that some parts had to be molded in the same color but didn't know the technicalities. I would love to know more about the whole actual manufacturing process but unfortunately all of the how it's made style videos on toys are either in designing or with toys so simple they can be made in a single mold

 

Ultimately, it's not that much more complicated.

The main thing to be aware of is that each set of steel molds is very expensive to produce, in the realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single tooling. As expensive as the 1-2 year design cycle and all the other associated costs is, simply getting the steel tools made is probably upwards of 75% of the entire production budget.

That's where all the economizing comes in. They'll cram as many pieces as is feasible onto a single tooling to reduce the amount of tools needed. Certain engineering techniques/constraints require the use of special plastics with their own unique properties (silicone/PVC for flexibility, PA for joint durability, ABS standard are the most common types), which necessitate their own molds. Depending on the character design they're trying to imitate, sometimes they'll end up with sub-optimal colour layouts. Maybe they run out of space on the white plastic runner, but have some room left on the blue, resulting in a piece that needs to be painted over. But however much paint costs, it's still orders of magnitude cheaper than making a new steel mold. Layout issues can be exacerbated when it comes to screen accuracy. On-screen character designs are not necessarily governed by engineering constraints, so colour layouts as depicted on screen may not be feasible in plastic. This is especially the case when it comes to redecoes. If it wasn't a simple 1:1 colour swap, than mold optimizations may have been tailored to one version of the character, but be entirely wrong for their redeco.