Almighty Unicron wrote:It's not an engineering flaw, it's an assembly flaw. There are variances in every individually machined part. Now, the prototypes are usually tested by QA in America or Japan, but the final toys themselves are molded, machined and manufactured in China by, what Onslaught said, are basically slaves. Why should a Chinese worker who makes a dollar a day care that your Blitzwing's shoulder joint works or not? He puts it together, maybe applies whatever paint, and then boxes it and ships it to America where people can spend his monthly salary on toys.
On Blitz, it is an engineering flaw, the designer used too long a segment to have enough strength to hold the shoulder into its shallow tab, and then didn't account for the material used being PVC which is also too flexible and can't be molded to precision flatness required. I think there might be a tiny bit of room to tap in the turret's pin slightly closer, but that probably won't cut it for long due to how long the PVC segment is where the shoulder is connected to. Moreover, the designer should have allowed the joint to work within manufacturing tolerances.
BWp wrote:Anyway, in all likelihood, Blitzwing's now-infamous shoulders probably worked just fine on the prototype version, where plastic was thicker, QC was effectively perfect, and the thing was assembled by someone who knew exactly what it was supposed to do.
My theory is that the prototype was built with ABS plastic for the turret base that's also the piece that connects the back to the shoulders, they went forward on that design at first but found during testing that the length of the segment of turret base that holds the shoulder is long and isolated and thin so it's easy to break off, and the quickfix was to change the base's material from strong but brittle ABS to pliant but strong PVC, and they made the mistake of not changing the shoulder connection from a female tab system to a male tab system so the shoulder tabs into the chest instead of vice-versa before finding out that the PVC's shape tolerances wouldn't mold straight enough to get that part clearance.
For now, there are already dozens of fixes for Blitzwing people have put up online. I think DvD's looks the simplest, where he just added plastic strips to the backs of the panels to push the clips forward the extra millimeter or so they need to peg in securely.
Yes, that is definitely the best I've seen, the plastic strips put the work on the ABS central core piece instead taking the work off the leverage point at the top and putting it lower down. It's a smart fix, I'm looking forward to trying it.
Honestly, I can deal with the loose shoulders. It's his upper arms being totally painted over, making the joints ridiculously tight and flexing and making the panel they're attached to feel like it's going to break every time they move them that I hate. Why didn't they just mold those pieces in grey if they wanted them to be grey? This is as ridiculous as RTS Jazz's stupid painted forearms.
His upper arms are kind of annoying, I agree. Does loosening the screw help at all? ... Ok, I just tried it, not much, there's a small amount more play in the joint but not enough gain to recommend it as a fix of any kind. I'd suggest probably opening up the shoulder and putting some grease on the axle inside the shoulder, I don't think roughing out the paint will be enough because what gains you get from taking off the paint will be lost by the damage done to the surface.
AU wrote:The shade of grey plastic in question is probably unpaintable, so they used another shade/kind of plastic (that's probably used elsewhere on the toy, to cut down on costs/complexity) and painted it.
They use unpaintable PVC plastic for safety when a part cast in paintable ABS plastic would break, using PVC can add to costs and complexity because molds made for ABS are not interchangeable easily with PVC due to the difference in the rate the materials shrink upon cooling. In any case, the part Prowl is complaining about is ABS and has been painted gray, the part is actually the same tan plastic inside its cavity as the rest of the figure's tan ABS. The part it connects to at the bottom is unpaintable gray PVC plastic (the elbow), very few parts are that gray PVC - nosecone hinge, neck, internal sliding hip joints, and foot joints (the nosecone is a different PVC mold runner that's shot in 2 colors of softer PVC, and I think the faces are shot on yet a different PVC as well that's molded to take paint) - so why they
didn't make the upper arm PVC as well since it's meant to be the same color is probably due to the intended detailing required, or maybe the price using ABS was cheaper which would be the opposite of the original theory.
Shock wrote:Is there any detail paint on the parts in question? If not, then I would have to side with Prowl and wonder "why not just gray plastic" (if you're not going paint it anyway). If there is detail paint on it then AU might have a point that maybe the gray plastic is unpaintable and those details would have been lost.
That's easy, there is no gray ABS in this mold, so the parts which have gray on them are too few to justify shooting them in another color of gray ABS, especially when the biggest one - the hips - requires mostly tan deco anyway and is less than 20% gray. Putting in a separate runner channel into the mold for the upper arms and knees that also has to run a separate material is expensive to run and maintain, whereas painting 6 tan parts is cheap.
