September 14, 2000 CURRENT RUMBLE Toycom Valkyrie Mk. II! Matt Alt & Graham Parkes 9.14.00 That's right, kids -- Toycom / Yamato took the criticism of the recent YF-19 transforming Valkyrie to heart, and quickly popped out a second version with a whole mess 'o revisions and re-worked areas. So what's the scoop? Beats me, as I've yet to see one of the improved suckers. So I'll turn the mic over to Graham Parkes, one of the Valkyrie-loving maniacs responsible for the Macrossworld.com website. Take it, Graham! The version 2, product improved Yamato YF-19 toy is now available in Japan and Hong Kong. I picked up two of the new toys today and also had a chance to examine several more in the shop where I bought them. The differences between the first and second production runs are described below in point form. Externally the ver.2 box is identical to the first production run. (at least I can't find any difference). However, there is a small difference in the internal clear plastic packing which covers the front of the toy. On the first production run, the internal packing had a hole for the toy's nose cone to stick through. The version 2 toy has no hole and the clear plastic tray completely surrounds the nose cone (comparison pictures of the inner plastic tray attached). The ver. 2 toys come with an additional sheet of printed instructions in Japanese. [They're basically a troubleshooting guide for people having problems transforming the toys. -Matt] The shoulder joints are now made of plastic instead of die-cast metal. This change was apparently made to reduce the problem of paint rubbing off the die-cast chest plate caused by friction with the metal shoulder joints. Personally, I never encountered this problem on my ver.1 YF-19 toys. The breakage-prone small plastic tab which slots into a hole to the rear of the canards has now been made thicker and has been strengthened by changing the cross section to a "T" shape. I'm not sure if this change has solved the breakage problem, as I haven't transformed the toy yet. The joints on the ver.2 toy have been made tighter than on the ver.1, which was a bit too loose in some examples. I'm not sure if the joints will stay tight, only time will tell. However, even if they do get loose a few minutes with a Philips head screwdriver solves the problem. [In fact, the troubleshooting guide suggests exactly this quick fix for dealing with overly-tight or -loose joints. -Matt] The lower chest slots for the wing tabs in GERWALK mode have been made a little larger so that the tabs now fit without any filing. The gunpod can now fit into the trigger finger hand without having to enlarge the hole in the hand. This is unlike the ver.1 toys where the hole was often too tight to remove the gunpod after you had forced it into the hand. For some reason the metal wing tabs on the ver.2 toys are all bare metal whereas on the ver.1 they were painted tan colour. Not only are the wing tabs bare metal, but it is obvious that they were previously painted and the paint has been removed with some very crude file work! I think this was done so that the tabs would fit into the chest slots more easily. The vertical tails have been redesigned so that they now fold backwards and do not fall down so easily. However, one of the tails on my new ver.2 toys was so tight that it would not open all the way up. I had to disassemble the lower leg and do a bit of remedial file work to get it to move freely. On all the ver.2 toys I examined today (about 8 in all) the nipple tabs were all bare metal. This is different to the ver.1 toys where about 50% had fully painted or at least partially painted nipples.  RUMBLE INDEX  |  CURRENT RUMBLE