by procyon » Thu Jun 14, 2012 11:15 pm
Hey all. Long time lurker, not a frequent poster, but I just got RC in tonight, and thought I'd share some of my experience with her in the hopes that it might save you some heartache.
Overall, I think the figure is fantastic. In either mode, she looks great. No, she's not G1 accurate at all, but she's got all the right parts in all the right places (read into that however you like), and she just looks a bit more... bad ass. I see this Arcee as a natural progression of her bike mode (Energon, Bayformers, Prime), mixed with the no-nonesense attitude introduced in the IDW comics. She will clearly stand out when placed next to original G1 figures, but she fits right in along the likes of Classics Blurr and Perceptor (and naturally Warbot/not-Springer).
All that being said, there are some gimmicks with her transformation that you really have to watch out for. For one thing, like many third party toys, she's as much a parts-former as she is a transformer. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just don't expect to be able to put her in and out of bike mode without removing/replacing/reconnecting a lot of little pieces. As for the transformation itself, that's another story.
The instruction sheet looks gorgeous... and it's almost useless. There are aspects of RC's transformation that the instructions simply don't detail properly or give enough information. There are two points in particular that gave me some greif and caused a small amount of plastic warping/cracking. Fortunately nothing too bad that it's obvious, but man I wish someone could have pointed some things out to me like I'm doing now so that I didn't nearly break her.
Both points have to do with her legs which become the front and back wheels of the bike. The first point has to do with her feet and how they are supposed to lock in around the wheel. The intrsuctions make it a point to tell you that you must push the feet all the way around the wheel base until they lock in. However, it takes an incredible amount of force to actually do this (at least, it did on mine.) So much in fact, that the little silver bracket around one of her feet bent and continuously popped out as I tried to push the feet into their locked position. It ended up being ok, but be prepared to really clamp down on that sucker because it does not want to go in without a fight.
The second part has to do with the "lock" that keeps the wheels in place. Rather, it keeps her knees bent at around a 90 degree angle. Whether it was necassary to do things the way PE did, I don't know. It helps the stability of the bike, but the mechanism that make it work was so infuriating to me, I needed to use tweezers just to get enough torque and turn the locks. The model has these two "kneecaps" that cover the locks. They're supposed to turn around in a circle. When they turn 180 degrees, they are supposed to lock the wheels in place and prevent the "knees" from unbending. However, these locks are so tight and rigid, they are next to impossible to turn as-is. You either pop the kneecaps off from too much force, or you find that the pegs under the kneecaps are way too small to turn with your fingers. That's why I ended up using tweezers and scrapping part of the plastic on the pegs as a result. It's fine because the kneecaps cover up the scratches, but man, my thumbs were so sore when I was done.
There are other little things that were minor nuisances, but those two issues caused me a lot of grief until I really figured them out. So I wanted to share in hopes that my misfortune might help out the rest of you. Last but not least, I know PE is an asian company, but is it REALLY that hard to find someone fluent in English who could have proof read the included comic book? The beautiful artwork is made almost comical when you read lines like, "I am just warm up," or "That that!" (was supposed to be "Take that!"), or finally, "To be continue..." Oh well, you didn't buy her for the comic book, right?
