Overcracker wrote:Excessive sunlight can also weaken the plastic and cause it to crack. by that I mean having it outside in the Sahara Dessert sun for like 2 months straight.
I live in the Phoenix, Arizona area.
It is a desert.
One summer, once upon a time, it got up to 122 degrees farenheit. I still remember it. People were outside on the news cooking eggs on the sidewalks.
Other people that were walking on cement and asphalt had to Stop doing that because their shoes were melting; you could poke your fingers through the soles of some (low quality i assume) shoe soles.
Enough sunlight and heat can do damage. Lately, it has been like 115 degrees or so, 110, and i left my Classics devestator box in my car. Unfortunately, it was in the direct sunlight. When i returned, i saw and tried to move it and discovered that the plastic window had already begun to warp in the sunlight and heat.
The figures themselves however too the punishment without any visible damage.
Another time, i had my MP megatron box out in the direct sunlight, and the box was getting so hot it was becoming a problem to even touch :/ Arizonans are used to not being able to touch stuff that has been sitting in sunlight though, but moving right along;
the more contemporary tf's seeeem to be more resilient than one would think, however, it really just comes down to which tf's you're talking about. You cannot be sure that the same type of plastic is used for every single piece of xyz transformer. I have only seen discoloration on action masters and g1 figures however.
Ultimately, if we go down to a chemical level, the heat would add energy to the atoms that make up the toy, expanding their electron clouds. This would cause the atoms to expand and require more space to occupy. If the plastic was rigid/brittle, this would create cracks/fissures due to the expansion and contraction of the plastic, which sounds like something that needs to happen more than once, but i could be wrong. Or, by adding heat, the chemical composition of the dyes/pigments could be altered by the same process, resulting in something that would reflect a different wavelength of light instead of its target one. (ugly cream/tan-ish color instead of purple for instance.)
I am not sure yet as to where the line is between heat damage and sunlight damage however.
I can just imagine toys freezing ^_^
Then again ... you may live in a fridge or something? I guess you meant 150 degrees? Typo?
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