The Energon Pub

Thanks to fellow member LOST Cybertronian, we have two unique and interesting videos to share with you today! Despite having been around for nearly six months, these clips had largely flown under the radar until now. They give us, as consumers, a little bit of never-before-seen insight into the assembly and painting process in Vietnam of the Transformers toys many of us love!

The first video shows aspects of the actual assembly of these toys; pinning, screwing, and other more obscure processes are demonstrated (featuring toys such as The Last Knight Leader Optimus Prime, Deluxe Sqweeks, and more from Robots in Disguise, Rescue Bots and so on).

The second instead gives insight into the painting process, providing detailed clips of both the spray-painting process for larger areas, and tampographing - called 'pad printing' here, though both terms are correct and interchangeable.

Each video also serves as a demonstration of the sheer volume of Transformers toy being produced at any given time, for those who are interested in a reminder of how many figures actually exist (it can be easy to forget if you only see five or six copies of a figure personally).

Check out the videos below, and share any thoughts you may have on these clips in the Energon Pub forums! Do they give you more respect for the process? A greater tolerance for errors in your figures, or possibly lower by some chance? Let us know! And as always, stay tuned to Seibertron.com for ever more Transformers news as it comes in.

Wow

I'm genuinely surprised how much of the process is still performed by hand. I expected to see a lot more robotic assembly lines in the video.

So...many...jokes...must fight...urge...

ahh....... it passed.

Could be worse though.

I found that a bit depressing for some reason.

It's a little shocking to think about that. All this tech in 2018 but in places in Asia it's still cheaper to pay all of those workers to do it by hand. Really shows how little money they make. Makes me thankful for the opportunities I have in the USA.

Hope this makes people think before they complain about the paint on the Hasbro figures.

Just to be clear, I am the brillaint MF that found these videos and posted them two days ago thank you very much.

https://twitter.com/collecticon/status/ ... 7751919617

It's always eye-opening to see how the proverbial sausage is made. I can see how Hasbro is so gung-ho about reducing "parts counts" on their modern figures, especially if that means paying fewer human workers to put together a given figure in full. It might also mean fewer quality control issues if there are fewer parts and fewer different hands in the mix...I'm not sure if it works out that way in reality, though. As for the paint process, a lot of it does seem to be automated, especially when it comes to the tampograph details. Most of the "hand painting" seems to be for total coverage of a whole part or a large area of plastic. If Hasbro is going to take out things like swiveling wrists and folding panels that hide hollow parts, they could at least spend a few pennies more on paint jobs. Now all we need is a video showing how those terrible foil stickers are applied.

Starscream wrote:Just to be clear, I am the brillaint MF that found these videos and posted them two days ago thank you very much.

https://twitter.com/collecticon/status/ ... 7751919617

Thanks for your investigative work, in that case! We news staff don't always see everything on our own, so if you have something like this you think might be newsworthy, always send it through to us - in this case another user was the one who alerted us to the videos so they were the one who was credited here.

Regardless, thanks for helping bring attention to these so we could share them further!

Wolfman Jake wrote:Now all we need is a video showing how those terrible foil stickers are applied.

Well it's not a video, but I do in fact have a highly-confidential insider image of one of Hasbro's top sticker-application employees hard at work:

Qwan wrote:Well it's not a video, but I do in fact have a highly-confidential insider image of one of Hasbro's top sticker-application employees hard at work:

I thought that was one of their top executives trying to respond to emails about stickers.

i found another photo of them hard at work

Someone tell one of them that they missed this detail with my MP-38 hahaha...

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=110109&p=1917624#p1917624

That didn't make my day any happier. I don't think any of them would like to have a Transformers toy at home.

It is always odd to me to see these types of videos in some ways, and not in others for a few reasons: One, I've done the factory floor job before. I worked in a copper tubing factory, dirty, hot and not fun, but I did learn a lot about the processes that go into getting the copper into tubes for brake lines, refridgerators and the like.
Two, we in the United States and similar countries are a more research based economic system, in that, more of our expenses for human labor are pushed into researching technologies (be it drugs, robotics, or other fields) rather than into labor itself. Most of the countries that we recieve our goods from push expenses into actual human labor. Which is part of the reason so many of our goods that we recieve are at least assembled overseas, the larger labor force is overall cheaper there (other reasons besides just the size are factors too, like pay scale but that is a whole other topic to get into). Often companies that build higher end tech has the parts made in places like the United States, where the process has become largely automated. It is cheap to produce those circuit boards and the like that way, they then ship those bits somewhere else that puts them together into actual product to sell, shipping them off from that point. It's crazy, but from a corporate stand point, makes sense. They actually use less money to produce their product and sell it by doing it that way then all in one place.
Does it make it any easier to see assembly lines of people putting together our toys, maybe not, but we can hope that at the very least they are treated well and given enough of a decent wage to live off of and that they aren't sweat shopped.

Lore Keeper wrote:I'm genuinely surprise how much of the process is still performed by hand. I expected to see a lot more robotic assembly lines in the video.

Some assembly line jobs just aren't practical to automate. Think about it, every single Transfomer on the shelf, big and small, simple and complex, would require a specialized system of machines to build. And for what? 4 months on the shelf and then another bunch of machines would need to be built for the next wave of toys. And that's just Transformers, now think of every toy in the toy aisle, comic shops, and Japanese web stores. It's much, much more cost effective to teach humans how to assemble all of the toys for years to come than to build machines that can only assemble one toy for a few months and maybe never be used again.

Emerje

Ain't capitalism grand?!