Looking good. Would love that Boba Fett myself. What was the price you considered cheap?

jlong05 wrote:Looking good. Would love that Boba Fett myself. What was the price you considered cheap?

£79 including postage from Japan. That's the cheapest I've seen it go for on eBay UK as a complete kit including the box, although you might find it cheaper in the US as a lot of these figures ended up there. I've seen it slightly cheaper once, but that was with no box, parts missing, and a broken backpack.

I only put a few pieces on the figure, in addition there's a small clear hose to connect between the backpack and right gauntlet, some knives and his pistol, and cloth parts over the boot tops. He also comes with two pairs of gloves, so has a few options for holding the blaster and/or pistol.

Dan

There are lots of problems with the Hasbro Vader, but the massive gloves are fairly easy to solve. After winning a cheap auction for some spare Sideshow Darth Vader gloves and a lightsaber hilt I started to research how to remove the original gloves but found no information anywhere. After much prodding and pulling, and almost resorting to cutting them off, I finally managed to pop them off using a small screwdriver, lots of swearing, and some careful twisting.



The Sideshow gloves are designed to clip into holes in the wrist of the SS figure, but the forearms of the Hasbro figure are short enough that the ball joints don't need to be removed.

The Hasbro saber hilt is quite large compared to the Sideshow version, and the SS version includes the D ring and is a nice little replica. The picture below shows the Hasbro on the left, and the Sideshow on the right.



I also glued in a small piece of plastic to the belt to use as the lightsaber clip, it's part of a broken piece of Hornby OO track sleepers and just about the right size. The hilt hangs on it but isn't permanently attached.



It'll do for now until I can find a cheap Sideshow Vader to replace it.

Dan

Spack wrote:

jlong05 wrote:Looking good. Would love that Boba Fett myself. What was the price you considered cheap?

£79 including postage from Japan. That's the cheapest I've seen it go for on eBay UK as a complete kit including the box, although you might find it cheaper in the US as a lot of these figures ended up there. I've seen it slightly cheaper once, but that was with no box, parts missing, and a broken backpack.

I only put a few pieces on the figure, in addition there's a small clear hose to connect between the backpack and right gauntlet, some knives and his pistol, and cloth parts over the boot tops. He also comes with two pairs of gloves, so has a few options for holding the blaster and/or pistol.

Dan

Forgot to let you know. Right after you posted this, I saw the BobaFet 12" in box at a local reseller. Price on box $499.

$499? For the Marmit? That's crazy! Even the new Sideshow 1/4 scale Premium Format figure isn't that much at RRP.

Dan

One thing that's bothered me about Darth Vader is that without a glowing light saber he doesn't look quite right. Last week I was reading about up how to make a custom light up saber, and most recommend CCFL but it's quite fragile and somewhat expensive. Then I found about EL (electroluminescent) wire and it sounds ideal - easy to work with, can be trimmed to any length, and most of all cheap. A quick look around eBay and I found a Chinese seller that had a 3V battery kit with 1m of wire for £1.75, and that includes postage!



The wire arrived today, and while it's red it actually glows orange, although it looks red in the photos. With new batteries and in the dark it's pretty bright, but very dim in daylight. But as a cheap option for a small scale light saber it should do the job. The battery pack contains an inverter that converts the 3V DC from the batteries to deliver 100V AC to make wire glow. There's also a button to switch the output between on, slow flash, quick flash, and off, but I only need on and off so the sequencer circuit could be bypassed later.



I also got a clear acrylic tube, it's 5mm outer diameter and 3mm inner so the 2.3mm EL wire slides in easily. The tube is 300mm so will need trimming down to around 180mm, and I'm going to try painting some of the spare with semi transparent red paint to see if I can get a better red effect.



The final step will be to drill a hole in a spare 1/6 light saber handle (which i handily already have from the Sideshow parts I recently bought), and to put black shrink coating over the excess wire that will run from the hilt to the battery pack - i could trim the EL wire shorter but that may cause problems with the inverter, and the battery pack would have to kept closest to the figure rather than hidden away somewhere.

Dan

As Hot Toys have just released their Vader figure, and Sideshow have announced an updated version of their deluxe Vader figure, I have been able to get a Sideshow ANH Darth Vader figure at a reasonable price, albeit with a missing right fist which helped get the price down - and happens to be one of the gloves I got recently to customise the Hasbro figure.



It's certainly an imposing figure being 14" tall, making it a scale size of 7', and the details make the Hasbro figure look like something a child designed. Here he is with a couple of Marmit figures.



Ive tried to get an idea of how the EL wire light saber will look but it's hard in low light, I'll get better pictures posted when the conversion is complete.



Dan

Is that glowing wire fire safe?

Angelwing wrote:Is that glowing wire fire safe?

Completely. It doesn't get hot, and even though it's 100V AC it's going through an inverter powered by 3V DC so the current is minute. There's a small risk of a shock if the end cap is removed and the core wire touched, but that's why the end cap is there More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroluminescent_wire

I've just ordered a white EL wire kit with a 12V DC connector for £1.98 from the same seller, it should be brighter than the red/orange one and with a red coating on the acrylic should give a good red effect. The 12 DC connector will mean that once I get a cabinet to put the figures on display I can hook the EL wire up to the same 12V source that the cabinet LED lighting will use and have it powered on when the lighting is turned on.

Dan

Ah okay. I just had alarm bells ringing with ' electricity', 'glowing wire', 'cheap far east component'!
I think the add on project is obvious. If you can hook up the wire to light up when you turn the cabinet light on, then it should be easy to have a speaker play a light saber sound effect at the same time?

A light saber hiss every time could get annoying. But yes, it shouldn't be too difficult to set something like that up, if I can get a circuit to play the sound.

Sent from my XT1032 using Tapatalk

Picked up a few more bargains recently. rounding out the Imperials nicely.

First up is the Sideshow Stormtrooper, I already have the Luke and Han in Stormtrooper disguise figures but this is the original Sideshow figure.



I also managed to get hold of a Hot Toys Stormtrooper Helmet, and a Hot Toys SE-14R blaster pistol. The Hot Toys Stormtrooper figure is far too expensive, but I was able to grab these cheap from some sellers who had split up their figures into components. The Hot Toys helmet is much more accurate than the Sideshow one, and the SE-14R blaster is a little bigger and more accurate than the one that came with the Sideshow Stormtrooper Exclusive pack (which isn't the one I have, so I didn't already have a version of this blaster).

I also picked up the old Grand Moff Tarkin and Imperial Gunner two pack, I was only after the Imperial Gunner figure but this boxed set, which is also still sealed, was cheaper than getting a loose second hand gunner ...



And finally for now I got a cheap Nendoroid Stormtrooper for my desk at work. I have a feeling it may be a bootleg as it was far cheaper than RRP and from China, but I'd rather have a cheap copy than have an expensive original get damaged.



Dan

Today the Hasbro 12" Emperor Palpatine and Royal Guard double pack from the late 90s arrived, still new in the box albeit with the box badly beaten up, but as a cheap pair of figures I wasn't too bothered about the box anyway. Amazingly the Emperor figure still has it's original 4 AAA Eveready batteries inside, and they still work after more than 15 years sat doing nothing!



However, there's a catch - the Emperor looks a little frail and could do with a throne to sit on, so I had a look round for any 1/6 scale thrones. The only one I could find that has been released as a product is the Sideshow throne, but with a $150 RRP and a limited release the lowest I can find one for is £200 in the UK which is far too expensive. After a short hunt around the web I stumbled upon a model on Thingiverse, Emperor Palpatine Darth Sidious Throne for 12" figures ready to print in 3 parts to glue together. I grabbed the files, uploaded them to Shapeways to get a quote, and nearly fell off my throne chair at the $1265 price tag!!! Gulp!



I've tried slicing and sparse filling on the work 3d printer software and got the material down from over 2000cm3 to about 600cm3 which is still about £80 - £100 for the ABS that the printer uses, which is still far too expensive. And it's too big for the Ultimaker printer a work colleague has where it would probably cost around £20 - £30 to print, much more reasonable but still more than I'd expected. A plan is under way to shell the main throne part to about 1.5mm thick and then split it up into mostly flat pieces that then be glued together which should cut out a large amount of material, as that way it will be entirely hollow and won't need to be filled with a mesh to support the outer faces. I'll post up progress as I go along ...

Dan

Tried to take some better pictures of the two Hasbro twin packs and the Sideshow figures I've picked up recently. Unfortunately it took longer to set them up than I had decent light so this is best I can do for now.


Left to right: Marmit Stormtrooper, Sideshow Stormtrooper, Sideshow Darth Vader, Sideshow Han and Luke in Stormtrooper Disguise



Left to right: Grand Moff Tarkin, Imperial Gunner, Emperor Palatine, Royal Guard

Dan

that emperor box says 'try me' and some text I cant read. What does it do?
Nice to get the interrogation droid. I guess you'll need a princess leia to go with it too?