Ban Dai wants you to scratch build

Well, maybe not, but they sure seem to be pretty hot to give us plenty of extra poly caps with their kits.

It's clear that they have a number of standard sets of poly caps that they put with all their kits. You will almost never use every one off the rack that is included with whatever kit you bought.

DO NOT THROW THESE OUT!

If you feel the urge to throw them out, send them to me instead. Just put them in an envelope with a couple stamps on it.

The 10 year old Vatshu IP kit I'm working on right now has the worst joint design I've ever seen. The knees are pretty nice, but that's about it.

Mecha joints should imitate human joints, because human joints (and those of other fellow vertebrate animals) are awesome. This means BALL JOINTS for hips and shoulders, and also - for simplicity's sake - for wrists and ankles.

This Vatshu kit just uses different sizes of side-pinned tubes, and they don't even fit well in most of the locations sculpted for them (except in the lovely knees, we all know side-pinned tubes make nice tight knee joints).

Thank heavens I save left over polycaps.

I found two lovely pairs of tabbed cup polycaps that I'll be using for the hips and ankles on this kit with a little puttying work, much of which I would have had to do anyway just to get the bad caps to stop flopping around.

Still mulling over the best way to sculpt the balls to fit into the cups, but I've done this before so I just have to figure out if the way I did it before was the best way or if there might be something easier. I'm not always so great at coming up with solutions that are both functional AND simple.