Q Force – Surfer Variant Type 3

[Hopper]

Red Baron.
Excellent stuff. Great photos... many thanks.

Your Surfer looks exactly like mine... crappy! Not at all like he should be.

The Shadow is just weird! Yes, it really looks like it just hasn't been painted, yet the collar and the eagle have been painted. Odd.
His hands looks strange too ("look, my thumbs have gone weird!)
And you say he is hard and loose like the surfer?

I think that Quickfire has the answer...

[Hopper]

Quick and dirty theory is that once the design team left in 84 that standards slipped ... any old mix for the plastic resin pellets or wotevs they were called, none of the old hands doing their formal and informal QC. All in a short phase end of 84 after the new wave had been prepped for Autumn-Xmas rush, Design Team kicked out, all before the sudden public transition to ?

Maybe the plastic mix for the 85 figures and their imported moulds was ordered and arrived before the final figs were manufactured?

New management installed, new bulk orders, drones still making what they were told, same moulds, different cack-handed spam-fisted outcome.

Yes, this!
Ably described and wonderfully worded by the master of mystery, Mr Quickfire.
This is has to be the answer. As it all rushed toward the new and sparkly AF, it all went pear-shaped in Palitoy.
This would explain all manner of odd things happening at that time of transition.
This needs more looking at, but is very interesting stuff.

[Quickfire]

Been there, done that.
-8 degrees with wind chill factor
Lost part of a knuckle due to a large piece of flint sticking out of a trench wall but not known about it as my hands were numb.
Rain that filled up my boots, whilst I sat patiently drawing. Tears and rain...
Oh archaeology, a cruel mistress... and not in a "thank you mistress, may I have another" good way.

Fugg, most Marvellian. Men must endure their going forth as their coming hither, the slings and arrows of outrageous wind shear auch usw. Hope you at least got a CBE for services rendered to the Crown etc.

Got frost-nip as a nipper whilst gripping a rifle for over 36 hours in the elements, ultimately hand froze to the pistol grip, walked around like quasimodo (or Napoleon? I forget) for three months thereafter once re-civilised and warmed up. Anyway, that hand still fkn hurts from the bone outwards every first week of October and bleeds randomly cos I don't notice that it's cut by x y or z when sorting faff out hither and thither. Nerves are fkd. Even my arm thinks my hand has gone weird on occasion, sort of ex post facto jamais vu kicks in at an optical-nervous level.

Coda: The Hopper Quantum / Conundrum / Heresy / WaveGasm / Variant Heresy / Delusion / Revelation / Coda / Concordance / Fugue / Exegesis / Dyspepsis / Pepsis / Dichotomy (betwixt mikes and plastics or whatever) / ... Ultimatum?

Love this!
The Hopper Exegesis - Yup, that'll do it!
Though I think obsession / folly / ignis fatui / trifle / &c. /
Is more like it!

Splendid! But after all that kerfuffle I actually decided that The Hopper Continuum might serve as the most appropriate adage.

[Quickfire]

Yes, this!
Ably described and wonderfully worded by the master of mystery, Mr Quickfire.
This is has to be the answer. As it all rushed toward the new and sparkly AF, it all went pear-shaped in Palitoy.
This would explain all manner of odd things happening at that time of transition.
This needs more looking at, but is very interesting stuff.

Danke Hopps, wrote in haste in the most condensed possible way before blasting out for the evening, glad you parsed it all.

Now back and coming down like Withnail after walking up four floors on the Charing Cross Road and take a surfeit of Surmontil 50s. Or whatever.

Feel like further explanation might be in order ...



Having worked part-time in a plastics factory for a year nearly twenty years ago as an injured undergrad I should know the lingo but have forgotten.

It's November 84. The blessed mould drones have everything in place just as they want it. But a new regime is coming in. That regime has new moulds and plastics.

Reading Red Baron, Tshot's and your posts I suddenly realised I've seen similar symptoms before...

There's a rush order due to demand, Xmas produce is out, noone quite knows what's happening next but the orders come into the management. Some gofer says "Make it so."

The pellets have been ordered, but noone on the shop floor is in the loop yet about what is actually going to happen.

The pick sheets are at least clear in terms of colour. Maybe some left-behind old hand just ticks the correct colours, but it's not the right plastic.

So, in the warehouse someone new picks the *wrong* plastic ?pellets that are the right colour.

Hungover mould-types pour in the new plastic into what are the old moulds. Management is in flux so who gives a tuppenny toss.

When they smelt the difference it was too late.

Harder, over expanded, the joints don't fit and the moulds don't work.

Also the old paint for the older plastic doesn't catch.

The figs were spat off the production line and just painted and packaged up as who knows what's happening next.

If anyone got in trouble, it was the noob on the picking gang. Not the mould types. Nor the design team neither, as they were long gone.

The harder plastic for the jointed figures would expand differently to the classically softer/more rubbery Palitoy type.

Rush job, grab what looks like the right pellet or wotevs. Try and paint the output. Nothing fits as planned.

QED.

Welcome to the Soviet Union/Communist Cars/Post-Palitoy Order syndrome. Scheiss happens.



Anyway, a hypothesis to be tested by the real experts on such matters.

Time to crash.

[SteveD]

An excellent theory!! Especially the plastics knowledge. I've been looking into injection moulding if late and it is, as Quickfire says, based on melting down pellets that are then injected into the moulds. The colour mix or consistency is determined by the ratio of pellets melted. So that can easily account for plastic hardnesses, or colour variants. Especially in tricky to mix ones like the oranges or yellows. I've got some noticeably different oranges and yellows in my little space gang.

[Thundershot]

Don't forget, Steve, that both age & storage conditions can also have an effect on the plastic & its colour too.

[Hopper]

Yeah. Excellent stuff Herr Quickfire.
It all makes sense.
So, it may well be that the Surfer T3 is in fact a sub-variant of the type like the two I described elsewhere. He is the end of the line, an anomaly, constructed as the wheels fell of the good ship Palitoy... and hit a mixed metaphor. Not a true variant, but an artefact that tells a story (I got all Time Teamy for a second)

Oh, and Quickfire... Jeez, that's rather nasty!
Sounds like your hand is, in the perlious parlance and vulgar vernacular of our present day youth, "proper fkd, innit."
Of course the question doth present itself... what the hell were you doing holding a rifle for 36 hours in arctic conditions.
Here's the part where Quickfire comes out as a 70 year old Russian, and he got frostbite defending Stalingrad against the advancing German hoard.
He's only here to groom us, so if he sends you a pm asking for 'special' pictures, tell an adult.

[Quickfire]

Now no longer off the proverbial rocker, I just thought of a HUGE flaw in the theory.

Gonna let it sit for a while. If I had the ever elusive History of Palitoy volume it might be simpler to explain.

Maybe it is all a light / temperature issue after all ...

Pointing out I never bought may give away the flaw ...

In the meantime, I feel like a schwein scheissed in my kopf.

[Hopper]

Now no longer off the proverbial rocker, I just thought of a HUGE flaw in the theory.

Gonna let it sit for a while. If I had the ever elusive History of Palitoy volume it might be simpler to explain.

Maybe it is all a light / temperature issue after all ...

Pointing out I never bought may give away the flaw ...

In the meantime, I feel like a schwein scheissed in my kopf.

I did wonder about your sobriety/sanity when reading your fevered ravings this morning... remarkably coherent given the bath of claret that doubtless passed through your liver.

Get a bacon butty down you and then tell all!

[Quickfire]

I did wonder about your sobriety/sanity when reading your fevered ravings this morning... remarkably coherent given the bath of claret that doubtless passed through your liver.

Get a bacon butty down you and then tell all!

Up to my neck in admin at the moment, still dwelling on the implications of the Popperian calamity that has befallen the theory. IT FAILS THE BIG TEST. Or is at least a bit leaky.

It gets worse: no bacon in the vicinity of my FOB, they haven't developed the sophisticated taste needed for digging on beauteous swine.

Was a singular moment when, utterly trollied, one quite reasonably started thinking about plastic in an obscure BFTB thread and had what appeared to be a eureka moment. And then obsessed about it again eight hours later when even more liberally bathed in the effervescent fruits of ethanol and hydraulic fluid.

In about five hours I'll have got back into the correct orbit.