It came from the 80s...

[paulson games]

I was digging around through some boxes in the garage which had a bunch of half built and ruined gundam kits. One of the boxes didn't seat quite right as there was way too much junk jammed in it so I popped the lid and just about wet my pants with happiness.

Inside were two seperate 1/48 Robotech Alpha Veritechs.

One half built, but with all the remaining parts on the sprue and one still bagged and 100% untouched, as though it travelled in a DeLorean time machine directly to me from 1984.

These things go for a mint on ebay nowdays, I was so happy I could almost cry.




These were originally sold as Go Bot Leader-1 kits by Monogram but it's repackaged models from the Robotech Invid arc aka Mospeada. (they even have the robotech mars base markings for decals) They were very expensive kits at the time and had several die cast parts, working landing gears, rubber tires and were fully transformable. Not to mention they were 1/48 scale which was huge compaired to most other robotech kits which were either 1/100, or 1/200.

Being that they were expensive kits I couldn't get one and I had a couple of the non-transformable versions which came in sets of 3 for about $5 back in the day. These two I happened on at a hobby store around 6-7 years later in their clearance bin for about $10 each when they'd been about $50-$60 originally. Their boxes had been smashed up pretty good but the insides were fine.

Later that summer my basement flooded when our sump pump burned out and everything downstairs was pretty much trashed with nasty black sewer water.

Apparently I'd cleaned the parts off but the boxes and instructions were ruined and no way to salvage them. The kits went into a box that's been apparently been ignored for the better part of 20 years until today.

The difficulty now is that I have a pair of extremely complex models, the partially assembled model only needs to have one arm and one leg built and there's still over sixty pieces in the box.

I think I can maybe figure it out by studying the built arm/leg, but I have no clue how I'm going to go about building the other one without instructions the internal transformation parts were pretty complicated.

I shot an email off to Revell/Monogram but no idea if they'll be able to help as the kit is 27 years old now. (god I feel old now)

[Arkangel]

Dude thats awesome!
I have a mint in box Gen 1 Jetfire so I know what these little finds mean to geek. Sorry a man like you or I!!

I hope you get some joy with the instructions if not there has to be. Robotech forum out there somewhere where somebody must bevavle o help?

Chin up and good hunting!

[paulson games]

Jet fire.... sigh I loved that toy. You are lucky as hell to have one still.

I got one for my birthday and had for four days before my dad in his infinate wisdom decided to let my 3 year old brother play with it and of course he snapped off the right arm at the shoulder. No amount of super glue could fix it. On top of that I got grounded for yelling at him.

It was still cool enough that I kept the broken one for about 10 years. I'd kill to get one again but that one is like finding the holy grail for most of the Robotech collectors.

I've also been really wanting to pick up one of the Toynami Masterpiece series Alpha's but they had a really low print run and run between $150-$300 depending on how the wind blows on ebay. They have a Beta that links up to it which is incredibly awesome and a bit more affordable but I'm not sure I want to drop that type of money if I can't get the matching colored Alpha.





CMS also has much more affordable versions of these available but the colors are pretty light and sculpts aren't quite as good. On top of that the Beta is about 30% too small to be in correct scale.

[TomG]

Hehe nice. Althought I like more original Macross.