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Unpaintable plastic

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Due to Prowl's mold layout, changing the outer shell of the car while leaving the limbs white for Sideswipe left a white part on the roof that had to be covered by a sticker. All of Sideswipe's white plastic (and the corresponding parts on other versions of the mold) cannot hold paint.

Just what its name implies, unpaintable plastic is plastic to which the type of paint Hasbro and TakaraTomy use will not properly adhere, due to the chemical compositions of said plastic. This plastic is sometimes used on Transformers toys for structural reasons, due to its durability, flexibility, or resilience.

The two most common plastics that are unpaintable and often used in Transformers are Polyoxymethylene (POM) and Polyamide (PA). The vast majority of Transformers toys have at least one mold that is unpaintable.


Examples

Photodegradation

While it is nothing new, photodegradation has become much more common and rapid in products released ever since the War for Cybertron: Siege toyline. Several figures' unpaintable plastic has become increasingly susceptible to decay and discoloration even while still inside the packaging or mere days after being opened. These figures are also known to "yellow" even when they aren't exposed to direct sunlight—even when inside windowless boxes!—and have been observed to have an accelerated reaction in humid climates.

The precise cause is still unclear. A common theory among the fandom is that a fire retardant within the nylon chemical buildup is the cause of this and reacts to heat and/or humidity, causing the plastic to yellow. There was even one case in TFWiki.net's own community Discord server where—what is believed to be—the yellowy-colored fire retardant chemical seeping out of a seam in an individual's War for Cybertron Trilogy Soundwave's knee! Gross. This was most notable as their figure never suffered the same fate of the rapid yellowing that just about everyone else had endured, likely due to the cause seeping out of the plastic instead. Other proposed explanations blame the COVID-19 pandemic: rapid changes in factory staff and cleaning methods, reduced feasibility of Hasbro site-checks, longer time spent on slowed-down Pacific cargo ships, or some mix of the above. As noted above, the newer sudden-onset phenomenon was first noticed around 2018, two years prior to the world-wide outbreak, so some of that may not be the real cause - though it could certainly have gotten in the way of fixing it.

Notes

  • Before you ask; yes, you can probably get commercially available hobbyist paints to stick to this plastic. However, you are not a multi-million dollar toy corporation that needs to meet stringent testing and durability standards while staying within very stringent budget constraints. This fundamental disconnect is pretty much the entire driving force behind customizing.
  • That said, if you're going to try and paint that kind of plastic, you need to be keenly aware of the limitations of your options. Enamels are a bad idea, as they chemically bond with plastics, and the results can end up gummy and sticky forever when applied to softer plastics. Acrylics form a "shell" over the plastic with minimal bonding, which is preferable. Still, those can chip and flake off fairly easily. A clear-coat layer can mitigate this, but since most unpaintable plastic parts are joints where a lot of friction happens and there's minimal room for more layers of anything, well... good luck.
  • Speaking of painting unpaintable plastics, nearly all of the Lucky Draw figures released in Asia tend to have those pieces coated along with the rest of the paintable parts. Whether they'll flake off over the years has yet to be seen.
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