Hum, doesn't look great indeed... I opened mine yesterday and everything seemed ok at a first glance but I have to check carefully. At least, you know that CB will send you a proper replacement part quickly and for free.
That´s, unfortunatly, very problematic. And it´s not a single case but at least the third time i saw people showing parts of the Gator looking like that. That´s very sad, cause I am used to CB´s excellent quality (belive me or not, in 8 years of buying from CB i had to contact the costumer service just twice, and one was a mispack) Even my Volstok and the smaller Nomad drones were without flaw. BUT I never bought them with release, and i realy tend to stop buying with release completely, which is unfortunate. But it seems like thats the way to avaid a lot of miscasts. Yes, costumer service is excellent. BUT it´s work and waiting. Non of that should happen when I buy a product. As someone who did work in Costumer service for a while: The best service you can do is the one that does not force the costumer to take advantage of.
I recently had my 1st contact with siocast. Objectives from ITS pack. Lots of miscasts on venting grills and in many ridges. Also the material itself is hard to work with, each of the objectives had excess material from mould on top. I tried 3 different ways to cut it and with 2 of them at some point the excess just snapped off and took a big portion of model with it. Had to use green stuff to fox the holes. Really dissapointed with siocast and now I'm sure no new TAGs for me.
I'm not really sure why CB is even sending those failed casts out. It's not like it's hard to spot the issues if any QA is done at all. So, there's either no QA and they "spot" the issues when customers start complaining (which is very bad on its own) or they're cynically sending the miscast pieces ahead, counting on early buyers being the most desperate customers and most forgiving. I really cannot see a third option here and both of the above are really concerning.
Do other companies have Siocast issues like this every now and then? Or only CB so far? And CB always seems to be about not pushing the mold material properly into the masters, or mold degradation (but so early?), with surfaces "growing" beyond what the 3d render shows.
I've not seen such issues, especially such egregious ones, with other companies. I know of a lot of companies casting Siocast, especially in Poland, who deliver excellent detailed models and have no problems. Yeah, it's weird how they seem to have not grasped the process yet.
