Transformers??? Wanted for my 3.5 year old son.

[Joshchisox08]

Originally Posted by Tripredacus

Close! 13,706 is a closer number not counting mold revisions which a lot of people don't care about.

This is my favorite pic so far, but its a tad outdated by now.

Is that yours? I can make out quite a few Gen 1 characters on those shelves.

[steve B]

Impressive collection.

My nephew is into transformers, but more for playing. The new ones have some impressive engineering. I've been a mechanic of one sort or another for a long time and trained in CAD/CAM, and one of the bigger ones still took me around 20 minutes to figure out. Probably would have helped to know what it was supposed to turn into

One thing to recommend would be picking up extras/damaged ones at yard sales etc. One of his favorite ones came apart a bit and the head got lost. They had a very long week before they finally broke down and bought a replacement. Now there's a box of parts figures tucked away, far cheaper than replacing a couple of them.

Steve B

[Tripredacus]

Originally Posted by Joshchisox08

Is that yours? I can make out quite a few Gen 1 characters on those shelves.

Yes. That shelf (at that time) was all G1/G2 mold toys and later releases of same mold under other series. While that is my primary collection focus, I do actually have the Optimus Prime your son is playing with in the pics you posted above. I did not see any pics when I replied.

Here is an example of a variation of original release Ratchet. The toy and instructions are the same as the regular 1985 release, but this particular one is the mailaway version. It comes with the white paper part on the right.


Here we can show an example of standard mold revisions. It is difficult to take pictures of these stamps, let alone more than 1. At first glance to my collection, a person would just see 3 of the same thing and wonder why. But here we can see there are 3 different toolings:


I currently focus on 80s toys and their mold-mates, mold revisions, artifacts (non-toy items), comics, books, videos and video games, and a few of the newer released ones. Everything else I've gathered over the years sits in bins.

Some exception would be more recent ones where a variation exists. Here is an example where at some point, Hasbro changes how the packaging was designed and changed it after being for sale. It was initially an un-noticed change, but once it was confirmed I knew I needed to have both types.


If you have any questions about them, or need help to identify something, feel free to ask.