ITS DONE.

Ready for action!

Well folks, the project is done.  I have all of my parts for the Killer Whale, and today the ship is sitting proudly on a shelf for all to see in my basement man cave.  She is *huge*.  I am so pleased with this project; its been a lot of wish fulfillment shipped to me in little packages from nice people all over the country on eBay.  I learned a few things about this- first, its much more expensive to buy the parts for the ship via eBay than I thought it would be.  It would have been much cheaper in the long run to spend $150 plus shipping to buy a complete ship from an online vendor then doing what I did, which was basically buy parts individually and in lots.  I bet my grand total for the ship came in at over $300 with shipping.   And that's a pretty steep markup over buying the thing in one big purchase.

At the same time, it was pretty cool to buy the parts this way, a one or a few at a time.  It was really something seeing the ship come together, and checking ebay in the end for those last parts to show up added to the tension and anticipation of putting the set together.  There are two sets of parts that are hard to find online and only show up every few weeks or so on eBay for this vehicle- the cannon tips and the vertical steering vanes.  You need four steering vanes and two cannon tips to make the ship complete, and the cannon tips were easy to loose back when.  They come off easily.  And the vertical vanes are easily broken. Each have two small tabs which could snap off, and both have two thing sections of plastic that represent 'hinges' that can break due to aggressive play.  I purchased two vanes individually just after my last post, and purchased the last two vanes together about two weeks later.  Then I had to wait for the cannon tips.

Yeah, this missile pods just don't like to stay up. :-(

I waited for a few weeks for the cannon tips to show up on eBay.  There are a few stores online that had listed them in stock at various points, but when I went back to check them out, they were gone.  I *had* to go through eBay.  I found one for sale with a "buy it now" option.  The second took another week to go, and then I found one- there was a seller with a Killer Whale parts lot, with a picture of the items.  In the picture, I could see the lot included a cannon AND the tip, and a few other parts.  The parts were not listed specifically in the description, which may have reduced the attention this particular lot received from other would be buyers.

There was no "buy it now" option, so I just had to bid.  It was rough actually waiting for the several days to see what the bidding would get to, but thankfully, I had the winning bid.  In the mean time, I had collected the other parts I needed- the bike, fans and shroud assemblies, and was good to go.

This toy is so cool.  There are so many things that can be done with it.  A drive shaft extends from each fan into a gear box, which has a button.  Pushing the button really makes those fans spin.  the fans have steering vanes that can be adjusted and shifted; there is a cockpit with space for two figures, two machine gun nests, really ferocious looking cannons, a spring loaded scout sled, and room for a lot of stuff inside the hovercraft itself.  This is a *fantastic* toy, one that I probably would have loved as much as my personal favorite toy back in '84, Castle Greyskull.

The one big draw back to this item is how fragile it is; there are a lot of parts, and they are not very securely fastened to each other.  It must have been very expensive to make, especially when you compare it to toys on the shelves today; I rarely see action figure vehicles as big as this when I do make sentimental trips down the toy aisle at my local Target; 95% of the stuff I see is much smaller, and I would assume, less complex then this guy.  I appreciate all the work that must have gone in to designing this bad boy.

Its a great toy, and I had a wonderful experience putting it together over these last several months.  If you are thinking about doing this yourself, I recommend it- even at $300, the experience of  getting myself something like this that I had wanted ever since I was a little boy was well worth the time, effort and money I expended to make this happen.  If you have the means and find yourself longing for this item, I say seriously consider picking one up for yourself on eBay.  I'd recommend saving up and buying one all at once if you can, but even if you can't, the experience of watching it come together is bitter sweet at worst, and at best, deeply, deeply, satisfying.

David Draper