Heat/Storage/XD

[CrazyinTexas]

Due to the fact that my wife HATES that I spend money on worthless "army toys", I cannot store my XD inside the house anywhere. I am forced to store my XD in our garage in 116q big Tupperware(from Target). These hold 5 hanomags/3 tanks/ or a mixture of both. There are quite a few in the garage and they are stacked by the overhead door. Normally on the weekend it is up and I'm doing yard work etc. I need to know if the sun will fade any items and if prolonged heat will cause any damage to my stuff. Mainly the figures-loose armes/legs or sticking joints. So far I can't really tell if there are any issues. Has anyone had any issues with sun or heat?

[Jesse James]

There's a lot that can happen from heat... Figures can literally melt. I know people who have had that happen in their car after they left things in the trunk or back seat for a prolonged period of time in the Summer.

Sunlight itself can, and will discolor many types of plastics, especially if prolonged direct sunlight is a problem. This often is a problem with yellowing white plastics, as is smoking, however it can affect other colors of plastics as well.

It's a real pain to deal with for certain but there's not much that can be done with it.

Figures can develop a tackiness to them... I'd imagine treads on tanks/armor would be at a greater risk for this as well. It's usually best to store toys in a cool, dry location. That's the best advice most anyone has. Unfortunately it's not easy to do that all the time for everyone.

Plastic, like most anything, will break down over time though... Over a truly long period of time, there's not much that can be done to stop that. I'm sort of curious as to what will occur to XD items over the long haul. Nobody's really sure yet... It's kind of a wait and see thing right now.

[B-29]

Heat can destroy joints, especially if they're boxed. If they're loose, there's a better chance of preventing this.As for the vehicles, do not store them in direct sunlight. I've had several issues with plastic warping under direct sunlight for long periods of time.

[tmanthegreat]

I store well over half my collection - figures, aircraft, armor - in my attic due to my current space constraints. Some items have been up there for years. The good thing about my attic is that it is dry and has no direct sunlight. The bad thing is that it gets hot in the summer time. Fresno, CA usually averages over 90 degrees during the summer and often hotter. (To give you some perspective, it is a national crisis when the east coast when the temp gets above 90, but my area is like that all the time !) Anyways, despite the fact that my attic can heat up to as much as 120 degrees in the summer, I have not had any ill-effects with my XD products and the heat. The rubbery plastic does get soft, but my figures are not wrecked and neither are the planes. .

Hope that helps with some perspective.

[aferguson]

i've had alot of my stuff stored on my balcony for years. Summers here are routinely in the 90's and i face west and get the sun full blast for the afternoon. Not one speck of damage to anything.

A car can get over 150 degrees in the summer; highly doubtful a garage will. These figures should be safe in much higher temperatures anyway, plastic melts at around 300 degrees+.

For what it's worth my stuff has also been in minus 20 to minus 40 temperatures and been soaked through with rain (not intentionally it just happened). And not one tiny bit of damage has occurred, except to the boxes from the moisture.

[immeww2]

I too have quite a bit of stuff stacked away in the garage and up in the roof attic for years and no damage has been observed (I check on those guys once a year) .

[skypirate]

Maybe it's time to install A/C in the garage?

My main concerns would be pieces warping and clear plastic dulling or yellowing.

Sticker adhesives might dry out and fall off. Packaging will age and no longer be mint condition.

Heat really isn't kind to models. Here in Texas, I won't use UPS for shipping during the summer. Those brown trucks aren't air conditioned and I'm the last person on their route. Baked the grip right off a camera I sent in for repairs.

Similar to warping, thermal expansion could be an issue, and the bigger the parts, the greater potential for problems. I use to build high power rockets and one type of tubing was known for thermal expansion/contraction. The diameter of the body tube would change according to the temperature, even more so if the rocket was painted a dark color. So, frequently fine tuning the fit of the nosecone was required and the larger the model the more pronounced the variance.

Everyone was more preoccupied with the diameter changing. When I tried making a rocket look more like a modern jet fighter, I discovered thermal expansion the length of the body tube would be an even bigger problem.

You can read about minor thermal expansion breaking an epoxy bond on one of my rockets.

[flyboy_fx]

Due to the fact that my wife HATES that I spend money on worthless "army toys", I cannot store my XD inside the house anywhere. I am forced to store my XD in our garage in 116q big Tupperware(from Target). These hold 5 hanomags/3 tanks/ or a mixture of both. There are quite a few in the garage and they are stacked by the overhead door. Normally on the weekend it is up and I'm doing yard work etc. I need to know if the sun will fade any items and if prolonged heat will cause any damage to my stuff. Mainly the figures-loose armes/legs or sticking joints. So far I can't really tell if there are any issues. Has anyone had any issues with sun or heat?

I WOULD NOT CHANCE IT

1. stuff your mean wife it the Tupperware out in the shed.
2. take her "office" and turn it into the XD cave.
3. run away if she gets out.
4. do not let her read what im telling you for fear she might track me down and harm my collection.

[Jesse James]

Heat really isn't kind to models. Here in Texas, I won't use UPS for shipping during the summer. Those brown trucks aren't air conditioned and I'm the last person on their route. Baked the grip right off a camera I sent in for repairs.

Neither's anyone else's truck. Belive me.


Heat can definitely impact clear plastics, but sunlight's more a problem for yellowing than heat is... Smoking too, is a bigger problem for clear plastics. That said, the plastic of packaging is much, much, much cheaper, and more prone to the yellowing, than the plastic of a cannopy on a plane or something.

Still, plastic, like I said, breaks down. You cannot avoid it ultimately. All long-term toy collectors agree that it's best to keep your stuff in a cool, dry climate. No extreme cold/heat, no direct sunlight... And definitely no smoking. The plastics will break down in different ways over time. Some break down quickly, like the limbs on some E1 figures from around 1999 are getting tacky for many SW collectors I know. That was less than 10 years, and for some it was closer to 5 or so.

That very easily could happen with XD stuff. Eventually everything will "go bad" though. It's really an inevitability. You'll probably not live to see it all, but yeah... It probably will.

Oh, and packaging is that much more open to damage from the elements... Like I mentioned the plastic of carded figures or window boxes is pretty cheap stuff. And moisture destroys cardboard obviously. Sunlight will easily fade graphics and things on the packaging too.

[Sky Ray]

Not 1:18 plastic, but last year I had stored my whole entire collection of 1:32 die-cast Unimax vehicles in another house over summer temporarily. The room I had put my collection of die-cast vehicles was the hottest, it recorded in about +95 degrees. Sadly I wasn't able to relocate them somewhere else, so they were stuck there in that room for three months.
Surprisingly, after moving everything to another cooler house, everything seem to have turned out ok with my tanks.

[sluff]

I know this doesn't answer the storage question but when I used to live in Chicago I lived on the 5th floor of an un-air conditioned apartment building and I noticed during the summer all my BBI planes landing gear (F-18 in particular) started to go soft so I display my planes "gear up" during the summer and "gear down" during the winter

[Dauntless]

I'm with Flyboy on this but reality does not go that way unfortunately, for those with significant others

I used to have a girlfriend who collected everything, and most of my stuff got relegated to the garage. She wouldn't share any display space. Knick-knack-paddy-wacks everywhere. You know girl things.

Now I have a P-40 Flying Tiger hanging in the kitchen I put there for Chinese New Year. It's still there.

As much as I would like to put my XD everywhere, it's kind of mancave overkill, and I have to keep somewhat of an appearance of respectability. Especially if I want to impress a prospective girlfriend.

I do have one small room that is a mini mancave though it's too small for much XD, so I hang up my 32X planes and have 32X vehicles on shelfs.

The garage gets hot, so I am currently selling off my Star Wars, and other collections to make room for more XD (and maybe a car?)
I want to get a small air conditioner for it eventually.
I do have an hot air exaust fan that kicks in automatically at a certain temperature right above the garage in the attic, and I keep the attic stair ladder open so the hot air can rise to it, then get purged out. It seems to help. It gets hot here in the high desert. Luckily it's dry though.

[flyboy_fx]

GF....XD........GF.......XD

GF<XD


You single make you whole HOUSE the man cave....unless