Okay, on Saturday kup showed me a different way of detaching the turret from the canopy by squeezing the sides of the canopy together and thus pushing the tabs inward and relieving outward pressure. It does make detaching the turret easier and the first couple of times I did it miraculously produced no stress marks on the tabs! I thought I'd finally found a way of transforming this toy without breaking that part.

But alas, yesterday morning when I was playing around with it, again using kup's prescribed pressure-relief method, it still produced some small stress marks on the tabs. Not as bad as on my other Blitzwings but it's still there. :/ So yeah... *deep.sigh* this means that I'm going to avoid fully transforming it to tank mode now.

<swear words>

Four Blitzwings from two different stores... this is enough proof to me that the QC on this toy is just screwed.