Quote Originally Posted by griffin View Post
I don't think there is much painting involved. I think most of the effort is cutting up the 'trees', cleaning up the parts, some paint-aps, assembly, stickers... and that should be it. I think the only difference to the factory is that the paint could be applied by machine.
If they were dissassembling existing toys of different characters, painting them up and then re-assembling them, it would be a custom job. These are effectively mass-produced (on the same machines that produce the regular toys) in different colour plastics, and are sent from the factory in the condition that the factory workers would get them when they put the toys together. The only real difference is that the 'toys' are shipped before they are constructed.

It can go either way though - personally, I'd prefer to classify them as 'fan customs' so that I don't have to even think about collecting them, but am leaning the other way because they are following a set pattern, with factory-produced parts... not to mention being similar to the various BotCon toys that have exclusive parts (heads/wings) for FunPub to put toghether, or paint/sticker details of BotCon 95 Nightracer (done by hand as well).
So you are saying that the toys are something more to being manufactured by old fashion manual labor than a factory machine. Still kind of weird but I agree from that perspective that it is less of a kitbash and more of an 'oddly' produced toy.

The thing is that so few of them are made (and bound to be of varying quality) that it would be next to impossible to find. I personally choose to ignore them as they would be very difficult to get and there are alternatives to the characters portrayed or they don't fit that well with the set like that Custom class Inferno from Botcon 06 as there is no canonical background to support it.