![]() |
Poor Cloudpuff. This otherwise perfect pony is suffering from a disease that is completely the fault of Hasbro. This disease is a phenomenon of regrind, a shortcut in the manufacturing process.
Starting in about year four Hasbro started to cut some corners in their manufacturing process, however, they may have soon seen the error of their ways because I haven't seen any later ponies with this problem. When manufacturing hard rubber items, such as MLP's, industry regulations allow a certain amount of regrind to fill out the mixture. Regrind is waste rubber from previous casts, ground up. It can either come from the edges of moulds where excess rubber shows up and is cut off, or it can come from factory flawed products. This rubber is then ground up very finely and added to new batches of rubber to be recycled in new products. This is a very nice and environmentaly friendly principle. The problem is, that only a very low percentage of regrind should be used for quality purposes and it should be ground very small. What makes this so important is that while regrind has the same texture quality as new rubber, it has already been dyed once and does not take dyeing a second time very well. The result is ponies like poor Cloudpuff here.
Cloudpuff is an example of a pony who's regrind content was either not ground up enough or not mixed in well enough. The result is spots on the body where the dye has faded from the recycled rubber. It is very sad, and we have no one to blame but Hasbro and their quality control department.
The only cure for regrind is paint. Dyeing will not be effective because while the pony will look an even color when she comes out of the dyeing pot, in a month or less the dye will have faded from the regrind spots and you will have the same problem in a pony with a new color.