You can take a screw driver, and slowly rotate it while applying pressure to carefully dig in and create an opening. Either that, or if you are capable and have the power tools necessary, you can use an appropriately sized drill bit to carve out the intended indentation. It may look a little rough on the edges, but you can either try smoothing it down by other methods, or ignore it completely due to it being covered up by the rhotuka mechanism piece. As long as you are careful and don’t over-gouge, as what you will be doing can be considered semi-permanent.
Either that, or if you want to be freaky about it and have the skills you can cut it out entirely and glue in another painted piece, like a 3x1x1 round technic beam. Or even flip it over to use the other side, seeing as how yours don’t seem to have the problem on the nonstandard side. But, I’d leave this as an only-if-needed alternative, like if you end up butchering it your first attempt.
The weird thing is that some do on both sides whereas others have on only one side. The one on the right I got seperately from Bricklink a few days ago. The one on the left came with Iruini (bought in the Netherlands a long time ago). Perhaps that also makes a difference.
Also, this issue seems hardly discussed among fans. When I bought the silver shield off of bricklink I was pretty annoyed and surprised that Eljay never mentioned this particular defect in his Toa Hagah review.
I am honestly considering scrapping the shields all together because it is just too much of a risk to buy them (especially because they are so expensive).
Are you able to find somewhere on the shields where they say something like X-01 (Where X is a number)? My theory is that this is based on which position in the mold that was used, thus the “X” should be different between the defects and the ones with a proper pinhole. Edit: actually I just noticed that it’s visible in the image. Both say 2-01, so there goes that theory… That makes this even more bizarre.
As far as if the connection ends up stressing the parts - without the groove being present, the pins of the Rhotuka launcher should be offset exactly so that they’re just shy of resting securely in the groove on the other side, meaning they’re permanently compressed, which may cause deformation in the long run.
edit: I’ve just tested this with one of my shields that has this error (all silver, weirdly) and putting the shield on backwards like this does allow the spinner to launch as intended. Normally, the spinner just stays on the pin on the defective shields.
When was that correction added in the instructions? It doesn’t show up in the Lego website. Also, doesn’t this beg the question why the hagah sets weren’t recalled? I mean, it’s probably nitpicking, but wouldn’t it be preferable to have the shield set as shown on the canister without the pinhole flaw?
He did come with one though; I was involved in a discussion about this some time back, and someone was able to provide one for Norik that I wasn’t able to find online.
@Fluffsheep As to your question, I don’t think it makes a difference either. The shields I got with the sets in 2005 were okay but the ones I bought seperately from a store in the Netherlands were not (I doubt they were first imported from outside the EU). Perhaps just a bad batch.
