Customs and Other Stuff

So I think it's time to finally share some pictures of my completed Metroplex! This first picture is Metroplex as I got him (almost): yellowed, broken waist, tatty stickers and missing most of his accessories:

He was missing his chest ramp as well but I wasn't prepared to pull it out just for the photo. So the first thing I did was to buy the accessories he was missing (I managed to find a lot on eBay which included non-yellowed legs plus the chest ramp), plus repro stickers. I did a (bad) job on repairing his waist and this is what I ended up with:

I don't think it looks too bad in this photo but that waist is wood! (From an old sofa!!!). Thanks to Jin Saotome Dangerous Toys website I later discovered Hobby Link Japan and basically how to go about this project so I started again.

I liked the extra height that the replacement waist gave so I decided to keep that idea, I then designed knees with swivels thighs, elbows with swivels wrists, articulated hands (from Jin's website), plus a ball joint head.

From previous experience I'd found that I find it's really hard to sculpt cubes or cuboids from epoxy putty so I made the pieces I wanted from polystyrene (easy to cut to size), made a rubber mold and then casted the pieces. It took a bit of filing, filling and sanding but it worked fairly well. I then used ball joints to give the movement.

Despite Metroplex having a broken waist I didn't want to permanently change the figure so I designed the pieces to be non-permanent. By undoing a few screws, etc, all the pieces are removable. (I did alter the legs though as I had a spare pair.)

So here's Metroplex in his restored non upgraded glory:

Metroplex now has knees and elbows so is capable of slightly more dynamics poses than arms up/arms down. So here is the finished item:

I dread to think how long this has taken me but I'm very glad to have finished! He's now posed on my shelves with some WST.

So here's a couple of other much smaller things I've done. Firstly Terradive from the Hunt for the Decepticons line, it's an awesome mold but I wasn't sure how to fit him into my Classics collection so I came up with the idea of making him a minion of Unicron (I bought 3). I removed the Decepticon insignias, painted the white bits silver and gave them a black wash, and then finished them with some Unicron faction stickers:

I'm a big fan of the Real Gear line, in particular Booster X12 aka Laserbeak, it seemed wrong that Buzzsaw didn't get the same treatment so I pulled out my gold paint:

Speaking of the HFTD line, it also featured a certain Bludgeon. I thought his head was too movie looking so I made my own by making a resin copy of MOTU Skeletor's head and painting it silver. I've since bought HeadRobots upgrade as well so he's also going to get a new sword:

As I've mentioned previously, I love the Hearts of Steel steampunk asthetic, so I felt inspired to pick up a few ROTF Ransacks and paint them as the seekers. Pretty rubbish robot mode but the alt mode is decent enough. I made some machine gun weapons as well:


I'm going to be working on some Terrorcon customs soon, pictures in several years!