This was inspired by the announcement of the new Botcon exclusive figures. One of the figures was named as Dreadwind, and while I still have no idea what they're doing, it almost immediately inspired me; having a looking at my Classics Jetfire I noticed some surprising similarities. I picked up a second Jetfire (25% off
) and got to work.
For the most part it's a straight repaint, but I am making a few mods to improve the resemblance.
Jet mode so far. Not
that much visible in this form yet, but I've already removed the tailwings, and fitted one of the vertical fins to the fuselage. I'm going to have to mod the tailwings to fit back on the hinge points, and probably level the back ends of them.
The wings, naturally, are going to be more delta in shape, but rather than actually remove them and construct new ones from scratch, I'm going to try taking off part of the trailing edge, and just add the necessary extension pieces. That should still do the job I'm after, while having more structural integrity than my original plan. The missiles come, appropriately, from a mini KO Dreadwind I picked up for 2 Euros in France a couple of years back.
And here's the mini-Dreadwind, just for yuks. In't he cute?
Robot mode, compared with the G1. In this form, rather than pivot back, the wings will swing down a bit, which will basically streamline the robot form a bit, but basically give him a kind of cape affair. I'll also naturally be adding shoulder guns to mimic the protrusions on the original. I'm trying to decide whether to fill and detail the ports for the FAST pack and arm launchers, since he's clearly not going to need them.
A good deal of the work was on the face, though.
And here it is. It was actually fairly easy to get the look from the inner head; I originally thought I'd be modding the helmet, but I realised this looked better (to me, certainly).
After removing the light piping, trimming down the nose to a stub and shaving off the top surface of the face (to get rid of JF's mouth), I cut tiny pieces of styrene strip and formed the ledge under the eyes.The bulk of the head was painted and varnished, then I filled the front part of the head (the face) with hot glue. I shaved that down, screwed the head back together, then pumped more glue into the notch where the original piping was. After trimming it down, cutting some details into it and filing, I painted the piping with yellow glass paint.
[EDIT] Hee hee... 2006 posts!