This Prime is already pretty top heavy, but thank God, the rubber ball joints are stiff enough to support the weight. But would they be able to support a full armor on top of that? My first idea was to make a G1-style trailer. After designing the feet, I quickly ran out of useful hinges - only had so many pieces to work with: leftovers from my Prime, Megatron, Starscream and Bumblebee set plus a second Prime set. Plus, the feet were too wide even with the trailer structure collapsed, so I scrapped the idea and started all over again to do a flat trailer to reduce the bulk.
I ended up keeping the same basic design for the feet and went from there. I first designed the feet, then the forearms, the chest armor and the hitch piece. Hitch piece was the most difficult because I had to work with an already designed truck and hitch (Prime's weapon in robot mode). At first, I tried to convert that part into a shield but the plan failed, the arm wasn't able to support the weight. Shield was too thick and connection points didn't work anyway. So I redesigned the whole thing into a jetpack with fold out wings and thruster. The wings are on the thin side right now, I'll try to give them some bulk later if I can. The biggest challenge wasn't to make the thing solid in trailer mode with so many pieces to connect. And I didn't want to cheat by added blocks meant only to secure the components together. So here's how it transform from armor mode to trailer mode:
(FEET)
01. Fold down the shin guards
02. Rotate the wheels assemblies down 180 degrees
03. Attach the fists to the angled silver pieces located on the shin guards
04. Turn around for trailer mode
(FOREARMS)
05. Fold down the wrist blasters (they double as legs in trailer mode)
06. Fold down the 4 stabilizers (they will prevent rotation)
07. Peg each forearm to each rear trailer half
(CHEST PIECE)
08. Fold the waist connector flat against the bottom of the armor piece
09. Leaving the bottom chest armor angled, insert the pointy chest bits into the holes located in the previously attached forearms
10. Fold down the bottom parts and peg it to the support bars
(HITCH PIECE)
11. Fold down the thruster
12. Rotate the wings assembly 90 degrees
13. Rotate each wing arm back 90 degrees (flat against the body)
14. Rotate the entire unit up 90 degrees
15. Fold back the wings against the body
16. Peg the hitch piece to the rest of the trailer
Voilà!
Fully combined, Prime now is REALLY top heavy and hard to balance. The poor rubber joints have a lot of weight to support, so poses are limited. But technically, he retains the full articulation of the regular robot mode.
