The Energon Pub

Hello all! This is one of a very few TF customs I've ever done, and it's not truly original, but I thought I'd share it here. Have done only a couple of repaints before, I got the crazy idea to dive into the deep end and repaint an Alternators Skids into Ratchet. Then I Googled some pics of a Ratchet made from a white knockoff of Hound. To top it off, the knockoff had die-cast parts like the BTs, so I jumped on that and hunted one down, then found an Alternators Rollbar for swapping parts. "Knockoff" is right; the smell of the cheap rubber on the tires gagged me as soon as I opened the packing box. Eventually I ended up swapping out the following: tires, shocks, front bumper, brushguard, feet/rear bumper, forearms, hands (because each version had different sized holes in the wrists), main torso, and spare tire. I added a lightbar from a police cruiser model kit and a front winch from a Jeep kit of the same scale. My special personal touch was the labels. I figured this Ratchet would obviously be a mountain rescue vehicle, so I made some labels from, among other pics, the logo of an organization named the Wilderness Rescue Institue. The best part, though, was the license plate from Reprolabels.com, which uses the Oregon state design for Ratchet. Older fans may remember that in the Marvel books the volcano where the Ark crashed was located in Oregon in the Cascades mountain range. Sorry that my phone camera is somewhat blurry, but I think you can still get the general idea here.

Nice. Very clean work. That head looks great!

Thanks. Keep in mind, as I said above, the knockoff was already white, so all I really painted were the hands, forearms, waist/torso, and head. I had to sand the forehead for what seemed like forever to get enough clearance for the chevron to allow the transformation. Another person put a hardtop from a Jeep model kit on their Ratchet, but I found I would have had to shave the roof away completely in order to still open the doors.

I can't get the final photo of the rear view with the license plate to upload for some reason, either as a jpg or a bitmap, so if you're interested here's the link at Deviantart:

http://cneterer.deviantart.com/#/d37t6s3