Gravedigging because I found this custom on a Google search for customized DotM Ironhides in order to get some inspiration to poke at my own a bit more, and it was cool enough that I felt like commenting. I think you did an excellent job on the repainting and other modifications. I especially like your custom left cannon for him and the storage solution for it. It's not quite the same as having a collapsible accurate cannon that stores in the arm, but it gets a lot closer than the Fans Want It cannon that can't store anywhere. I'd say you've done him better than both HasTak and 3P have.
Mykltron wrote:LOL, yes, it IS rather important! It wouldn't have been difficult to make this figure good when they were designing it. Kitbashing it was quite hard but designing it correctly would have been easy.
Yeah, there's a lot about him that misses the mark. Although for my money, as someone who wound up not getting him til well after the fact... probably the worst decision was the struts for his hood assemblies attaching via frigging ball joints. And unlike RotF Optimus' feet or Jetfire's JTFR panels, there's not even a 3D print replacement kit available yet (more's the pity).
SKYWARPED_128 wrote:LC Ironhide is IMO a victim of sloppy designing. It actually has a redundant lever for the light-up gimmick in the form of a lever in the back of his neck/head, which preposterously inhibits head articulation if it has any in the first place.
I keep wondering if they had later abandoned the lever idea and opted for the more conventional feature on his chest, but forgot to get rid of the lever.
I wouldn't say it's entirely redundant. At least if I recall correctly, it's for activating the eye lights without needing to deploy the big chest cannon or activating the other sounds. Which is a nice thought, although were I designing him I would have opted to use a button for that task so that the lever could solely be used for raising and lowering the mouthplate (a la Cybertron Optimus Prime). It's just about perfectly set up for that - all it needs is to be disconnected from the electronics and a bit of trimming for clearance.
Ironhide is a victim of "Leader class am supposed to have electronics", those electronics getting prioritized above other features in the design (something that also impacted Leobreaker and Starscream back in Cybertron), and the insistence on powering those electronics with AA batteries instead of anything smaller. These factors also had a negative impact on Movie 1 Leader Megs (who has a battery box butt, which may have been a factor in his legs not forming the jet tail as they should), RotF Leader Megs (wanna know why his right arm doesn't have an elbow joint? It's so that the missile trigger can also hit a sound button in tank mode
), and RotF Jetfire.
Mykltron wrote:Do you have this figure? In case you didn't know, he DOES have neck articulation: if you twist his head to the side really hard you can break the glue seal with a sickening crunch and then him head turns with no problem. Yes, they gave him a turning head then glued it in place.
Yep. Doubtless to protect the wires, as has been said here already. I don't blame them for being a bit nervous on that score given the wiring repair I had to make on an HFTD Starscream, although smarter design (either forgoing the LED or putting it on a separate mount that the head rotated around) would have removed the need to worry. I have broken that loose on mine, along with gutting the electronics.
Now, as for my thoughts on the base figure. First, the blue. To start with, let's look at Movie 1 Voyager Ironhide.
Very minimal presence of blue, almost everything opaque is cast in black plastic. Which together with his only having a standard paintjob leaves him looking a lot less detailed than he really is.
It takes the extra paint of the Premium Series release to solve this. And, well, that's a bit of a problem.
The lack-of-contrast issue was sidestepped on
regular RotF Ironhide by making his main color a screen-inaccurate dark gray, but would recur on Recon Ironhide (who was back to being mainly black).
This lack of contrast is a problem Jetfire would also have shared without a premium paintjob. So to counter that, they used dark blue as a secondary color (probably because it was close-ish to a dark gunmetal).
This idea would be brought over to Ironhide for the HFTD toy, with a lighter blue. It's not the most accurate, but it provides much-needed contrast and Ironhide's gunmetal parts
do have a bluish tinge (
especially in renders).
Speaking of the HFTD toy, I believe it was a design influence on the DotM Leader. It makes some similar engineering choices (less the many additional sacrifices made for the DotM toy's electronics), and its having Ironhide's turret as the left cannon seems a probably culprit for the DotM toy's odd, inaccurate left cannon.
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