I've fallen in love with Rescue Bots, it is a bit simple in its plots and at times predicatble, but I love the characters, the easter eggs, and the potential it brings to the table. But the figures are sorely, sorely lacking. Several people have customed a Movie Ratche into Heatwave, of which I am following suit by gluing some lego bricks to a roof to mount a Lego fireman's ladder. Blades can be sorta gotten to with the Evac repaint of ROTF Blazemaster (you can even fold the helicopter cockpit around Evac's head so he can hide!) but what about the other two?
Well, how about this guy?
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My goal is to modify this figure quickly and painlessly to achieve a look of Boulder, not so much to reproduce a figure that's Screen-accurate, and without fully committing to a full-on repaint. There are some lingering regrets to breaking up the Universe Devasator 4some, but I barely did anything with most of them anyway, so I'll get over that.
1st order of business? getting rid of that honking giant Decepticon lgo. To do so, I employed a teqnique I picked up from Model Railroading. We use a decal solution, and a mechanical eraser to remove decals and factory pad-printed paint layers. About twenty minutes worth of careful work to not badly scuff the bulldozer's roof panel looks like this:
You're seeing the base coat of white and the layer of Decepicon purple on top. The fuzzies are from the eraser and wipe off cleanly.
A little more work gives us a mostly clean roof:
If you look really closly, there's some faint ghosting of the logo on the roof, either plastic fade or sauration of paint, but largely hard to notice. Step two then is merely cosmetic functionism and has no bearing on the figure or anything:
Removing Devastator's head. Unfortunately, the neck plate forms part of the cab for the bulldozer so some remnants will remain, but I wanted it gone and one screw was all that stood in my way.
As a side effct: There's now a perfectly clean one person sized opening cockpit. And were I confident enough in my skills that I could glue lego parts inside of it and they'd look liek controls and not lego parts glued inside of Boulder, I'd really like to find some more of my levers and a seat and fill him out in there. The only real catch is that the glass, although transparent, is frosted, so it's not likely to be seen
But I'll know.
I'd actually be pretty happy there, but I haven't even painted anything yet! So, tomorrow, some silver paint and black is coming out. Much as I'd like to do his legs in green, I don't have a good color to match him, so I think what I am going to do is paint the purple on his feet and shins lack, and, using some model railroad decals, stripe him in caution yellow stripes similar to Boulder's feet. But I'm not sold on it yet, so any idea are welcome!
