If you ever tried to take apart optimus' chest, you will realize it is impossible without tearing one arm, sentinel style, in order to get to a single screw behind it
, so i looked for a way to do it. In order to take apart the arm, you have to remove the pin securing it, to do it, remove the batteries and the connector. DON'T try to pull, it is EMBEDDED in the plastic, you will have to drill your way around it- Drill the plastic until the tiny metal tab is visible
Once you remove it, keep on drilling until you see the pin:
- Pin under the battery compartment
I don't know if it will be stubborn on other figures, but mine was specially hard to remove, so i took an extreme measurement: Freeze it! yep, that will make it slightly easy, for metal and plastic shrink at a different rate when cold.
- Yep, there are energon icicles in my freezer...
You will have to work as fast as possible, to avoid defreezing the pin. With the help of a really thin screwdriver and a firm and supporting area with a hole in the middle (in my case a plastic tube) to allow the pin to be displaced, hammer it SOFTLY until the arm is free.
- Now you can get that little bugger out of OP's chest!!
What you will find inside is not much, just the chest flexing mechanism, the speaker and a tiny circuit board which is basically an integrated circuit and a few resistors. The ones we are interested in are R2, R3 and R4, for they regulate the current feeding the leds.
- If you look close, you will read "470", maybe it is 47.0, for the numbers are reeeeally tiny...
Taking a multimeter, they read 47 ohms each. Depending on the leds you get, maybe you will have to add some other resistances in serial connection. I recommend using one line to feed the eyes and spark chamber, other for left headlights and left chest, and the remining for the right headlights and chest. In my case, it turned out that the white leds were some huge power hogs, dimming severely the other leds, so i limited the current throwing an extra resistance with 35 ohms on each line.
When puting together the headlight sets (two parallel 3mm leds per line), even when you buy the leds on the same store, some of them will not be the same, so i recommend trying them together on pairs before soldering, for the one more power hungry will devour all the current, leaving the other one very dim, so try different ones until you find a pair that looks even. Since everything was outside, i changed the green and red leds for blue ones. In order to create the spark chamber, drill a hole in the neck piece through behind just below the screw keeping everything together, carve all the front and shape it, put the led, connect it with the eye line, and mold the spark chamber with epoxy.
- Is it really THAT expensive for Hasbro to add just ONE led?
To connect everything, you will need the thinest cable you can find, for the chest mechanism takes almost all of the available space. Hard disk IDE data cables will do really fine.
Once you have tested that no led is dimmer than others, drill two holes below the speaker to allow the headlights to come out
- If you are brave, you could leave these cables long enough to get to the headlights of the ALT mode, although it would be a little difficult to store them, due to the lack of space within the chest..
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Check that there is no cable interfering with the mechanism, and put the screws back. glue the headlights in place, and cut the false ones form the moving parts
Enjoy!
- Spark chamber
There will be almost no difference in places.
- One more thing, you will have to carve the back of the shoulders, in order to give space for the leds in alt mode..
- Everything working
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Excellent job. Those are tiny spots and places.
