| ARCEE
PROJECT #93
CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
BASE FIGURES: TARANTULAS (BEAST WARS KNOCKOFF); BLURR
(TRANSFORMERS); DIERDRE (MYSTIC KNIGHTS OF TY RA NOG)
PARTS USED: DIE-CAST 1/44 SCALE CORVETTE STINGRAY (WHEELS, WINDSHIELD,
DASHBOARD, SEATS)
MATERIALS USED: HOBBY KNIFE; SCULPEY MODELING COMPOUND, PAPER CLIPS,
SUPER GLUE, ENAMEL PAINTS
FIRST APPEARANCE: THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE
"Have to... try and transform!"
Preamble: Arcee has always been one
of the most-wanted toys on my list. Now, I'm not talking about an Arcee
that transforms into a spider or a motorcycle, or a tiny little PVC figurine.
I'm talking about an actual Arcee toy that turns into a car, is the
same size as the other movie character toys, and who actually looks like
the animated character from The Transformers: the Movie. Back
in the day, Hasbro just got a little too caught up in the notion that boys
just don't like to play with toys of female characters, and none of the
half-hearted attempts to rectify this in the modern era have ever completely
satisfied me.
Ever since the original Beast Wars Tarantulas
toy came out, I realized that his transformation was very similar to the
way Arcee transformed in the cartoon. I mulled over the idea of using
Tarantulas as the basis for this project for a very long time, but I didn't
really have the experience or skills to properly execute it. After
years of playing around with the idea, I finally set out to design and build
the toy. (What's ironic is that Tarantulas makes up less than 50% of
the finished project.)
It was important to me that I used as many parts
from existing toys as possible. I could have sculpted the whole thing
out of Sculpey, if I wanted to, and it probably would have been a lot more
accurate. A transforming Sculpey model would have been incredibly fragile,
though, so I tried to stick with as many existing plastic parts as
possible.
Preparation: Once I figured out what
toys I wanted to use, I had to hunt them down. A kind soul from the
alt.toys.transformers newsgroup donated the knockoff Tarantulas I used for
this project (I didn't want to destroy a genuine one since they're fairly
hard to come by). The knockoff was made of substandard plastic, but
it sufficed, and the cheaper materials ended up being useful. As for
Blurr, originally I was just going to use the sensor on the top of his head
and the arm shields to serve as wheel hubs, but after I went that far, I
saw no reason not to make use of other parts of the toy as well. Blurr's
vehicle mode shares many similarities with Arcee's, after all. I got
a Mystic Knights of Ty Ra Nog action figure on clearance, which I
used for the female-shaped arms, lower legs, and head.
I also drew up full blueprints of what the finished
toy would look like. This was going to be such a complex piece of
engineering that I needed to plan everything in advance. Arcee's
transformation actually isn't that complicated, but I was working with so
many different parts (and different toys) that I needed to determine where
everything would go during the transformation, how the parts would fit together
and what modifications I would need to make. (I found it helpful to
temporarily attach pieces together with poster putty while I worked, which
allowed me to see how each piece would be attached.) I also drew up
a character model of Arcee, researching the movie as well as episodes like
"Five Faces of Darkness" and "The Dweller in the Depths."
Construction: I chopped Blurr into
pieces, cutting his pelvis off for use as Arcee's, and cutting down his chest
to form Arcee's chest plate. I also had to cut grooves out of the sides
of the body to make room for Tarantulas' arm pegs, which would later be attached
to the sides of the body. I cut out a large hole in Blurr's backpack
for the vehicle seats, and another small hole to insert the sensor from the
top of Blurr's head.
I screwed Blurr's pelvis to Tarantulas' inner
body, deciding to keep the skinny Tarantulas waist in an attempt to retain
some of Arcee's feminine physique. Unfortunately, the Tarantulas knockoff
toy has hips that are much wider than the genuine toy for some reason; I
wanted Arcee to have wide hips, but this was a little excessive. Oh,
well.
The floorboard from the Corvette toy served to
connect Tarantulas' pelvis to Blurr's backpack. The dashboard was glued
in place, as were the two seats. (A Diaclone driver can fit in the
seats, incidentally.) The windshield would be glued in place later,
after I had painted most of the toy. The space between Blurr's body
halves (where his head goes in vehicle mode) really bothered me, so I attached
a new piece of plastic to close the gap.
The legs posed a couple of minor problems for
me. Tarantulas' legs transformed just like Arcee's were supposed to,
as near as I could figure it. I wanted Arcee to have much more feminine
feet, though, so I replaced the lower legs with those from the Dierdre figure.
I also cut out the feet and reattached them with a section of paper
clip. This was necessary for the transformation so the ankles
could bend, but it also gave the figure a little more articulation. I
also cut out grooves in her shins for the wheels and attached them with screws.
(I know she doesn't have wheels there in the cartoon, but neither does
Hot Rod, and that didn't stop Hasbro from sticking wheels on his legs.
Besides, they had to go somewhere. It hadn't occurred
to me until much later that her wheels were actually in her knees, like the
Blurr toy.)
The original plan was to cut out holes in Dierdre's
lower legs that were the same size as the ones for Tarantulas, so I could
easily attach the new lower legs to the thighs. Unfortunately, when
I was test-fitting the right leg, the plastic broke. I settled on cutting
the knee connector off Tarantulas' leg and attaching it to Dierdre's leg
with a combination of screws and super glue. The fit was loose enough
that it didn't put too much strain on the screw. I could have done
the same to the other leg, but I figured if it ain't broke, don't fix
it.
The legs were all set to go, except for the fact
that the new pelvis plate wouldn't fit when the toy was transformed to vehicle
mode. I cut out grooves from the inside of the thighs to accommodate
the new part, also cutting away at the screw base that held the upper legs
together. The upper legs no longer had anything to hold the two leg
halves in place, though, so I drilled small holes in each half, took another
piece of paper clip, and basically stapled them together. Another problem
was that the bumps on the fronts of Tarantulas' thighs were interfering with
the transformation. I didn't want to cut away at the plastic because
that would leave huge holes in the legs, but I realized that if I put a cookie
sheet in the oven at, say, 500º for
a few minutes, once I took it out it would be hot enough that I could press
the leg to the sheet and melt the plastic down to the right shape. The
fact that the legs were made of cheap knockoff plastic made this very easy
to do.
The arms ended up being the hardest part to build.
I had to find a way to attach Tarantulas' arm pegs to the body without
them interfering with the rods that the backpack was attached to. In
the end, I cut grooves into the inside of the body shell, just large enough
for a paper clip, which I inserted through the arm connectors after drilling
holes in them. The paper clip sections ended up going though the length
of the body and hooked into the sides, and I glued the pieces in as well.
I also had to whittle down the connector knobs so that Dierdre's arms
would attach to them.
Blurr's arm shields became the large shoulder
pads for Arcee. I added some Sculpey to them to make them the right
shape, but unfortunately I warped the plastic when I baked these pieces without
a piece of tin foil on the baking sheet. I had overestimated the heat
resistance of the styrene plastic, which warped slightly in the oven. I
managed to more or less bend the pieces back into shape. For the front
wheels, I decided to sandwich them between the shoulder armor and Dierdre's
arms, with each arm assembly held together with a piece of a paper clip.
After I cut off Dierdre's head, I drilled a hole
into the base of her neck and whittled down Tarantulas' neck connector to
accommodate it. I cut a notch into the inside of Blurr's chest to
accommodate the heck connector, which would swing back during transformation.
I drilled a hole through the side of the inner body panel, used the
screw mount from Tarantulas' leg to make the hole in the neck connector smaller,
and attached the neck connector with a piece of paper clip. I also
cut away at Dierdre's face to get rid of the mask and cut at her nose, cheeks,
and chin to make her a little more robotic looking. Then I sculpted
the helmet armor and baked her head.
In painting the toy, I stayed as close as possible
to her color model from the movie and cartoon. The stripe on the bottom
of her chest is actually a strip of plastic that I painted and glued to her
body. In car mode, her tail lights are sheets of plastic that I glued
to her backpack. She carries two weapons, a pink rifle (like the one
she's got in "Five Faces of Darkness" and a smaller grey one (which she used
in the movie and "The Dweller in the Depths"). I also cannibalized
a genuine Autobot symbol from my Kup toy and a rub symbol from my headless
Inferno to give her a touch of authenticity (this was long before anybody
was offering reproduction labels).
Transformation: To transform the
toy, the chest pivots and flips up, to give her head room to swing back.
The chest then connects with the back to form the car's hood, and the
arms rotate 180º to form the front
wheel hubs. The lower legs fold into the upper legs, and the upper
legs wrap around the pelvis to form the rear wheel hubs.
Comments: I'm not completely pleased
with the finished product. The robot mode is pretty good, I guess,
but her vehicle mode just isn't as compact as I'd hoped it would be when
I designed it. (There have been several other very good Arcee fan projects
that totally blow mine out of the water.) On the other hand, even as
poorly as parts of this project turned out, this toy is still more
accurate than any of the official transforming "Arcee" toys Hasbro has cranked
out over the years. |
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