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Transmutate Kitbashes

"Its datatrax are scrambled beyond recovery, its structure is a nightmare, and its logic circuits are barely at the level of a drone.  Coupled with its sheer power, it's a danger to itself and everyone around it."--Optimus Primal, "Transmutate" (BW)

Transmutate was one of the unfortunate Maximal protoforms whose orbiting stasis pod crashed on prehistoric Earth following the quantum surge.  She was transmetalized, but her stasis pod was damaged, creating a mutant protoform with a twisted robot mode, no transformation, and a scrambled mind.  Both Silverbolt and Rampage took a liking to the creature, and she reciprocated their friendship--even sacrificing her own life to prevent the two from hurting one another.

I'd been making minor changes to my toys for years, and I'd also created numerous Play-Doh sculptures, but this was the first time I'd brought the two skills together for a full-scale kitbash.  I created it back in 1998, and I've learned a lot about kitbashing since then, but I'm keeping this page mostly intact as it was originally written, since I think it's an interesting look at the project that propelled me into this crazy hobby in the first place.  I've added my second Transmutate project (pictured above) to this page as well.

Parts used:

• A Star Wars POTF2 8D8 Droid, which was still in production when I started this project.  (The vintage figure from 1983 would work well, too, since the two are mostly identical.)
• Some paint and paint thinner (nail polish remover works too).  I bought a very nice Testors set for $4.49 at TRU--it had just enough paint to do the job, and it even came with a brush (I didn't want to spend a lot of money, and I don't already have a lot of paints laying around).
• I'd already been introduced to the Sculpey brand modeling compound a few years previously, and I knew it would work well here.  I bought all the colors I needed, which was kind of silly since I ended up going back and painting over the stuff in the exact same colors to cover the parts of the toy that were still exposed.  Go figure.
• An X-Acto knife.  (I use two blades; a good one for slicing up plastic, and a crappy one for cutting the Sculpey.)
• Super glue or model glue.  (I recommend super glue, because I also had to glue metal to plastic.)
• A very small screwdriver (for making holes to insert the paper clips; I didn't own a drill at this point).
• A drawing of Transmutate.  I wanted my kitbash to be as authentic as possible, and to do that, I needed a character model.  I referred to it constantly throughout this project. 

Construction:

The first thing to do was chop off all the superfluous droid bits; all the pistons on his arms and inside his legs had to go (I was very careful when I chopped them off, since I would later use them as new Transmutate parts).  I also whittled away at the main body to make the waist more narrow and make the chest smaller (so that the Sculpey I added later wouldn't impede the movement of the arms).

Transmutate's left arm is made of four pistons; one of the piston is actually the remains of the toy's original arm (whittled down much smaller than I was comfortable with) while the other three are bits of paper clip.  I had to drill tiny little holes through the top of the original shoulder (I wanted to retain the toy's original articulation), wetting the paper clip parts with super glue before slipping them inside.  The fingers for the left hand are actually pistons I'd cut off from the toy.  The right arm is almost entirely Sculpey; I ended up gluing a bent paper clip to the arm for support and then building up Sculpey around it.

The right leg was kind of tricky, since Transmutate has one relatively normal leg and one "chicken leg" that bends backwards at the knee.  I ended up cutting off the foot and gluing it on backwards, then drilling a hole through the outside of the leg joint and flipping it so it was on backwards as well.  (I had to slice off a section of the original leg socket and glue it to the other side to give his leg some clearance room.)  The extra piston on the right leg is another piece of paper clip.

I used the pistons from the robot's inner legs for Transmutate's torso pistons.  I've got them hanging down from the chest in such a manner that makes it look like they're attached to the legs.  They're not, of course, so the legs can still move.  For the head, I chopped it off at the base, using the pistons I'd cut off 8D8's arms for use as the new neck pistons (I carved out a section in the back of the head to attach them).  I pulled out the translucent yellow piece (that makes the toy's eyes glow when you hold it up to a light) and stuck it in backwards; I also cut off a tiny piece of a G1 tech specs decoder and glued it behind the toy's eyes so that they would glow red instead of yellow.

This was my first time trying to bake Sculpey while it was wrapped around an action figure, so the tough part was determining how long I could bake the figure without melting it.  With some experimentation I found that Transmutate could survive for about two minutes; her arms and legs came out wiggling like Jell-O, and it took several trips to the oven before the Sculpey fully cured.  (Half-baked Sculpey is great to work with, since it's still malleable without being flimsy.)

The neck was probably the trickiest part of the project.  Transmutate's neck actually runs up and down on a little track, but as there was no way to reproduce this with Sculpey, I simply cut a large groove inside the track and kept the original neck articulation in place.  I found a piece of black stretchy elastic-string for the neck cables; I didn't want to bake these in the oven, so I ended up sticking them in the holes in the back and head that I'd drilled previously, attaching them with Sculpey, and simply gluing them on at the base.  The Sculpey's not cured, but it's coated in super glue, so it's sure not going anywhere.

This was also my first time mixing custom paint colors, but it proved to be extraordinarily easy.  The only real trouble I had was when I painted his face and accidentally covered up the red plastic eyes, and I had to go back and put in a new piece of decoder sheet.  For the detailing, I ended up cutting some tiny pieces of colored paper and glued them in place with tweezers.  (Man, you haven't lived until you're working with slivers of paper smaller than a grain of sand.)  

The only real problem with this project is that it's extraordinarily fragile.  Sculpey isn't terribly durable stuff, and probably wasn't meant to be used for the arms and legs of poseable action figures.  I ended up having to coat the arms and torso in super glue; it served as a hard, protective shell to hold the project together.  I also went back and coated it with some clear gloss for that slightly Transmetalized look.

In June 2000, ViceGripX approached me about creating a second Transmutate toy for him.  On the one hand, I was kind of hesitant about doing the exact same project twice, but on the other hand I'd learned quite a bit since then and I knew I could substantially improve on the design.  The knowledge that I could make the second one even better than the first proved enough to keep me from getting bored, though I will admit the fact that I was being paid for the project didn't hurt, either.

I went through most of the same steps as above; thankfully, I didn't have to do any scrounging for spare parts, since most of the parts I needed were already contained in the 8D8 figure, which I used as the base figure once again.  This time, I decided to make Transmutate look even more ungainly than she did already, so my second version was much more stylized, with more exaggerated proportions.  Sculpey comprised more than half of its makeup; it didn't stand up very well unsupported, so I ended up constructing a display base for it out of one of my Star Wars "Millennium Minted Coin" figure stands (not pictured).

I'm thinking this is the Spychanger edition of Transmutate; a properly-scaled toy would stand close to the same height as Beast Wars Rampage.  One of these days I may have to construct an even larger one out of my Manga Spawn Cybertooth toy.

This Page Created December 1998
Last Update: 3/3/2002
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