Being a huge fan of the Gtfour, and having owned one as a project car for some time I have gathered a few collectibles. Years ago, when my car had different wheels, I was contacted by someone telling me they had my car. He sent me a pic of this Trofeu Diecast toy, and I bought it on sight. As the years went by, and I have modded the car I decided to let this toy be its own thing and make a small mod to it. The wheels are somewhat boring, and there are not really any "tuner" style toys of the Gtfour, so I decided to make my own.
The Trofeu as it originally looked.
I used to have a Z car, but have since moved on. I liked this diecast car alright, but it became the donar because I could not find a set of wheels, with brakes this detailed in this scale.
The modification was simple. I had to grind off the rivets on the bottom of the 350z to remove the panel, then use a soldering gun to heat the tiny metal axles to remove them from the wheels. I then used a jeweler drill to make the holes on the wheels larger and cut some plastic rod for new axles. I was then able to slide these new wheels right on. Check out the pics below for the final project.
I want to start a new segment where I talk about missed opportunity with product lines. Since I collect a lot of Transformers, lets talk about War For Cybertron's Optimus Prime. If you don't already have this figure, you missed out on one of the best action figure Prime figures since the classic mold. I would put this guy in my top 10 Primes for sure. This is when Hasbro was still using the more advanced engineering brought on by the early movie line, but with a much nicer classics inspired ascetics. This first wave of the video game line, was actually fairly hard to come by. This also began the age of the hunt for me, as with this release transformer toys I liked started getting harder to find, thanks to movie Bumble Bee figures clogging up the shelves and the distribution of the desired figures went to crap.
The missed opportunity I wanted to talk about was the weapons done for these. This line could had lent itself to many accessories as one of the main mechanics in the game was all the various weapons. Between the scale discrepancies, and lack of similar weapon mounting the line as a whole had some lacking, even though the individual figures stood great on their own. The Prime from this line actually lent itself to the idea more than others. I feel that the characters could each had come with one of the weapons with the game, and you could mix or match. Hasbro could had even done accessory packs that came with a few weapons from the game to outfit your robots. Since this was not something in the plans for the line I made a gallery of various Weapon combinations that just make this already battle ready looking prime, even more prepared for war for cybertron.
Bonus: FOC Optimus Prime with Bulk Head Micon Fists.
Here is a video where I talk a little on the subject, but spend more time trying out these and other accessories on this WFC Optimus Prime.
Trying to gather funds for another project, so I am putting my Ice Bunny by Joe Ledbetter on eBay. Here are an assortment of unedited photos of the figure, as well as a review video. The first photo is the only one that was corrected and adjusted for lighting. Go here to check out the auction and get your chance at an Ice Bunny.
This time we are going to follow a continuation of the Mugenbine line. If this is your first time here, I had done a bit on the earlier Mugenbine toys. Check out the old article if you haven't. Where you had a somewhat limited approach with the older toys, the candy line is more versitile for making bots that are large relative to their basic pieces. They also have a lot more parts designed for heads and limbs and geared towards possibility. The great thing about this line, is you can still find them online, and they may still be producing them. There are other bandai toys with similar sized pegs you can use to combine them with, so its a great line to experiment with and see what kind of bots you can make.
With this line it is not as essential to locate doubles as they are already including multiples of each component for the sake of symmetry. Having doubles would better suit providing smaller components for larger combinations for more complicated designs. There is a good variety in the line with the designs and lend themselves for some great combinations. The real draw backs in the line are there was a slight change in the peg size so some parts may be more loose or tighter than others when making combinations. Another issue is I found the ankles tend to be on the loose side when it comes to supporting the weight. Unless some modification is made, these really lend themselves to display after something is made and less for play.
Here are some of the Mugenbine sets I have and the combined modes they are meant to form.
Mugen Holy Beasts of the Sea (ムゲン海聖獣)
Mugen Five God Beasts (ムゲン五神獣)
Mugen Phantom Saint Beast (ムゲン幻聖獣)
Mugen Ryufire (リュウファイヤーバイン)
Below are a few custom creations. The first two are just to experiment with part swapping, and the last is to make a fully custom design with a variety of parts.
Below you can see a couple of vbuilds where I show some examples of building with these sets. They give you a better idea on how they go together and some of what you can do with them. Follow us on YouTube for future Vbuilds, and Deviant art for images of new construction toy designs.
I find them to be a good construction toy to use to make custom creation for blocking up robot designs that can inspire some concept designs. Its worth checking out their info on wikipedia to find out the names of other collections and toys that might be combined in this line. They are fun, but can be tricky to pose depending on how you design your joints. Its still a good toy and can be more easily found than some of the other toys I have mentioned for concept design. I'll share future creations here, youtube, and instagram so stay tuned for this and other toys I will review that can be used for inspiration and creation.
Here are some sketches from this years March of Robots fun draw. I planned to participate daily, but I had a lot come up this month, so here are the few drawings I managed to do. I also filmed some of the drawings. You can see the ones below that are already online and follow our YouTube channel to see the others I will be uploading. You can also check out these sketches and more at my Deviant Art as well.
