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[Fighbird]

Happy Easter, everyone!

I'm afraid that I won't be continuing my Origins-series yet again due to time constraints, so I figured I'd dig out an old kitbash project of mine to show off instead.

I'll be a bit picture-heavy, but OTOH it'll show off the progress much better than I'd ever be able to write it. Also, these pictures haven't been available online for almost a decade now, so I figured it was time to bring them back.

One of my very earliest kitbashes was a Micromaster version of Breakdown. I'm a big Lambo fan (can't wait for the announced MP Sideswipe!), and I really liked the sculpting details of the G1 Micromaster Freewheeler. So starting with a Freewheeler as a base I set about to recreate Breakdown in Micromaster size. The old TF bash site Transtopia was a big influence on me in the early 2000's, and that really inspired me to get started. Sadly it went away (it was "absorbed" into Seibertron.com AFAIR after the site owner suddenly passed away) and I never went back there. Excellent community of artists there, though, which really helped and inspired me in my own work for years to come.

The pictures are perhaps a tad small, but they are the only ones I have. Besides, bandwidth was much more limited 10 years ago, so they kinda had to be small to allow modem users to get to them...

Exploded view of Freewheeler on the left; modified parts (fused front hood, added spoiler parts, new front wheels and resculpted torso) on the right.

Test assembly, so show scale and similarities. I went for a cartoon look with the head and torso, BTW.

Replaced the head with a more accurate one and primed him, which really helped getting the spoiler wings to "blend in" with the rest of him.

No progress without a few set-backs... The white I decided on was too bright for the off-white base color, so I had to strip all the old paint off again... Since he was basically held together by Putty only, he pretty much crumbled into all of his atoms again.

But that gave me an opportunity to re-sculpt the torso to be much more cartoon accurate, and the paints I used turned out much better.

Continued in next post due to picture limitations!

[Fighbird]

Continued from previous post!

Final result, which I was - and still am! - very proud of. Looks a bit rough up close, but remember that this guy is only like 5 cm long...

Robot mode. I think the whole project took me 4-6 months, total.

Comparison with Freewheeler.

A nice "by-product", if you will, of making a Breakdown in this scale was that he was now more in-scale with G1 Motormaster.

And yes, I later started doing the remaining 4 Stunticons, but that is for another time to share that.