I had two transmetal megatrons, a bluish purple one and a regular purple one and both were suffering GPS so heads and arms were gone on both of them, a very sad state of affairs when you love the character model yet can't do anything with it. As luck would have it I also had an armada predacon (formerly painted into Grimlock) who no longer fit my collection due to MP 08. The solution to my problems came to a head today when I decided I would merge the two. Before doing the project it was said that there were a lot of differences between th emoulds, to some extent this is true, it mainly has to do with pegs vs screws and some minor remoulds but should be no problem if you can remove pins and keep the internal pieces of the Beast wars version (the GPS is not as bad inside joints) He still needs a little work, the hips are loose as heck due to the ratchet no longer working properly no matter how I try to fix it, worst case i'll just ardcoat the heck out of it to make it a swivel instead. This is a Megatron I can now play with and pose and not be in fear of breaking. He is not yet finished as I intend to mount a balljoint to the base of the neck and have it inside the head, it is painted to match the show. Decent pictures will be up once he's finished but as is he's looking excellent!
GPS is an acronym for Gold Plastic Syndrome, it's where the plastic a toy is mad eout of starts to rot and falls apart to the touch without any pressure, the western releases of the transmetal megatron have pieces made out of brown plastic which develop this same brittleness. I can confirm that Predacon does not duffer from this problem thankfully. to be on the same side i think i'm going to take some clear coat to Henkei Dinobot's gold plastic parts to head off any potential problems further down the line and see if that has any effect.
Love the work you did!! I've had the same mold problems with my TM Megatron, so I brought the METALS version from BBTS back in 2001 and it has ZERO issues! Megatron is still holding strong... YYYYeeeessssss
I'd have done that myself but the Metals Megs is super expensive these days and predacons are fairly cheap. Cheers . Going to attempt to balljoint the head today (the one attached to the tm ones snapped off in the socket on both of them and I seem to have misplaced the predacon one ) I seem to recall Clocker did me well for Universe Ironhide so it's probably going to be from him.
Looking good, man! Now that you mention the mold differences, I'm really curious to know the OTHER differences other than the Minicon ports.
inside the hips the ratchet pieces are moulded slightly differently, the balljoints on the shoulders are pinned in on one release and screwed on another, the cog that allows the waist to ratchet is pinned in one and screwed on the other... like I say the differences are mostly to do with construction, the only noticeable remoulded parts are the minicon parts like you said.
