By Generation: RotF Human Alliance Skids - Door, Wings, and Backpack Mod Tutorial

Discussion in 'Tutorials and How Tos' started by Matt Booker, Oct 26, 2009.

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  1. Matt Booker

    Matt Booker Fantasy Adventure Author

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    HA Skids has potential to be a great figure, but he's hampered by back kibble and a general design that gives him the appearance of a hollow ball with arms and legs.

    I wanted to contribute to the Radicons section here at TFW2005 is a down and dirty, quick step by step on how to fix the figure's door wings and backpack. If you're up for a laugh (or want to know about the extra arm cannon steps), feel free to check out the full humored version over at MattBooker.info or click the link in my signature.


    HA Skids has kibble doesn’t sit up so close to him because there has to be room in his back for humans to stand. This is so they can man a Gatling gun that, since he’s a robot, is integrated into him.

    So wait… He has a Gatling gun that’s attached to him, and a gun on his arm… Not a gun that he holds, mind you, but weapons that are integrated into him.

    And the humans operate them?

    Isn’t that kind of like mounting a cat to your arm and saying, “Here, you control what this hand types.”

    If I start writing kitty pidgin about cheezburgers, you’ll know what happened.

    Thankfully, there is a way to dehumanize Skids to both compact the back kibble and hide away the door wings. Personally, I don't mind the door wings, but they do make him less screen accurate.

    And for those of you worried about not having the HA functionality, these mods still allow for the original transformation into his 'mobile human battle station' mode.

    Also, take note that this guide is in two parts. First, the backpack mod. This lends itself to my favorite Skids transformation. I like the look of the door wings, but after seeing so many people complain about them I did another mod to fix the wings.

    There is a way to just fold the wings down, but this gives you doors that have the interior facing out, looks more awkward, and is not exactly easy to transform. The door mod on the second part of this guide gives you an easy answer to that problem.


    Part 1 - Dejunk the Trunk


    Here's a picture showing before and after the backpack mod. (For pictures of the backpack mod plus the door wing mod, scroll down to Part 2.)

    [​IMG]


    Step 1 – Raise the roof.

    First you’ll want to unscrew the roof from Skids. You’ll have to do this in bot mode, and there’s a total of four screws in the T shaped piece that’s holding it on. The top three screws in the T are easy, but the bottom point of the T has a an additional layer to deal with – the windshield.

    Here’s the layout.

    Screw
    Windshield
    T piece (attached to the human stand inside Skids)
    Roof

    Because the T piece goes up into the windshield piece, and the windshield is also attached to the roof\rear of the car, you’ve got to get the screw out first, then the windshield, and then the T piece will separate from the roof.

    Getting the windshield off can be a bit tricky. It has two posts that attach it to the roof\rear of the car, and it should raise up off of those, but the ‘back glass’ area needs to be popped out of the frame first.

    Here’s a picture!

    [​IMG]

    Once you’ve got the roof detached, we can easily get to the parts that we need to cut.

    Yes. This mod has you cut some plastic away from the figure.

    And really, if you’re going to pay this much for a figure, wouldn’t you want to fix it so it doesn’t suck?

    (And the whole, “But I shouldn’t have to!” argument doesn’t count because it’s a moot point. It’s there, fix it and enjoy it or put up with it \ don’t buy it.)


    Step 2 – Cutting Corners

    More specifically, cutting one corner in particular.

    The roof is divided into two sections, the back end and the front end (where the hood \ bumper is attached). The joint that connects them is a pair of pin hinges with a swivel at one end.

    The dark gray piece that attaches the two hinge joints is the piece we’re going to be cutting on. Don’t worry, it’s thick and sturdy and this doesn’t affect stability or durability!

    On the hinge joint attached to the back end of the roof, the gray piece has a squared off end to keep it from rotating all the way around. Cut that off.

    I just took a pair of flush cutters and snipped it off. Ironically, the cut itself doesn’t have to be flush, but you want enough of the squared corner chopped off at the otherwise rounded joint can rotate further.

    Here’s a picture to illustrate, with the part to be cut off in red.

    [​IMG]

    That should let the joint do a full 180 and flip completely over. Almost.

    That bring us to the next step.


    Step 3 – Cut the Ridge

    There’s one other ridge on that middle joint that’s causing it not to rotate completely around to sit flush against the back end roof of the car. That’s easy enough to fix, so just take those flush cutters and trim it down.

    You don’t have to cut it completely off, but enough that it ’s out of the way.

    Another picture!

    [​IMG]

    Just one more cut to make so far!


    Step 4 – Unhook the Bumper

    And by unhook, I mean cut off the hook.

    That hook on the underside of the bumper used to attach the top half of the top of the car to the bottom of the back of the top of the car, but now it’s not needed and it actually going to get in the way of the next step.

    It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, so just take your trusty flush cutters and cut the hook off. If you want to get all pretty you could take a razor blade or some sandpaper and clean up the spot where the hook used to be, but the main thing is getting it off and out of the way.

    No picture for this part, but really, do you need it? There’s only one hook on the thing, and it’s below the bumper. If you don’t know where it is then you probably don’t own HA Skids.


    Step 5 – New Transformation

    After you have put Skids back together, arrange the kibble the way you would have previously for transformation.

    There’s no hook so you can’t latch the front bumper onto the back bumper, but instead of that you’re going to flip that whole half of the kibble (front bumper, hood, and windshield \ front of roof) up and around to rest right where the humans would’ve stood.

    Angle the bottom of the kibble (the rear of the car) away from the legs as far as you can (you will get more range out of the legs this way than if the bottom of the car were sitting flush against the top of his hips), and make sure the dark gray piece we modded is now sitting flush the way I described it should.

    Here’s a picture to illustrate that point:

    [​IMG]

    After that, fold down the hood and the bumper so where the hook used to be is now up against the top of the back of the roof. You can do what you want with the black bars, but I usually have them sticking out at an angle.

    In the above picture you can see what I mean about the front bumper sitting flush without the hook on it. The black bars were down against the back half of the roof to let the camera take a picture of the circled area.

    This cleans up the back kibble considerably, and I like the effect of the windshield peeking up above his shoulders. And, should you ever want Skids to

    cheezburger

    Erm. Lets try this again, should you can feed me cheezburger nao plz.

    *detaches cat from arm*

    *several band-aids later…*

    I figured that wasn’t going to work out well. But if you should still want that line of thinking, you can convert Skids back to his mobile hoomin gun mode by transforming the kibble the way the instructions would have you do it. If you’re that keen on it, you can even not cut off that hook, but the front bumper won’t sit as flush as it should in the modded transformation.


    Part 2 - Door Wing Fix

    Lets take a look at the current setup of the door wings.

    [​IMG]

    The door itself is held on to a sliding joint by a screw with a built in washer. The joint can slide up and down in the rectangular channel on the door in order to give the door more clearance when opening up.

    I’ve colored a couple of things red in that picture. First is the corner of the joint itself, and then a section of that rectangular channel on the door.

    If you’ve been following along with the guide so far, you’ll know that the parts colored in red need to be cut off. Be careful with the joint and only cut as much as you need to in order to get clearance. I would suggest doing it after cutting the door, just so you can test to see how much you need.

    As far as the door, just cut away enough to let the door rotate down. You’ll notice that the door has a bit of a curve to it, and that could cause problems with the rotation of the door.

    The easy way around that?

    Just loosen the screw a bit.

    If you loosen the screw a bit it gives the door a bit of wiggle room, and so the little bit of a bend in the door isn’t going to cause problems when you rotate it down.

    Unscrew that screw to take the door apart and start cutting. I used a pair of flush cutters for this mod. Quick and easy!

    When you get the door put back together, this is what it should look like…

    [​IMG]

    The only other thing to keep in mind is that the bottom of the door frames (those black bars) need to be pointing down or they’ll get in the way of folding the doors down. If you adjust the back a bit, you can get the bars lined up with the back \ rear of the roof.

    [​IMG]

    I’ve colored the bar blue in that picture to make it easier to see.

    After that, just rotate the doors down and close them around the backpack kibble. Here’s some pictures to show you what it looks like!

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    If you have any questions, just ask. If you do the mod, drop me a message to let me know what you thought of it.

    ~Matt Booker


    (Some very useful discussion took place after Matt Booker posted his tutorial. That discussion is below. ~Superquad7)

    I took the parts off because of the use of the flush cutters, but that works too. And I agree with you about the wings. I think it gives a better visual flair to the figure. I wasn't even going to do the second part of the mod till I noticed all the people wanting a mod for it.

    ~Matt Booker

    They can, but I don't know how good it would look. Tcracker's way of folding the doors works because there's a ton of backpack kibble to blend with the door kibble.

    My mod reduces the backpack kibble by about half (the windshield and front half folds up and into the empty space of the body instead of just hanging off his... skidplate.

    My door mod causes the door kibble to not be as obtrusive as well, so it blends in with the compacted back kibble. It also helps that the curve of the doors line up with the backpack kibble, whereas if you just flip the doors around they'll curve out. Like )[](.

    If you're unsure, my suggestion would be to do the backpack mod, as it doesn't affect the regular transformation. Then you can flip the wings around, see if you like it, and if you don't you can either transform it how you did before or you can do my door mod. :) 

    ~Matt Booker

     

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