Okay, so I caved and bought the Encore head mold things to go with some old Ratchet and Ironhide toys I've got. Now, I had been planning to do this whole mod with them years back, where I would move the arms and create a backpack out of the back of the seperating cabin section. Inside of that, I wanted to store the head and have it flip out, then make the whole thing mount on the 'chair/face-sticker' segment in bot mode. Well, I never did get around it, but I did experiment with my Ironhide a long time ago and placed his arms up on top of the screw mounts.

Anyway, these heads came along, and I knew I was going to combine the new parts with my old idea. Everything arrived last night, and I set to work this morning. The Ironhide experiment worked out nicely enough, and I applied it all to Ratchet--whom turned out better as a result.

In the third and fourth pics, you can see I had to do a little cutting of the actual custom piece. The obvious part was modding the back panel to allow for the pin heads that were now in the way. You can see the little corner-cuts around the swing pins on each side. The cool thing here is that the bracket piece acts as a natural clamp, holding the pins down.

The second mod was cutting into the actual toy frame, where I cut out a segment to allow room for the pin head. Leaving the part at the top also acts as a natural clamp--something I didn't do for Ironhide when I cut the same section out of him some years back.


Now, this makes them both official partsformers, as you have to take the arms off and stick them back underneath to transform him. Those that don't care for that sort of thing can either skip this, or come up with some kind of swing-piece for the arms to swing around at the shoulders. But that's beyond me. Oh, and someday, I might configure the backs of the cabins into backpacks that can be removed for both forms. I figure, if they're already partsformers, might as well keep it going, eh?

In any case, I'm very happy with how this all turned out. Granted, they're still kinda wirey, but they look so much better and blend in very well with the other G1 toys. Finally, these two have normal heads, and a decent bot-look to go with them!

Sure, I'll use one from above:



The disk is the flat part at the end of the hinge arm that the rivet goes into. It's the bit now sitting upside down in the black socket. You can see where I cut a groove out of the black plastic to get it to fit--the disk part sticks out too much and won't sit flush if you don't cut some room for it. You only want to cut enough to make a groove.

New diagram, added above:


But as I said before, if you cut a bit too much, it can be loose and not stay. The combination of the modded Encore head plate (with the corners cut just right) and this groove cut JUST enough to get the disk to fit but still hold it in is the key.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. You unscrew the screw (or drill out the rivet, depending) cut that groove in the black plastic frame to fit the arm disk/swing pin part, then cut two corners out of the new backplate at precisely the right fit (as shown in the pics). You just have to figure out where the head panel slides all the way down, where the arm disks will end up sitting, and how much of that panel plastic needs to go to make it sit flush.