This kit bash turned out to be even MORE work than I thought even when I started on it, VERY little of the original kit remained.
Around a month before the actual kit arrived, I used an extra Heavy Arms Custom head to make Prime's head. I carved the Gundam's "face" into Op's faceplate, and painted the whole thing (eyes too) silver. Then I simply painted clear blue over the eyes, and used a Gundam marker for the black around them. To make the "helmet", I cut the antenna fins from the V antenna, I used the middle section for Op's forehead , and attached the fin pieces to the side of the head instead of HArms small antennas. I then added two small pieces of sheet styrene (thin sheet plastic...a very common thing for Prime, as you'll later see) to make Op's inner "fins", and painted it Medium Blue. When I began working on the whole kit, there were 4 major "stages" I went through:1. Leg and arm development, 2.Body development, 3. Transformation development and detail additions, and 4. Painting.
Leg and Arms development.
Well I decided a while before I had the kit that I was going to completely scratch build the lower legs out of sheet styrene (I used .8 and 1 mm thick styrene), and that I would need to "beef up" the upper arms since I was not going to use the big shoulders of the kit. For the legs, I used HArms leg "innards", the parts that the polycaps would connect too, and the rest was scratch built. This was tricky process as I had to do a lot of measuring, and everything had to be very precise so that the legs would look right, its just a good thing that the styrene is easy to work with. With the arms, I simply built up over the smaller upper arms with more styrene. I added yet another layer on the shoulders as well to make his arms look like Op's. I also had to remove the Army Knife attachment form his right hand....I thought about leaving this on, but it would interfere with transformation, so oh well. At this time, I also removed the Gatling Canons inside the chest, and removed the top part of his feet in order to give them a flat appearance.
Body
This was the easiest stage, but had one very tricky step. I started out by removing a small piece(which would be of use later from the orange chest frame. Then I had to cut the small shoulder cannons off (refer to the previous HArms pics), and then I removed the entire "neck base" (its the white platform that the head sits on), and glued it back it upside down, thus it is now sunked in instead of raised above the top of the body. This allowed room for the new neck piece, and would provide a better look in vehicle mode. The last step in altering the chest was creating the window area, which was also the hardest. I took HArms two opening chest plates, and cut then at about the middle, leaving the pieces that went together as truck's grill, and the pieces that would become the opening window sections. However there was a problem, the pieces were solid, but I wanted clear windows....so after a VERY careful, and at times frustrating procedure I managed to get a thin frame which I could work with. I added a piece of clear plastic to the frame and then built it up some with some thin styrene, until it looked like Op's chest. After the window frames were done, I attached the whole contraption (orange frame, grill, widows) to the body. Also at this time I finished the adding pieces to the lower legs, and puttied up all the needed areas.
Transformation and Details
This was the longest stage, as a lot of work was done in it. To begin with, I had to create the transformation hinges to swing his arms back, which really got my mind going. How to make something transform, that was not supposed to at all? Well I had the idea to add a swiveling polycap inside the chest, attach a peg to that which would in turn attach to the polycap in the arm. Well MUCH easier said than done. But after quite a bit of work, I got it done, and after more work, I got the joint area to look good again. I was now able to finally glue the torso together. The I went on to the wheels. I used some lego indy car wheels for the large rear ones, and a pair of lego landing gear wheels for the front. Next I used more styrened to fill in the waist panels, and to top off the feet. After shortening the elbow extensions, I went to my spare pats box and got some of the little tiny MG Zeta Gundam light pieces at glued them to the top of Op's chest to make his little light pieces (which look SO perfect as them). Finally using two pieces of a parts tree, and what used to be the shoulder cannon covers, I made the his smokestacks. The gun is a black painted Wing Gundam buster cannon, with a small piece cut off so that it would fit better into the hands I was using (from the Gundam Wing Endless Waltz series which come with 3 pairs, fist, open and weapon holding).
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