Some Robot Mode Updates. You can see how the front hood will accordian down behind his head. (hinges not complete yet)
They are nylon-plastic with a metal pin, so the pieces themselves are pretty sturdy, and have a little bit of give to them. The material is soft enough to cut with an exacto. The hinge itself is loose (like a door hinge) and isn't going to hold a pose, but I don't think there's any concern about them wearing out or stressing through repeated usage. If you were to to put excessive force on the hinge, the model would break before it did.
Rear Swing Arms and trunk hinge installed! Some Glamour Shots in the harsh light of day: I'm so happy and amazed at how much of the original Batmobile Setheus has managed to preserve. If you look up earlier in the thread, the direction I was going last year would have been a gappy mess, and I was willing to live with that as a concession to the difficulties of the build. But he's really a miracle worker! -Hunter
Small updated today, some close-ups of the hinge that transforms the rear wheel-wells. The beauty of Setheus' solution here (and in retrospect it should have been obvious to me last year) was to attach these swing arms to the canopy and not the legs. This is part of his re-design of the backpack. So the rear Wheelwells will be up on his back rather than part of his legs like I was trying so hard to accomplish.
Small update from Setheus (well huge in terms of work done, but small in-terms of stuff we can show). The trunk hinge that he created was having some issues since it holds so much weight with it. He thinks he has a stable solution now.
Thank you. The project is mostly done but due to some personal heatlh issues it's on hold for the foreseeable future.
So I think the structural work is complete. And I need to thank Setheus again for all his work and rescuing this project. CAR MODE
Bat-Formation Underbelly The Bat-tusi! Almost there... For the most part he still transforms like Springer. Legs fold around the same, Arms fold in the same. Shoulder fenders extend and contract the same (although they are now 3x as long). Details on the Trunk hinge are earlier in this thread. The biggest change here, is that Setheus moved the rear fenders and wings to the Backpack rather than incorporating them into legs. Additionally, due to the hood tragedy from earlier, Setheus moved the bat hood to the robot's back. The chest is now a magnetically attached partsformer. That also stores under the hood. It's not the best solution but considering the damage I did to the original hood hinges, I applaud him for making it work at all. I'm sorry to inform @JomasterII that plans for the Robo-wang had to be scrapped.
BOT-Mode No Chest With chest-piece attached: He's currently using a Barricade head. Bat-Fenders can be positioned up or down. It's really difficult to see, but the back-pack/trunk snaps in pretty tightly in both modes, so that's great. And as usual, I can't seem to post images right-side up. They look correct on my end. I've even run them through my photo editor to make sure the file as saved is definitely right-side up. He ends up with a bit of a backpack of course, but no worse than the Hasbro Ectotron, or even the last two MPs for that matter. So the final steps as I see them are: Pain touch ups. Possibly hit the car mode with a nice high Gloss car black. Detailing to the Bot mode. He still needs some accents to break up the mass of black. I'm thinking a Yellow belt to start with. But maybe some gunmetal on the gauntlets and boots? Previous design choices cause me to clip the heels from the springer figure, but at this point he desperately needs them back. I may go in and glue some tabs in there. And of course: Bat Symbol on chest. I'm convinced that the shoulders should be able to fold down Ecto Style, and I'd love to see the wheels on the outside of the legs, but .... Setheus just told me to stop talking or we couldn't be friends anymore. At any rate, I think we are 90% there.
I'm getting ready to do a spritzing of paint & Gloss. But I have a question for the group. I'm giving the Batmobile a light sanding/polish using a super fine sanding block. I'd like to get the imperfections on the hood smoothed out a little and then hopefully when it's painted and glossed it will shine. Is there anything else I should do to help buff it out before painting? I'm not super concerned with paint spillage since it's black on black anyway, and I'm probably going to go back in afterwards and hit the silver bits to freshen them up. I was mostly concerned with not spraying the windows.
