Here is my take on doing a Classics version of StarSaber. I do have to give a bit of credit to ALPHAMAGNUS for his Skyfire Prime idea, When I saw that I though it was kind of cool, but I didn’t think Jetfire was the quite right person to “be on top” when combining with Optimus Prime. When I was trying to think of someone who would be more appropriate, I remembered a digipaint Gryph had done that turned Jetfire into Starsaber. I thought that was perfect, Victory Leo is a rebuilt GodGinrai, so having StarSaber combine with Ginrai (or Prime) wasn’t much of a stretch. So I grabbed a Treadbolt and started planning out all the color placement and modifications I wanted to do. I wanted to do the armorless robot as Saber, the robot with armor Starsaber, and the armored robot with all his weapons deployed for Victory Saber. Obviously he needed a cool sword, and I wanted to do something for Yikio, the brainmaster component. I toyed around with the idea of adding some fins to the nose of the jet, because the original toy had canards in jet mode, but I could never find a way to do it that would really satisfy me. In the end, I decided to use a Minicon for Yukio, and I wanted to attach it behind the cockpit in jet mode to use its wings as the canards, but that did not work either. While I was trying to decide what Minicon to use, I pulled out the Kmart repaint of the Thunderwing Minicon, the one that turns into an F-14. The shape in jet mode with the wings back was very similar to the shield Saber has on his arm. Yukio has always been depicted in the show as being a mini version of StarSaber, so I thought he was perfect for the job. Now all I really needed was a sword. I pulled out my old armada Starsaber sword team, I thought that would be fun, but I forgot how ugly the sword really was, and how brittle all the clear plastic on them had gotten over the years, so that would not work. I started fiddling with the Minicon to try and find a way to mount him on the jet, when I stumbled onto a way to turn him into a hilt for a sword. I grabbed a few legos and a cool lego sword I had, and soon I had the makings of a really nice sword. I cut and glued two lego pieces together to make the mounting for the blade, and stuck the blade on the front of the jet. I glued another lego into the back of his head to make a handle, and I glued some scrap plastic to the hinge to make it lock into position for the sword. I do have to say I really did not like painting the minicon, it is a pain trying to get any decent edges between colors, the slightest wiggle and there is paint everywhere. Now the sword has three modes, one with the blade perpendicular to the hilt, like the original toy, one with the blade parallel to the hilt like the robot masters version, and one with the hilt in a star shaped configuration. I like the third configuration the best, but I like being able to do all three whenever I want. The only modification I did to Saber was to add a peg on his arm to hold the minicon. Once that was in place I realized that the peg was blocking the arm armor, so I had to modify it as well. I pulled off the front of the armor piece, and cut it apart. I took the peg that connects to the arm and moved it up and glued it in place, and reattached the part with the whole for the missile to fit through back on the front of the missile launcher. I used Krylon Fusion for the white and blue, and a regular krylon paint for the red. The white is Brighter than Jetfire as you can see, and the red is a little darker. The blue paint is really close to the blue plastic Treadbolt originally was. There are so many unremovable pins in this guy that I couldn’t really get him apart anywhere near as much as I wanted to, so I had to do a lot more masking than I wanted to. I am quite pleased with how this came out, I think he is pretty recognizable as StarSaber, and looks different enough from Jetfire to not feel like a lazy repaint. I really liked how I was able to use the below knee and elbow swivels to get the lower legs and arms to change colors for the different modes, and how well painting eyes on the helmet really worked. (Edited 3-18-2011) G60Force had a mod he did for his Jetfire, simply removing the four screws that hold the boosters onto the backpack, this lets you remove them and stick them in the hand holes. This lets you make a much more cartoon accurate V-star super jet mode.
Looks really good. My biggest complaint is that you need to break up the info in your post. It is harder to read a huge chunk of info without it being broken up some. But again, great repaint and I really like the sword!
Fantastic! The color scheme really works well on Jetfire, this would look great standing next to the Botcon Deszaras.
dang, that's sweet! i'd love to see something like this done if they relaunch classics/universe after the end of the rotf stuff
Dude, you write novels about your customs like I usually do. lol On topic though, excellent work! I dig the little things that make this great (and more than just a simple repaint). Nice job!
This is just a fantastic piece of work. I love it. Awesome, awesome job on this. So many little touches that put this over the top.
Thanks for the Cred. but this is awesome, totally dig the StarSaber. The pic with prime is a bit off, but it totally reminds me of Energon Prime. he also combined with Wing Saber in that series. Did my combo really inspire this? regardless it's AWESOME-TACULAR!
for a long time ive really try to toy around with finding some way of creating a classics star saber and victory leo. as far the star saber half, youve done amazingly man. you may have just inspired me to finally get started on my cutom after so long. awesome work!
