Hello. Have you recently purchased the TFC/Chinese KO Dinobot Combiner? Have you tightened up all the joints and whatnot using nail polish, released Swoops missiles, swapped his wing tips, done all the little touch ups, but have found that there's still one nagging imperfection that truly stops you loving it like a new child? Yes, are you miffed that your T-Rex is consigned to doing a static dad dance, whilst his team mates are free to wave their hands like they just don't care and have a good old boogie? Well fret no more, your Rex could soon be jigging like it's 2099, and doing the full Saturday Night Fever courtesy of this relatively easy mod that will give him full unrestricted shoulder movement. You will need to get your grubby little mitts on two of the very specific parts pictured here. They are from a Mega Bloks Neo Shifters set. The one I used was this handsome chappy; His name is, funnily enough, Magna Rex. I don't know much about this particular line of toys, but it appears that there are several of these characters, and they are all exactly the same. The only things that differ are their masks and colours. They also appear to be readily available on eBay for around about ten of my British Pounds. The specific pieces we need are his thumbs. Everything else can be chucked into the parts bin, or you could make a robot with no hands, whatever man, I ain't judging. HOW DO YOU DO THAT THING THAT YOU DO??? This is a quite simple mod that doesn't take too long, is fairly simple, and incredibly effective. It does require the removal of quite a bit of plastic. You'll need a few simple tools... * Stanley knife or Exacto Knife. CAUTION! If you are inexperienced at using a craft knife like this please exert extreme care. They are very, very sharp, and the plastic you will be cutting into is very good quality. Remove small pieces of plastic at a time and take your time. * Clippers * File and Sandpaper * Small Phillips Screwdriver * Pliers * Junior Hacksaw * T-Rex * Neo Shifter Thumb x 2 Not pictured, thin drill bit, and nail or thick wire. Of course, if you have a Dremel, then this will be much more effective at removing the plastic that needs removing. Go ahead and use it. Go on, I dare you. If like me you don't have a Dremel, then you'll have to go the elbow grease route. Yeah, sucks to be us. DIS-ASSEMBLE NUMBER JOHNNY 5!!! So then, you have your tools, you have your parts, you have your nice clear workspace... What do you mean you haven't got a clear workspace? Get it cleared, what's wrong with you? Go on, those as well. That's better. First off we need to remove Mr. Rex's arm. Simply remove this screw conveniently circled here; As always, make sure you put any screws you remove in a safe place, we'll need them later when we put him back together. Next up, take apart the shoulder by removing these here three screws; Split the shoulder and separate all the pieces contained within. Unless you've been a tad ham fisted and sent everything flying in the dark recesses of your workshop, you should have... * Two Shoulder Halves * Lower Arm * Combiner Socket * Hex Peg Mushroom Peg * Ratchet Ring Make sure you put the Combiner socket somewhere very safe. You don't want to be losing that! The two parts of the ratchet can be consigned to the parts bin. It's a really good ratchet and you might want it again in the future. Now then, what makes this specific Neo-Shifter part so important is two things: 1. The orange peg is exactly the right size to fit into the hexagonal hole on Rex's shoulder. 2. That hole at the top is exactly the right distance away that when the orange peg is pegged into the hex hole, it lines up perfectly with the pole at the top of the inside of the shoulder. It needs a little work to get it onto that that pole with room to move, but that fact combined with this joints ratchet joint is what's going to give us our outward shoulder movement. GET TO DA CHOPPING! This is where the fun part begins. Although the joint has all the characteristics we need, it also has a lot of extra material on it we need to get rid of, and we need to make room inside the shoulder for it to fit. Let's chop this joint. First off we're going to tidy up the joint. We need to do the following things. * Remove the 'collar' from the orange peg. This is straight forward enough. With your knife simply carve the extended collar off of the peg, then sand around where you've cut to round it off * Cut the hollow part off of the peg. This is another quite remarkable thing about this joint. About half of the orange peg is hollow. Bizarrely, if we remove just the hollow part, then what remains is exactly the right length for what we need! It really is crazy! * Cut off the fingers. Live out all your workmate torturing fantasies by removing the fingers of a plastic robot. Just cut straight through above the hole, sand smooth, jobs a good 'un. * Remove the ridge. On both sides there is a raised ridge around the centre hole. This will get in our way later so using either your file or sand paper rub it into oblivion on both sides. * Lumpectomy. You notice that one side of the wheel is more bulbous than the other. I've pictured it on the right to give more space, but this is actually going to go by the orange peg (we'll just rotate it around) therefore this piece needs to be flattened down otherwise we won't be able to get our shoulder nice and flush for transformation. This is probably the hardest part of altering this joint for a few reasons. We're taking off quite a big bit of very hard plastic, next to a joint that's very important to us, without much to hold onto. I held the piece in my pliers and used my hacksaw to cut this piece back on both sides of the orange wheel, then tidied it up with my craft knife. Take off about as much as I've highlighted, you can always trim it later if it turns out that you haven't taken enough and your shoulders won't sit flush enough. Once all this is done your piece should look like this: You'll note that I've now rotated the peg around to be on the side that we've flattened off. Do this for both your pieces and then put them to one side. We now need to make room for them to fit inside the shoulder. There's just, like, no space, man! So our joint is sorted, but to be able to get that hole over that pole and have it be able to work, we need to clear some stuff out of the way. I've highlighted here in yellow which bits need to vamoose, from a top view and side view. As you can see, on the side that goes on the inside of the shoulder, we need to take out a large rectangle for our joint to move through, and on the inside we just need to remove some material to make space for when our joint is tucked up all cosy and tight inside. Just take small bits at a time until you feel that you've created just enough space. When you're done, it will look something like this; Rub that pole! Finally, we have one more thing to do inside that shoulder, and this is probably the trickiest part of the whole shebang. Our pole that the hole on our joint needs to slide over is quite a bit too big, we need to reduce it by about 30% With your knife and sandpaper, shave down the entire shaft. It's very much slowly, slowly, catchy monkey with this. I would recommend taking the top side down as far as you can without creating a hole in the side of the pole first, then moving around the rest of the pole. Shave, sand, test. Shave, sand, test. keep going until you can just about start to get the pole through the hole. Now switch and sand the inside of the hole. Sand a bit, test. Sand a bit, test. Eventually your joint will slide nicely onto you pole. You want it to be a little snug, as this is going to be a weight bearing joint, but not too tight that you're going to twist the pole as you rotate the joint. You can see the difference in the size of the pole I have reduced, compared to the other two. Remember the wire or nail I mentioned waaaaaay up there? This is where that comes in. as this pole is hollow, you can cut a length off and stick it inside here for some added strength. make sure that you still have room up top to put the screw in. You can coat your bit of metal in epoxy resin if you want to make it secure. Nearly there! Now you can put everything back together and test it out. Make sure that you have enough clearance to move the joint inside the shoulder, test that it sits flush against the Rex's shoulder by pegging your orange peg in. Make sure that your joint isn't too tight against the pole and twisting or stressing it. Trim, sand, or file where you have to until you're satisfied that your joint works as it should. Re-assemble the arm, don't forget the combiner socket! Now we just have to reattach it to Rexy. Plug your orange peg into the hex hole, then with a drill bit smaller than the screw that you took out of that hole, drill through the screw hole into the end of the orange peg. Then simply screw the screw in. Viola! Congratulations, your T-Rex robot is now fully capable of joining in all the other Dino Robots games, and pull off such poses as... The Charge! The Stoic Hero... The NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! And many, many more imaginative ones too. BUT DOES HE STILL, Y'KNOW??? Yes. This mod does not affect anything that he was able to do before. He is still fully transformable, provided you have flattened off that bulbous piece enough for your shoulders to sit completely flush. Neither does it affect combined mode. HOWEVER bear in mind that you have replaced those incredible tight shoulder ratchets with a joint that whilst flexible is not as crunchingly tight. Therefore exert caution when moving your combined mode arms, as the shoulders may move with it and unpeg from the Rex head chest. Combined beastly mode is just fine and dandy too! I hope that you have found this tutorial practical and easy enough to follow. Any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to ask, and I look forward to seeing all of your posing Dinosaur robots soon
You can get the set at chimme or SirToys, under the name Star Cat Dino Combiner. They are really awesome and only $79.99.
Awesome tutorial Kraken! Wasn't sure if I wanted to disassemble my Rex but after reading this, I'm already looking for my Dremel! lol Nice one man, job well done!
I do appreciate the attempt but I think I'm going to go another way. That shoulder is huge and I'm pretty sure I can squeeze a donor ratchet for outward movement in there and keep the original forward ratchet as well.
Very Informative- I haven't seen or heard of this set before now but this mod guide was a fun and easy to understand read
Thanks for all your kind words guys. It was fun doing this. Just a small word of warning, the first shoulder I did, I shaved the shaft down too much and split it making the joint loose. However, the Neo Shifter kit comes with a thin shaft piece, I think it's a missile, that fits through the hole so I've basically cut away the original shaft and replaced it with a piece of that. I can't show it I'm afraid as I epoxy'd it in on both ends and now my shoulder is sealed closed. It makes an exceedingly tight joint too. I may just go ahead and do it to the other shoulder anyway. If I do I'll show pics, but it's pretty self explanatory. No worries man, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I'd like to see how you do it.
Those neo shifters are kinda pricey on ebay. We need someone to make a kit for this or cast the parts.
Love this tutorial bud! Nicely executed. I hope someone does indeed make a kit that improves this Dino combiner set. With the initial value you get this combiner for, buying add ons isn't that big of a deal money wise, pretty much a no brainer. I got this whole set plus the Rescue set for 140 shipped! That's 2 full combiners, so spending a little bit more to really improve the small trouble spots on these guys would be a definite win.
I dont have this set but I just wanted to give a big thumbs up to this kind of post! Very detailed, clear and helpful, with great photos and clever explanations of the process. This post represents the very best of what toy of forums can do for the fans! Thanks Kraken!
