I couldn't leave it alone, so I spent more time attempting to fix Mirage. I remembered a guide about fixing warped plastics (
Repairing Bent/Warped Soft Plastic) and read up on it. Then I took the Mirage's front and back parts and boiled them. They straightened out pretty nice but I overdid it since the back/car piece shrunk on a side a little bit, fixing one warp but giving me another. I marked the new warping in the photos.
It faded out a bit of paint. You can see where by the squiggly lines.
I did manage to fix my T30 Springer's warped sword with that method, so that was nice.
Back to Mirage. Even with the "fixed" pieces there was still a lot of stress when putting his body together. The wheels wouldn't flip easily, the arms wouldn't come out without a lot of force, the chest still felt like it was bending, etc. I started scraping/filing down his internal bits as much as possible, reducing nubby bits that went into rails, etc. I've marked in red in the photos where I scraped down the plastic. I wish I had an original to compare the internals.
On the arms there's a bit where I completely cut off. You can see in the photo where Citanes is visible, marked with a rectangle. It was a large-ish piece meant to go into a groove. I only noticed after I removed it that I had been putting the arms backwards on the body when testing the smoothness of taking the arms in and out. So I don't think I had to remove that bit.
There were other bits on the black part of the arms that were square on one arm but looked malformed on the other. Evened those out.
Because of the new warping on the back piece, I had a heck of a time trimming down the chrome intake pieces for them to fit again. One fits okay, the other doesn't and bends the internals a little.
I suspect the boiling also shrunk/warped the chrome front piece in other parts. I found that the die cast hinge didn't fit as well and was really stiff. Shaved some more plastic, marked in the photos.
I put him back together and things seem to work a lot better. It's not the cleanest looking thing you've ever seen, and the arms droop some, but I've got a much better articulated/transforming figure out of it. Gonna sticker these guys up and I think that's pretty much it for me with KOs