Well I finally got around to taking some final photos of my first major custom, Voyager Classicsverse Galvatron.
When I first got Universe 2.0 Galvatron, I found the size and stature of the figure leaving something to be desired. Later, as I added Cyclonus and the Botcon Scourge and Sweeps, I wanted a bigger figure even more and more.
Along some news thanks to Paul Grant's KO
thread. Sure enough, KO Toys was offering a KO Galvatron. He is 'upsized' to something much larger than the original deluxe, so What I hoped to do was simply get a can or two of paint and do a light custom. I thought "sweet!" and promptly ordered one.
Although I wasn't expecting perfection, I was a little shocked when I opened the package and transformed the figure. About HALF of the articulation and joinery was removed during the translation process. Mighty Galvatron was mighty ridiculous.
So he sat for a few months, and from time to time I thought about how I might at least make the legs better. Finally, I purchased a Lego Bionicle for some joints, and the project ballooned from there.
The heaviest surgery was to the legs..completely new joints, vastly more solid than the old ones. There was a lot of work that went into making sure the new joints lined up and could extend the legs properly. Once I got all the dimensions right, I made a jig out of lego to glue the thighs together.
Note the Lego Bionicle Parts.
This is a glueing jig made from Lego. The green circle shows the actual thigh part to be glued.
Here's the completed thighs. The visible part of the thigh was made from the KO, albeit with heavy surgery.
For the lower part of the legs, I cut a bit, then a bit more, then added new parts...and just kept cutting and fitting and visualizing what the final leg would look like. In the end, the front face of the leg was exchanged with the back face, and the results improved dramatically. After this was figured out, I added some details like the red 'knees' from the G1 version.
His cannon arm had basically no articulation, so I added a joint there. His head also just pegged into place with no place to store it...and although I contemplated making it slide like the Universe version, I simply added a hole in the centre plate to store it.
I beefed up his waist/groin a little bit by fabricating some styrene.
The head had a massive sink mark in the forehead, but the face paint was actually quite good. Again, a little piece of styrene and some sanding/painting was just what the doctor ordered.
The painting was a blast. I found a pretty nice metallic purple, a nice textured grey and some flat-ish black. I did some chrome on the wheels under the tracks and added the red 'abs' for the G1 look. At first I left the cannon 'as is' from the KO but over time I started painting it and eventually painted his whole arm purple for more 'balance'. This is one major thing about the paint scheme that differs from the Classicsverse/Henkei version.
