Fusillade, Doubletime and Turbo Rifle

While I was waiting for my Despoiler print last time, I started work on the next in my hexpod series, Doubletime, designed to turn from a little hexagonal prism into an articulated robot.
Then I also decided to do some robots that became guns usable by larger action figures, and while I was at it I designed a gun especially for a Transformers custom I was working on.
These all arrived today.
Note: All the thumbnails are clickable, and take you to larger versions of the images.


First opened was the Turbo Rifle, ordered in black-dyed WSF.



This couldn't have come out any better. The gun feels nice and sturdy, and the detail is beautifully crisp. The handle is designed to fit into any standard 5mm peg hole, which it does perfectly, and also has a tab in the rear which fits between the legs of a particular figure, but that's just for me. Because the finish out of the box is very matt and more of a dark purple-grey than black, I've given it a thinned coat of black acrylic and sealing it up with acrylic clearcoat.


Next out was Doubletime.



A few pieces had broken off the sprue, presumably during cleanup, but I pretty much expected that; I basically added them to make it easier for the production crew to dig them out and clean them. After separating the pieces and spending a few minutes making sure any powder was removed (using an old stiff paintbrush), I assembled the figure.



It was largely very easy to put together; my snap-in hinges (used on the rifles) worked so much better than the original ones on Despoiler, and my experimental rotator peg fit in beautifully. A couple of the balls were difficult to fit into their sockets, but this is where I neglected to include an alignment groove; most sockets had them, but there's always one. . Easily fixed. Once in, it turned out I'd actually allowed a bit too much clearance this time; many of the balljoints turned out quite floppy, so I'm gonna have to shrink the sockets a little. The flip-out rifles work perfectly.
Then there's the hexpod mode, which aside from the aforementioned looseness, works exactly as I'd hoped. The tab and slot which hold the legs together in this mode fit really nicely, and I think I'll be adding a few more to help hold this mode together before releasing it.




Finally I opened Fusillade.





Again, it assembled very nicely, with hardly any cleanup required, but does suffer from the loose balljoints. On this print I'll probably tighten them with a little well-placed cyanoacrylate glue, but naturally I'll shrink the sockets again for the digital version. One thing I'm particularly happy about on this model are the shoulder mounts, which are designed to slide forward a couple of millimetres so they can pivot round for the gun mode, and this has come out very nicely.



Aside from the looseness, it transforms very nicely, and as with the Turbo Rifle, it has a standard 5mm handle to fit into the hands of larger figures.



The full album of photos can be viewed here.
Enjoy!

Andy

Great pics of awesome models!

-Whystler

Coolness! It looks like you're getting the hang of designing those hinges - I do hope you'll share that knowledge with the rest of us one day

How about posting a short video of how the model transforms? I'd love to see that!

Cheers,

Bart

OH yes! video please

-Whystler

Thanks, guys!
I'd love to do a video; first I need to tighten up the ball joints, then find my video camera's charger cable and figure out how to use it!

And yeah, I'll see about throwing together some kind of hinge-designing tutorial, too!

Andy

i love all these transformers at shapeways!
yours is one of the neater ones!

I'd love to see a tutorial on making functioning ball joints and hinges for similar-sized figure projects!

Thanks Redshift,

we will look into mechanical tutorials, great idea.

Duann

Already planning it.

Andy

Are thinking of selling those hexapods?