Megatron

It all starts from the legs

Maybe slightly and gently wisened by a couple of MEM kits under my belt, I didn't follow the exact order of the instructions that strictly. That means that I didn't bend all the main components shut but first attached the greebls and whatnot and only then boxed them in. That made things much less aggravating as I had more space (and I didn't need to open the leg bit just to have the space to tighten the seals of the greeblies). And maybe this time I'd remember to triple-check the alignments so I wouldn't have to undo bits misaligned by 90° or 180°.

While assembling the tiny discs on the sides of the knees I managed to draw blood. As the depth of the discs came from a rolled up strip, that when closed had two of those attachment lips poking from both ends. I was holding the two-piece hamburger standing on my thumb, pressing the disc on the cylinder so that I could bend the parts to seal the connection. Maybe I pressed a tiny bit too hard as I got the damn thing into my thumb. Sigh.

Assembling the first leg took just about 40 minutes. The second one took a nice bit less, not that I paid much attention to the clock.

Sometimes the already built pieces took so much space that closing the remaining attachers wasn't as nice and clean as I would have liked to. Mostly I just bent the bits flat, but in a few places I decided that twisting them would make that much of a difference in the connection's tightness (and would not require space that wasn't even available). Wherever I didn't have the space for more than a twist, I had to be very careful not to scratch the neighbouring surfaces while poking around with the tweezers.

The legs that got attached to the hip complex ended up in a very masculine pose on just on their own. I had to bend them shut quite a bit when I was attaching the feet to the baseplate. Nothing squealed or snapped off, so I wasn't concerned for the durability.

Based on the photo below someone could imagine that I was working on a Rifleman BattleMech. But no. And for some reason after this part I was led to work on something completely different.

Gunnery

I got to build Megatron's gun form's barrel now. Rolling up the tube went pretty well even if I said so mayself, it actually looked round. I almost did the barrel's end piece wrong but noticed that it was going inside out, but I noticed in time. The biggest problem was to get the end piece to slide over the whole barrel's lenght without getting caught on all the protrusions along the way.

The torso

In another surprising move the next part was the torso and the head. Megatron's hatholder proved to be quite a lot more complicated than what I had expected. Still, it didn't cause any problems and allowed itself to be built very nicely.

After the head was done I built a support structure for the gun-mode's barrel and installed that one on the right shoulder blade.Then I attached the head itself and finally the whole chest unit on the hips. All this was pretty quick and problem-free.

Gunnery, pt II

At last! The scope of the gun-mode was the awesome arm-mounted cannon of the robot-form. Somehow, being too excited I assume, I managed to do something wrong. That funnel-shaped piece was supposed to have the grooves on the inside, now it wasn't. It was actually quite curious that all the tubes were sealed with solid bits and there were absolutely no surface details on the arm cannon.

I had decided to use my own judgement regarding the instruction's working orders to make my life easier. The instructions suggested, again, that the box would be mostly closed (3/4 pieces bent to their final positions) before attaching the other pieces on the box. That was always so very complicated in a very restricted space, so I've taken the habit of attaching the details first and closing the boxes when all the essentials were done.

The paws

The arm building took a fairly good amount of time, thanks to the greeblies and details. What I had feared the most were the fists but they were just about the easiest part of the arms in the end. Again breaking some patterns the right arm that I built first was much quicker than the second one, most likely because it had less extra bits thanks to the arm-mounted cannon. This way the right arm needed less extra bits than the left, empty one.

Yet again I deviated from the guidelines to keep my own sanity levels high (or at least trying to do so). First I installed the cannon on the right arm and only then did I attach the arm to the torso's side flap, which was obviously closed up last. At least this sounded better and less annoying to me. Installing the left arm was just as quick and easy as the right one. And see, Megatron was completed.

He ended up pretty coo. Nicely I didn't leave many fingerprints, which is mostly due to the textures on the surfaces which didn't grab as much crap as the smooth, flat surfaces. This robot was pretty sizeable, which is something that is much easier to notice with some comparison shots. The traditional half-an-euro coin was there to provide the perspective.