Stomping ahead

Final components

Before the head itself the backpack was to be done, and to be left waiting. I was almost optimizing by installing it already, but a quick "hey, let's check what's coming up still, just in case" check saved me and this build.

The face here looked otherwise familiar, just a bit too tall. I expected that to be straightened during the next steps.

Oh yes, the ninja mask repaired the long face immediately. The most difficult thing in this face building operation was to get the pieces folded into correct angles without accidentally splitting the pieces apart.

Apparently the unusual height of the head was to cover up the extra step that ended up being in front of his jaw. This had obviously absolutely nothing to do with the good old G1 toy, but as I think I pondered on that in the first post, this model was depicting a more modern version of Optimus Prime than the one I grew up with.

The helmet with the ears/antennas was one of the worst subassemblies so far, thanks to the round shapes. Luckily I got it done in one piece without getting bothered.

Combining the head's two parts was about to give me grey hairs. Again it got done succesfully without smashing or bending the components into a mess. This was one of the details in addition to some random weird corner shapes that increased this model's difficulty rating.

Putting the backpack complex into Optimus' torso was almost scaringly easy. At this point I noticed that I had left a couple of few-corner edges open from the small of his back / corresponding sides, either because I had just ignored those in the instructions or didn't understand to do it as told (as you could see in the first photo below, I had also misread the image for attaching the left arm and got him almost keeping his free hand against his hip instead of down-front).