Not sure what got me started on doing up my Hoffman crew, it might have just been wanting to see if I could put cool flared smokestacks on the Peace Keeper like I made for my Robogear Spider or just wanting to rush through a crew simpler to paint than McMourning's.
In any case yes I totally can fit on two badass smoke stacks on the Peace Keeper in place of the stubby ones it comes with.
I made the smoke stacks from Evergreen plastic tubes. I measured some marks on the top and snipped with side cutters to get the crown top then filed to clean it up before heating it a bit and mushing it with pliers to flare it out before more sanding to clean it up again. Then a strip of plastic sheet was wrapped around it under the crown and rivets added with plastic rod. Making it all from styrene made life easier to glue it all together with plastic cement. So much less hassle than super gluing on rivets on a metal figure. Which is why I glued down a strip of plastic sheet along the center of his carapace and added more rivets to that. After assembling the stacks I super glued them in place and added a spacer between them to make them a bit more solid.
The next big conversion on this guy is that the stock legs are just tiny and in an extreme lunging crouch. I guess it gives it a low center of gravity but it seemed to me to have one too few joints for a working set of legs. So I decided to copy the top segment from an AT-ST leg and made some from lasercut MDF leftovers from a building kit (think these were the bits inside the window frames). I rounded the ends, drilled holes to take pins from the hip and the legs and added heaps of bits of plastic card to detail them up.
Plus I added some hex bolts from a Kotobukiya options sprue. These can be bought from online or if you're lucky your local hobby store around the Gundam kits.
Also digging through the off cuts bag I found some broken wagon wheels so thought I'd put one to good use on the base to let him stand on something and have a touch more height. The cactus is from Pegasus Hobbies.
Next on the converting list was getting the spear gun into a more sensible position than sticking out wide horizontally from the body in front of the close combat claw arm behind it. So I put the support arm vertically on the back socket and did some pinning to get the gun into position. Maybe it needs some extra hydraulics to make it look like can tilt a bit more I think it's much better where I put it.
The other arms I posed in forward and back to counter the stride of the legs so it looks like there is some more movement to the mech. I had to cut back the wrist sockets so I could get the hands to co-operate with the new arm positions.
Now for a little turn on the catwalk:
Bit like a big robot genestealer isn't it?
From the front on shots you can really see how much difference my leg mods made to the height and stance of the robot, he'd be dragging with claws along the ground otherwise.
I'm working on cleaning up the rest of the crew now, will put them in the next post then on to paint.
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