Roll Out!

I didn’t have a chance to write up stats on my Optimus Prime conversion for Dropzone Commander but was able to complete a bit more of his final “package.” I’d already completed his truck and robot modes but still had one little nagging thing missing: what was inside his trailer.

From the cartoons and the early toys, we knew that Prime’s magical appearing and disappearing trailer could also open up house some fun goodies. The main addition that we saw was “roller,” his little 6-wheel scout.

I first cut a spare UCM Wolverine in half and sanded both halves down to shrink the width of the vehicle. Then I cut off the back wheels from another Wolverine and cut up my modified main chassis to make the extra set of wheels fit. Green stuff then hacked it back together and filled in some of the bad gaps.

Moving on to the trailer, or “combat deck,” as it is officially referred to as, I cut the top 2/3rds of the trailer off, then cut that in half. I was torn about hollowing out the trailer pieces to make it fit more with how the actual combat deck opened up but was afraid I’d break the pieces or find that they wouldn’t hold together when assembled.

I decided to leave the halves intact and just glue the whole base together to make a single, solid flat bed. Underneath, I added some supports to make sure it would lay flat on the table as well.

Next, we have the “combat” part of the deck. I built an arm/boom assembly simply out of the laser cut mdf leftovers from my ruined buildings.

Then glued them to a platform that I would later magnetize.

For the combat weapon system, I grabbed the spare Wolverine body that I cut wheels off of and further dissected it. And then, Re-animator-style, I cobbled the back piece back on to give the body a little more life.

I tested out the entire assembly and corrected the angle a bit more then finalized with a set of Wolverine missiles on the very top (drilled and glued in).

I drilled some extra holes in the front of the deck to add some Gun Wagon AA guns and give it a more “combat-y” feel. Then I grabbed another mdf piece to make roller’s exit ramp.

With Prime’s approval, it was time to get the rest of this primed.

The deck was done in Gun Metal metallic from Army Painter while the rest of the pieces were done in my grey automotive primer.

Roller looked much better primed.

And at this scale, the green stuff blends in pretty well.

The weapon system also hid some of the uglier hacks I did to the model as well.

While I was priming things, I also was able to build up a few models I had waiting in the wings. First off was the big “Bertha” drill.

A really easy model and didn’t take too much work to prep. This one is in Gun Metal again and is quite large.

The regular drill is pretty large on a 10mm battlefield already but Bertha is just monstrous.

Speaking of monsters, I also worked up the Apex Predator model. This is a “show exclusive” piece that I picked up at Gen Con. The model went together very easy and aside from a few slight gap fills on the back legs, it hardly needed any work.

Lastly, we have my last official Famous Commander model, Rakkon Krell’s Cortez Class Walker. This one is sporting the non-Famous Commander Azrael guns but it also has the original missile backpack as well. I wasn’t really in love with this model as the standard pose is really stiff.