J.T. Silversmith

This is what TFW2005 said about the group responsible for Nightbirds car mode. "The official render of the alt-mode belonging to Nightbird from Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts is unveiled by Pandem Rocketbunny who worked on the customization of the Nissan Skyline R33 GT-R. Pandem Rocketbunny is a vehicle customization company established in Japan. The company is most famous for its Pandem Aerokits. Founder and CEO Kei Miura was directly involved with the design of Nightbird." So that is who you should blame Peter, it is clearly his fault. Yeah, i think a lot of the cars are overdone and too "MichaelBay", and that makes me nervous. I hope it is just because they are all going offroading, but it does not instill confidence.

It looks to me like it is a 1x2 flat tile. It is clipped onto the bottom of the gunpod with a claw piece much the same way as the hand is holding it. You are seeing the bottom of the tile, so it looks like an open box. The claw sits between the cone and a rectangular brick.

Some of the holes for the hands and feet to connect to were off center, I remember specifically Nosecone has a hole in the bottom of each foot, rather than the single hole that Strafe, Lightspeed and Afterburner had in their feet. In the photo above, you can see the two holes on the little orange block in Computron's ankle. The bottom where the foot piece connects is the same, two holes side by side, so the foot piece can't connect centered. No Idea why he is that way, and the other three are different.

I have been working on my own custom Lego Valkyrie that I call the VA4-Peregrine. I have been considering putting it up on the lego Cuusoo site. One benefit of an original design is that you don't need to worry about licensing. I have a gallery on deviant art if anyone is interested. http://jtsilversmith.deviantart.com/gallery/45823764

I built a Lego version of an original design I called the VA-4 Peregrine. It is a VTOL Attacker designed and tested at the New Edwards Test Center on Eden. I intended it to be a contemporary of the VF-11 and the VA-3. I have a gallery on Deviant Art that has lots of pictures if you are interested. http://jtsilversmith.deviantart.com/gallery/45823764 Tell me what you think.

I think it is this picture that makes me believe in a Hotrod + Rodimus Prime toy. You can very clearly see there are long exhaust pipes on the back of his leg and a full tire with a tread inside his lower leg. A pure Rodimus has zero need for that. The only reason would be to make it more like the Hotrod toy, that you wouldn't do if it is just Rodimus. The gun has two seperate handles, and it looks like it can split in half to make two smaller guns. There is also a picture that shows a long window, that runs the entire length of his upper body. The window in the RV mode is the same length as the RV hood, and that is only half the length of his chest. There is no way that long a window could be for the RV mode, so it must be for Hotrod!

I tweaked the levels of the photos a bit, but I didn't really change the color at all, mostly I cleaned out the green, but in the Arcee picture there are still bits of red fuzziness that should probably be grey, but other than that the colors should be accurate. Did any one else notice the two different paintjobs on Optimus's truck mode? The picture from the slideshow is a plain red truck, the one on the sign announcing the panel times has stripes and blue panels on the sleeper. I wonder which one is more correct. Also the cow horns on Cliffjumper's hood made me laugh, and I really liked Ratchets combination of eyebrows and traditional head crest. These look fun.

All right, that is quite awesome, even if most of those ships are a little to old for me to really love them. That was a riot.

len_d69, that is a nice paintjob on voyager Prime, that mold is fun. Still I have to say I do like the new leader one better. With a bit of touch ups, a wash and some drybrushing it just looks soooo nice.

I thought you guys would appreciate this, I bought the Treadbolt repaint of Classics Jetfire, and decided to turn him into someone much cooler. Let me introduce you to Saber and his minicon companion Yukio. They are a couple of Autobot Flyboys. When Saber uses his booster unit, he is known as StarSaber, the greatest swordsman in the galaxy, and Yukio becomes his sword. When times are desperate he can activate his "Victory" mode... or Combime with Ginrai (Classic Optimus Prime) to become the most powerful warrior in the universe Victory Saber! Wow, that sounds so much cheesier than I was hoping it would. Oh well, it is a really fun custom, Enjoy.

If I wanted to look at that I would just get out my Goldbug There is a reason the only ones who play with him are my 4 and 6 year old sons. All kidding aside, that is kind of fun.

This was a very inspired mod, I did to help Activators Bumblebee look better. In the first picture you can see how the toy originally transformed. His arms are WAAAAY to long, with his fingers nearly reaching his ankles. Needless to say I decided to try and do something about it. I cut the black piece of plastic that makes the upper arm right above the upper circular part of his elbow. Once you do that the screw and peg act like an additional joint, allowing the upper arm to bend 90 degrees downward. In the second picture you can see the arm bent. Like this, you can now rotate the old shoulder so that the old upper arm points forward, and then use the new joint we created as a shoulder joint. This effectively moves the shoulder up and forward, greatly reducing the length of the arm, and moving the tires above the shoulder instead of below. I think this looks much better myself, so I thought I would pass it on.

I finally got a hold of Samurai Prowl, I like how they remolded almost every part, it really shows a lot of thought went into the figure. Just from looking at the pictures I knew there were a few things that I knew I would have to do once I got him. Painting the hands, thigh pads and "ninja stars" were a given, as well as adding the grey accents, and toughing up all of the gold. Once I had it in my hands, I found there were a few things that bugged me enough that I had to do something about them. I did not like how much they had to scale down his head to make the helmet fit, On the back of his left knee there was a small tab of plastic that was keeping his knee from bending all the way that I had to trim off, and I thought the top edge of the windscreen stuck up to far in robot mode. After looking as some screen caps, realized that it is too big in motorcycle mode as well. So I decided to trim it down a bit. I think it looks much better now, and interestingly it is still too big in motorcycle mode. In the cartoon it is cut in a low curving line just like the window on the sidecar, but that would look wrong in robot mode. When I saw 5 servos of Doom I really liked the look of Yokitron's helmet, and decided to see if I could modify the toy to look more like the cartoon. With some careful planning I realized that it would be possible to make a fair representation of the new helmet with some careful trimming and a few scraps of plastic. While I was at it I thought I would try and see it it would be possible to make the helmet fit the older bigger head. Thankfully there IS enough room, and by widening the inside of the helmet, and the opening for his chin, I was able to get it to work! I then swapped the non opening Ninja stars with the working ones from the old one. Now I have one excellent prowl, and one with a gimpy head and cheap ninja stars I can give to my kids. [attac hment=65648:P1010009.JPG]

I just got Inferno as well, he is quite nice. I do like the arm cannon, it still feels like the old missile hand blaster thing, but he still has a hand as well. I think it is a nice upgrade. Also, for amyone who enjoys Transformers Animated, the third season started today, and it was EPIC. Tons of action, tons of new characters, lots of interesting answers, loads of references to previous shows. It was great fun. If the rest of the season can compare to this, season 3 will be ledgendary.

I went looking on Brickshelf, and found a few very helpful, in progres, and close up shots of one of those Vipers here. http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=304038