Presenting: Alternator Grapple

Here he is: Alternator Grapple! Why Grapple? Well, there's a pretty good reason, as you'll see further down the page. While I wouldn't call him a favourite of mine, he's a pretty cool character. Hey, he built Omega Supreme which is a pretty neat thing to do! Yup, I'm all Marvel comic continuity here...

Grapple was based on Rollbar with basically just one big change: the head. As you can obviously see, he has the original G1 head which is excellently sculpted. It took some brute force to separate it from the collar contraption he and Inferno wears, and I found that the head is entirely hollow. Filling it up with green stuff, I could mold it onto the ball joint and then let it set for a perfect fit later on.

The Jeep mold works fairly well for Grapple. When I first got him I considered just leaving the reddish orange as is, but I thought the better of it and used up the last of my orange spray paint from the Predacons. He's slightly darker than the original but it works out well anyway. As usual I tried to stay as close as possible to the original color arrangement. I painted all of the interior black to match the G1 figure and to get rid of the fairly crappy dirty brown that Rollbar had there.

But now then: why Grapple? Well, as I said I'm a big fan of the comic and for some reason (read: Smokescreen) I'm very attached to the five Autobots introduced in Rock And Roll. But Hasbro would only meet me halfway, with Smokescreen not really being the 38 edition racing car and only Skids and Tracks actually released, so that was the goal of my repaints: finishing this team!

So, what's next? No idea. With the Predacons and now the '85 Autobots finished I have the repaints I really really wanted. There's also a distinct lack of new molds to be inspired by, and a distinct lack of funds to get spare copies of the ones I have. We'll see...