C1-10P "Chopper"

Starting off the second half of my Rebels crew for Star Wars: Shatterpoint, and these require a bit more conversion work...

 

 

I want my Rebels miniatures to all have mostly uniform poses, so the characters with the "jumping around/ blasting off" poses need to be toned down so they can all stand together for a nice "family photo." I'm starting with Chopper, because his fix is a simple matter of removing the rocket thruster and adjusting his legs. 

 
In fact, even on the show, I've never been a fan of Chopper's rocket thruster– It's very toyetic; how many of us as kids (myself included) looked at the hole underneath the old Kenner R2-D2 action figure and imagined that it could be fired like a cannon, or that it was a secret rocket booster? So, watching Chopper fly around in that fashion always seemed like it came from that spirit of child's play. And Rebels was a [great] cartoon, so I could overlook the fact that there's no way to steer, and the mechanism for switching between the thruster and the central wheel would take up most of his insides...

 
Anyway... No thruster for me. The easiest (and fastest) solution would be to cut off the thruster and stand him on his two legs, but I wanted to have him rolling on his wheel. In fact, one of Chopper's defining traits is that he's janky and jury-rigged, with mismatched legs and a caster instead of a standard central leg.

 

 

I started by cutting off his feet...

 

 

...and using a jeweler's saw to cut out the slot on the top of the foot. I glued some 0.75mm styrene card to the bottom of the leg, making sure that it fit snugly into the slot in the foot.

 

 

The card was then trimmed and sanded into a half circle, allowing me to articulate the leg and foot.

 

 

Before attaching any of the parts, I cut the tabs off of the legs and glued them into Chopper's torso. I also removed his left arm so I could reposition it later.

 

 

When I glued the torso halves together, those tabs filled the slots on the sides, allowing me to drill into them so I could pin the legs onto the body.

 

 

The legs were pinned in place without glue so I could test out the angles and then freely rotate them into the correct position once the wheel was attached.

 

 

To build the wheel, I used 4mm styrene tube for the tire, cut into a ring and sanded round on the outside. The ring was then fit over a bit of 2.5mm rod (In this image I have 3.2mm rod that I had to shave down at the tip so I could fit it into the ring. Then the "hubcaps" were cut from 2mm rod and added to either side.

 

 

With the basic wheel constructed, I then used .38mm styrene sheet to cut the pieces for the wheel's frame.

 

 

The final touch was to add a few small rivets on the sides, made from .75mm rod, and a 2mm disc at the top.

 

 

Chopper's bottom (with thruster removed) was then glued underneath him, and the caster wheel attached. With the wheel in place, I could then position his legs to the correct angle and add a touch of super glue to fix them in place.

 

 

The final bit was to glue in his arm, and Chopper was ready to roll!

 

 

As with the other Rebels, I used images from the show and the character color guides to make sure I had all of the details correct.

 

 

Here's the astromech with the attitude, painted and ready to roll:

 

 

All I have remaining are Ezra and Sabine, and they will require a significant amount of repositioning and sculpting to sort out their poses, so they might take a while.
 

'Til next time!