I thought I'd post my swoop bike here as well just so that my stuff is still all together in the same thread later on when the contest's thread get's pushed back to the bottom of the list.
Spudafett's Planetary Vehicle and Rider contest entry:For this contest I wanted to make a bike from scratch or close to scratch. I also wanted my figure to be a Gi-joe based figure customized to fit into the star wars universe. In the course of this project I started with my rider first.
For my rider I used a gi-joe 25th aniversary para viper for the base figure.
I started with a lower leg and foot swap as the original's lower legs had been sculpted to clip on flippers...
I added several details, including a clone trooper's shoulder pauldron which was trimmed down. I added little greeblie bits with some red wireing and a removable cape. The cape has a new feature I tried out and will be using from now on. It's an old boba fett cape and has a copper wire strung through it so that it can be posed in a "flapping" position.
I wanted this figure to realy be equipped for swoop bike racing. I realy liked the look of the shoulder and knee pads of the para viper and thought the pauldron added to that. BUT what about high atmospheric flights? I took a removable clone helmet and trimmed it down so that only the lower half remained and fitted a range finder to the side. A repaint later and I have a respirator that looks realy good on my rider. I also figured he'd need a back up oxygen supply so I trimmed down a Assassin Droid's backpack and made a canister which fits into the figures back peg hole.
As this will be the leader of my biker gang I wanted to decide on a color scheme that the whole gang would use. Red and Black was decided upon. Several details were brought out with red and silver detailing.
ok enough explaining here are some pics of just the rider:
Some of these pics were taken early on and the flash brought out a few spots of missed paint, which were fixed about half way through my photo session. The final figure doesn't have any purple showing through and is completely painted.
I guess I should have retaken the pictures...
ok, you've already got a few glimpses of his custom swoop. let me explain a little bit about it first and then you can see some pics.
Go back to the top and look again at the wip photo of the figure. See that engine laying in front of him? I took that from a 1:18 scale die-caste model car. I believe it was a maisito (sp?) model. Anyway, I used it as a starting base and started from there fitting parts together. I wanted his swoop to slightly resemble an "S-swoop" but look like it'd been stripped down to almost nothing but a motor, a seat, and steering vanes. In essence this is a super light, super fast, racing swoop.
I also wanted to have a couple weopons encorporated into the speeder and have a set of saddle bags or pouches on it. The weopons include one blaster cannon on the speeder, a swoord (vibroblade?) for the rider to use, as well as a holster for a blaster pistol.
You guys remember the wip teaser pics I put up eirlier?
That astromech's head... well it didn't get to be an astromech any more. Try to find it in the finished speeder:
"pickin up chicks"
I hope you guys enjoyed that. I know I realy enjoyed building and creating both the figure and the swoop especially. It's probably the first from scratch vehicle that I've made that actually turned out looking realy good (in my critical eye). Now I know I used existing components and didn't make it completely from scratch like the mando chick's bike I did before with just sheet styrene... I hope noone was disapointed I didn't do it that way
