ThighMaster Suzerain

The ThighMasters started as a one-off joke, which I posted to alt.toys.transformers. Click here to read that post, modified so that Suzerain's techspecs match the toy I made. On and off for the last few years I pondered making a kitbash of a Thighmaster, and finally I realized that if I used Legos (and Mega Blocks, a knockoff competitor) for the Thighs, I wouldn't have to worry about finding vehicle legs that worked, I could just build to suit.

The robot base is a Perceptor I've been raiding for parts for some time now. All that remained was most of the torso, the head and the legs (I used the arms for another project and it was already missing the microscope barrel and most accessories). I decided to make the legs into arms, and removed the head to put at the other end, leaving a slot where the neck once was to attach the new ThighMaster legs. After cutting off the gear part of the head, I glued it to a rotating Lego piece so that the figure would have a point of articulation there. Some more Lego bits and fists from a knockoff toy (which inexplicably came with two spare fists) gave the toy hands (glued to the bottom of the toe pieces, so they can be rotated out of the way to let the wheels extend). Next, a connector for the Lego vehicles (which were actually built first, I'm kinda getting ahead of myself here) was made and glued into position in the old neck hole. Finally, I added 3x2 Lego slats to the shoulders so that the pilots could sit there (having found that they couldn't sit side-by-side when their vehicles were snapped together). The rest was just painting.

As for the ThighMaster vehicles, I constructed them from mostly Mega Blocks with a few Legos where I needed specialized pieces, like the control panels and toe joints. Once I was satisfied with how they looked and connected (using a Lego rotating post-in-hole connector), I glued the pieces together in that configuration so I wouldn't have to worry about them falling apart later. The skids are there to keep the vehicles upright when separate. If I were building this as a "real" toy, with all the resources of a design lab, I'd have put in small wheels instead, or centered the main wheels.

The shoulder/hand weapons were a pair of Flash Gordon "boltguns" left over from a couple of other projects, glued to two Lego hinge pieces and painted a bit. They can fit on the shoulderpads or onto pegs on the wrists of the robot mode (I gave up on trying to make them fit into the hands when I couldn't find any plastic rods the right diameter for pistol grips). The weapons on the feet were made from short segments of 1/8" hollow rod with 1/16" clear plastic rod glued inside them. They were originally planned for the shoulder guns, with two to a "rack," but I ran out of 1/8" tubing after only three, so I moved two of them to the feet and set the third aside for a later project. Maybe I'll make it into a rifle for one of the pilots.

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