A while ago, I picked up a Ghost Rider figure at Kay Bee for 99 cents on deep clearance, figuring that the blow-apart gimmick might be worth a buck in amusement value. Then I realized it'd make the perfect base for a Junkion. Plus, I'd just bought a Dremel MiniMite and was itching to reduce something to a pile of plastic shavings. Because I basically kept tinkering with this kitbash until I felt I'd done enough to it, I'm not going to present a chronological report like I usually do. Instead, I'll go by body part. This toy is truly a Junkion in spirit, being bashed out of many different toys.

    HEAD - I decided after some carving down that the skull head of the original figure wasn't going to work. A big part of this decision was that the neck was defective and wouldn't hold onto the torso (bent piece somewhere, I'd guess). So I went back to those cheap Gundam knockoffs I'd been cannibalizing lately and removed the head from one. Some Lego cone pieces made for "ears," and I extended the crest forward into a Junk-punk mohawk with Milliputt. The neck peg I Dremeled to fit the hole in the torso.

    ARMS - The shoulders are shoulder pieces from another Round Vernian (the Neofam, I think) kit. I Dremeled the shoulder and the model parts until the two fit together snugly, and then I added a lot of hot glue to make sure they didn't pop off. Then I took the launcher arms from a pair of knockoff Cyberjet Skyjacks I have and glued them to the forearms. After the glue was hardened, I filled in the forearms with Milliput. It should be noted that these cheap imitation Transformers were not made with very good tolerances or good plastic, and the missiles really don't launch.

    LEGS - Here's where a LOT of work and plastic shavings came in. I'll go from top down. The pelvis I extensively reshaped with various Dremel tips, giving it a more angular appearance and cutting channels across the front. I glued a piece of styrene sheet to the backside to act as a rudder in aerial mode. I Dremeled the sides of each thigh flat and ran a channel up the back of each thigh (not visible in the scans). I took two 3x1 Lego bricks and Dremeled them within a millimeter of their lives (covering myself in Lego shavings in the process) to make thigh-mounted launchers. Pre-painting, the missiles could be flicked from their mounts pretty nicely, but painting jammed those holes up...gonna have to go back and carve out the paint if I want to launch missiles from there. On the boots, I took a 1x1 Lego brick and drilled it out so that the shoulder pegs would fit inside, then glued these bricks to the boots. Next I took three Mega Block (Lego competitor) 1x1 barrels and glued them together on each lower boot to act as trijet engines. I coated the whole thing in Milliput and shaped it extensively. Then I drilled through the trijets and made a depression in the middle of each assembly to insert a round Lego decorative piece in upside down. In the bottom of these pieces I inserted googly eyes to give an overall turbine impression.

    PAINTING - Because I wanted to leave all the joints movable, I had to use blue as one of the colors so that if any paint flaked it wouldn't be as obvious. I succeeded in leaving all 11 points of articulation usable. I mostly used Pactra arylics, except for the Ral Partha copper I used for metallic accents. I added further details with a .35mm craft pen.

Corkscrew is a rarity among Junkions, in that he has an aerial vehicle mode. This is probably a good thing...a few more Junkions like Corkscrew, and there wouldn't be a safe place on all of Junk. Powerful trijet engines in his legs theoretically would let him reach Mach 2 in vehicle mode, but due to his overall lack of aerodynamics, he almost always spirals out of control at the Mach 1 barrier. In either mode, he's equipped with two long-range missile launchers with a range of 50km on his arms, two banks of auxiliary launchers with an effective range of 1.5km on his hips, and two sets of short-range needle blasters on his boots. The needle blasters fire bursts of monofilament segments which can penetrate most armor and temporarily disrupt an opponent's systems, but they're useless against force fields. Sometimes he can't find any monofilament and simply fires blasts of regular nails or wires which can distract an opponent. Corkscrew is addicted to "Anything in black and white where we beat the Germans and win the war!" He has yet to be convinced that kamikaze tactics are a bad idea. Like all Junkions, being blown apart only slows him down for a while.

STR 4  INT 6  SPD 8  END 9   RNK 3  COUR 9  FRP 8  SKL 5   Avg 6.5