Look! It's Duskwing!

[dragoness_e]

After I boiled a Seeker to death and recorded the results, I got another Classic Starscream and disassembled him (will document that another day). I took him apart a bit more thoroughly, so that parts like the legs wouldn't have air chambers in them and float around in the dye. I also left out parts that did not need dyeing; those that needed painting got sprayed with a light gray primer instead.

After my last experience, I was paranoid about exposing the parts to heat....

...so I took the batch of dye from my previous attempt and let the parts just soak in them cold. After a couple of days of this, it was plain that cold-dyeing wasn't going to cut it for all the parts. Certain parts--the tough, resilient plastic they use for the ball joints and other joints--suck up dye in no time flat, and were dyed too dark already. Fortunately, they're small, obscure parts that mostly aren't visible in the finished toy. The rest of the parts were ignoring the dye like it was so much water.

Okay, I was going to have to heat-dye the rest of it. This time, I used a double-boiler. At first, I just heated the dye and then took it off the burner before I put the part in the dye, but that seemed to go a bit too slowly. Finally, I just left the parts in the hot dye on the double-boiler, but made sure the double-boiler never got too low. (If you let a double-boiler go dry, it's like not using a double-boiler).

This worked. I had to take some parts out earlier than others; there appears to be three different types of plastic in the figure (in addition to the canopy 'glass', which I wasn't dyeing). The aforementioned joint pieces suck up dye like nobody's business; most of the rest of the pieces absorb dye at a medium rate; the flat, stiff pieces like the wings and tail surfaces resisted the dye and had to be boiled much longer than the other pieces to get anywhere near a matching color.

Note: the Decepticon decals are from Reprolabels.com and I want to thank the guys there for taking the time to write back and advise me on which background might look best for dark wings. Naturally, I disagreed and did something different, but I still appreciate the excellent customer service.

The pictures below are thumbnails; click on them to go to the full-size picture. The pictures are not of the highest quality; to get them, I used my old analog camcorder, captured the video to hard disk, and grabbed still frames from the video. The color balance on that old tape was occasionally a bit whacky; I tried to fix it up in post-processing, but some of them are still a bit oddly colored. Also, I forgot to turn off the timestamp when I was taping in the first place.

	Duskwing, robot mode, front.		Duskwing, robot mode, front. Guns removed to show decals.
	Duskwing, robot mode, 3/4 view.		Duskwing, robot mode, back view.
	Duskwing, robot mode, closeup
	Duskwing, jet mode, 3/4 view.		Duskwing, jet mode, aft view.
	Duskwing, jet mode, nose and cockpit detail.		Duskwing, jet mode, tail and engine detail.
	Duskwing, jet mode, right wing detail.		Duskwing, jet mode, left wing detail.
		Duskwing coming at you!.

Addendum

• Duskwing Reference Image, Robot Mode
• Duskwing Reference Image, Jet Mode
• Stupidity in Blue - Wayward's original picture that started this whole thing
• "The Only Good Robot is a Dead Robot" - Duskwing & Circuit Breaker, by Wayward.

Comments

[danielwitwicky.livejournal.com]

*leaps onto Dusky's leg and hugs* You look awesome!! Just get a new paintjob?

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! ^_^

[darkfire-blade.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, Duskwing turned out very nicely! ^^ After seeing how nice he looked, Starscream probably looks quite nice as well...I'll have to see if I can pick up his toy at Walmart some time...