Saving Rampage; and the Quest Against Flaking

This project has taken me such a long time. Basically because: 1. I'm lazy and 2. It's been a pain in the ass to find a replacement shell for Rampage. The bot is notorious for having a flaky shell, it has happened to several Transmetal toys out there, the most notable being Rattrap and Rampage. If you’re thinking of investing in Transmetals always check for paint flaking, and also another common problem with these toys is ‘Gold Plastic Syndrome’. Which is where gold plastic has been used and the stuff just turns to dust!

This story starts about 2 years ago when I won a boxed, complete, Rampage for an average price… not ‘cheap cheap’ but not ‘wow I'm flat broke’.

I had wanted Rampage after I had seen the Transformers club version of him and Transmutate. Plus, I owned a Beastwars Depthcharge. So clearly it would be terribly rude if I did not own his rival.

Why would you not want to own this big beefy evil looking crab? With his massive pincers of doom, mean green death stare, and that shell! So rad and shiny......

Or, in my case NOT so shiny.

I had the most wonderful surprise, like when you open a Happy Birthday card and glitter spews everywhere. Except this wasn't my birthday, and the glitter was the chrome flaking off the shell.

My Rampage suffered from the flakes, I was gutted.

A quick complaint to the eBay seller and I got half my money back, so no harm, no foul and some neutral feedback. I thought this was going to be a super quick fix, just take him apart and repaint the shell. No problem.

The taking apart happened but it took another whole year before I actually did something about it. This guy just rolled around in his box for a while in pieces. I wanted to soak the shell in white spirits as I was told this takes the chrome off a toy, then base coat it, add a plain silver chrome base, and wash over with translucent paint to try to give that wishy-washy orange and red chrome effect.

Instead I just trawled eBay for a junker. But no junker ever showed up with a decent enough shell.

Lucky a friend has done me a solid and hooked me up with this shell! I have coated it with a clear varnish, which has made him super shiny and also will help protect the paint work a little longer

*Cross fingers*.​

Pieced back together now this bot looks like a dream! I do love that angry crab mode!

With the extra parts from the junker I have fashioned my self a rather fetching necklace, no clue where the hell I'm going to wear it. The spare parts are headed for a Facebook group, no point hoarding stuff when there's fellow collectors out there struggling to complete there figures.

Now these 2 guys hang proudly on my wall locked in an endless battle!

Thanks for reading.

FYI: In this post I’ve used some really old pictures so the quality of some may be bad.

#transmetal #beastwars #transformers #rampage