How to Alter your own Transmetal 2 Dinobot

Hello fellow alterers! Many of you have e-mailed asking me how I altered TM 2 Dinobot so his hand has 4 joints --->2 finger joints (still connected) with a thumb AND a separate joint for the sickle-blade fore-finger. This allows Dinobot to ~close~ his hand together so the "sickle-blade finger" can articulate separately from the thumb. Here's how I altered mine:

The first step was to get rid of that rivet they use to hold the hand together. As you know, rivets are a pain in keester to remove, BUT we came up with an easy/safe way to take them out. I used a drill, starting w/ smaller bits then woking toward larger ones, I eliminated the rivet head on one side while being very careful not to drill too deep to and cut the rivet shaft or plastic around it. Once the rivet head was effectively eliminated, I used a nail to push the rivet shaft through then once the head on the other side was exposed, I grabbed it with a needle-nose pliers & removed it completely.

The next step involves the plastic piece that's the Sickle-blade finger/Thumb. I'll refer to it as S/T from now on. I took the S/T piece and basically cut off the S (sickle) using a dremmel

tool. Then very carefully smoothed out the cylindrical portion where the S used to be attached, so you can't tell it used to be there.

Then using a completely new TM2 Dinobot toy, I repeat the same steps outlined above, only on the second time, I cut the plastic tube which connects the S/T to the fore-arm and cut off the

Thumb. Again, when I was done, I smoothed out the areas where the tube and Thumb used to be so you can't tell they used to be there.

At this point I have have a knuckle with thumb and tube connecting it to the fore-arm AND a knuckle with only a Sickle-blade finger. Before reconnecting them I painted them using a blue metal silver color paint and get those fingers looking like daggers of death!

The last step is reconnecting them. Of course the problem is you can't use a rivet, it's too short to re-insert now w/ the extra knuckle and besides that, it wouldn't hold things together tight enough w/o a head on the both sides. For this, I used a screw with a small head (not bigger than the diameter of the old rivet head) and very fine threads. Shown in the picture below. I carefully measured then cut it to the length I needed.

Holding the 2 finger piece, the thumb piece, and the sickle blade finger piece together very tightly I used a screw just like the one above cut to length to hold the hand together. In fact, the hand opening and closing mechanism is now more stiff than it was w/ the rivet. It worked very well.

It took a little doing and you have to have at least one extra TM2 Dinobot that you don't mind destroying, but I think the results are worth the effort. Good luck! :)
-Perceptor@unicron.com