Alanyuppie's LEGO Transformers: Video Tutorial: Transformer Spiderplane from LEGO set 31099 and 76146 (Creator plane and Spider man mech)

Saturday, January 23, 2021

Video Tutorial: Transformer Spiderplane from LEGO set 31099 and 76146 (Creator plane and Spider man mech)

This creation was completed last year (2020) and had the honor of taking me a very long time to get right.

This project combined both sets 31099 and 76146 took me almost a month to bear fruit. .

Both sets were chosen for my project because:

1) they're cheap regular LEGO sets

2) their have similar color schemes

3) one of the sets provided the much needed ball joints at a cheap price.

The first few weeks was quite a struggle, since I wanted to make use of the plane propellers in this Transformer. So the design /prototyping process must revolve (no pun intended) around that.

One of the final challenges in building this creation was finding ways to connect the landing gears to the bottom of the plane. This itself, bugged me for a few days.

I think I spent half the time swapping parts around /redesigning to streamline the color of the plane. For example, initially the tailfins were dark blue single pieces, but I redesigned them to use white parts instead to match the wings color.

TRANSFORM!

The nosecone design is my favorite part of the build due to the extra complexity in folding the panels together, which is something I rarely able to apply in TF made from single LEGO sets that usually demanded me to be conservative in the engineering/transformation.

ROBOT MODE

While building him, I sensed a strong Powerglide vibe there.

I tried hard to align the propeller blades symmetrically for photoshoot, or at least not getting in the head's line of sight.

He has the most menacing head , of all the TFs I made from LEGO sets. I guess he's destined to be a Decepticon despite the cheerful/friendly color scheme.

As mentioned earlier, I streamlined the plane mode by having the tailfins to share same color with the wings. The dark blue fin parts from the set is now being applied to become the feet instead.

Initially I was pretty redundant in using precious ball joints to hold the landing gears, but I guess they need such level of flexibility to be positioned properly under the plane mode, and also tucked in nicely to the back of the robot mode.

The arms connector is probably the weakest link here. Initially the shoulder ball joints were held together by 2 light gray round plates. But for my case here, only one side is tight while another was loose (QC problem in LEGO parts?) . So I decided to substitute 1 gray round plate with a single piece blue round tile instead.