I was dying to own a Ultra Magnus toy. Nope, not that he doesn’t have any toy, he had quite a few and I ran across two of them during my collection era. But they weren’t right. I want the classics style G1 Ultra Magnus and the closest figures are Titanium and Classics with City Commander set. The Titanium one is hard to find now and his size isn’t perfectly right. The City Commander set is just too expensive to pursue now. So while I keep my hope on Hasbro to one day make a rightful one, I saw a member at Seibertron created one based on the rubbish RTS Grapple. That idea was almost fantastic and immediately made me go out and bought Grapple.

So, based on his idea, I started working to make my own. No, Grapple looked nothing like Ultra Magnus. There I need to make many customizations around his body. Here they are.

Head
For his head, I first removed his two tumors. Then added two antennas on each side. Those two antennas are from the tips I cut out from Cybertron Soundwave’s wings when making him to Skyjack. There required a lot of cutting and trimming to make the antennas fit well. Can’t be too long because his head needs to be in the cab in truck mode. Then I extended the length of his cockscomb by cutting it from Gundam MKII. Lots of challenges here since the piece is fairly small. Lastly I fixed his neck a little bit so he can look down.

Chest
The idea is using Grapple’s back as chest now. But since the back was quite hollow and flat, I need to add something here. First I cut a shoulder piece from Zaku Custom III and place it underneath the folding chest panel. Then cut the two hip armors from Gundam MKII and fixed them for the chest part. Have to be careful about the thickness here because the space is quite limited in truck mode. Last, cut the two arms out from L-Gaim MKII to beef up his stomach. Also need to watch for the limited space here especially in truck mode.

Shoulder
Using DOTM HA Whirl’s clip on machine guns, cut the two side pegs out and stick them on each shoulder so the guns can be clipped on. Cut all the barrels out and I use two Lego pieces to make the missile head. Glue them together.

Hand
Thanks for Hasbro’s all in one piece, swapping his hands are much more difficult. I actually use a different right hand from Great Mightgaine so he can hold things (still needs some modifications, though). Then cut and removed the peg for holding the crane and fixed it to fit into the gap on the arm. The crane can still fit there if I want to and the base won’t take out too much space. Now here is a side issue. If you notice, the panels on his forearms are gone. I didn’t mean to remove them, the plastics holding the metal pin broke right off like playdoh during my customization. What a pissy quality, Hasbro. In order to save me another 10 dollars buying another figure just for the panels, I shaped two pieces of plastics to put on them so they can clip tightly on the shoulder panel and still able to clip on the legs for truck mode. This distraction cost me two nights to fix it.

That’s pretty much. I didn’t do his shoulder tower thing. Planned on doing that before but then dropped the idea. Reason is then the shoulder panel will need to switch every time between robot and truck mode (if don’t switch, the arms will have very limit space to move and cause many paint scratches) and those two towers will make his truck mode look very funny. Painting him didn’t go that smooth either due to I made a critical mistake on spraying wrong base coat paints. Anyway, he is done and now I have a classics style Ultra Magnus that will make me happy for long. Enjoy the pictures.