Ratchet’s minor ‘operation’

The green-colored Movie Transformers Legends Ratchet that I found last Sunday at China Square Central had a very minor defect.  I guess that was why he was ‘rejected’ by his former owner, whom I think is a collector and not a kid. 

I wonder if this Ratchet could be the MOC one that had been selling for SGD 15.00 at another toy store there months ago.  Or maybe this slightly ‘defective’ Ratchet that I bought on Sunday was being replaced by that SGD 15.00 MOC Ratchet in somebody’s collection.

Basically my green-colored Ratchet’s problem was that his fingers were too thick and couldn’t fit into the slots on his front bumper.  Hence his front bumper sort of hunches up when in his vehicle mode.  Initially I just forced his fingers into the slots and they did go in but it was very tight to pull out again if I want to transform him into his robot mode. 

I used my snowy white-colored Rescue Ratchet for comparison and found that even green Ratchet’s thick fingers couldn’t even fit into Rescue Ratchet’s bumper slots.  So it was confirmed that this was a manufacturing fault.  Maybe that’s why green Ratchet’s former owner rejected him.  Needless to say, Ratchet showed his low self-esteem when I discovered his shortcoming.  He thought that I would reject him like his previous owner did.

Well, I decided to perform a minor operation on Ratchet to resolve this issue.  But he had to go under my trusty penknife.  Basically I just needed to make his fingers ‘thinner’ to fit in nicely into those bumper slots.  And so I laid him down and positioned my penknife carefully before ’sawing’ slowly and vertically down the plastic.  Ratchet was brave and didn’t flinch when my penknife slipped a few times onto his arm.  He got a few very light scratches there but those are on the non-display side.

For his other arm, I padded it with paper before performing the ‘operation’.  I just needed to shave off a very thin layer of plastic from his fingers on both hands.  Each arm took about 5min, including the repeated testings to check if the fingers could fit nicely into the bumper slots.  You’ll be surprised that a simple penknife can shave off thin layers off seemingly hard plastic toys so easily.

After the operation, Ratchet went though a few rounds of transformations from robot mode to vehicle mode and vice versa to fully test out the effects of the operation.  He looked very pleased with himself.  He bonded quickly with Rescue Ratchet and the 2 are now inseparable like brothers, though in theory they are supposed to be the same character.  Since Sunday, the pair remained on my study table as my favourite toys of the week!