crazysteve's Gallery of Resin Tetrajets
Nothing wowed me more as a kid than when I saw the first episode of the Transformers cartoon and those two Decepticon guys turned into those weird triangle jet things. While I was doing a certain kitbashing project I realized I needed to learn resin casting. Since the best way to start was to try something small, I figured the first thing I'd make from resin would be little non-transformable tetrajets like I saw in the cartoon.
The very first four tetrajets I ever did I painted as Skywarps. Back then I thought they came out nice, but now in retrospect I cringe whenever I think about them. There are so many flaws in the casting and the paint jobs sucked. I couldn't figure out how to make the nosecone and rocket part of the mold, so I made those seperately out of sculpey. Consequently each nosecone and rocket were totally different from each other, and they came out all irregular. It was awful, but for some reason I thought they were nice when I made them. I tried making little blasters out of styrene and I glued those to the nose. I gave away all but one of those first Skywarps. I'm embarrased by them, but you gotta start somewhere.
Thundercracker here represents the first major evolution of the mold. I destroyed the first mold and made a new one, this time the rear rocket, main body, and nosecone were all one piece. I didn't bother to put blasters on the nosecones for this version, and I made quite a few of these for some people. The rockets came out kind of rough, but overall I was satisfied with the end result. Some people have told me Thundercracker should be a light blue, but that's not the way the actual toy is colored, and I wanted to approximate the look of the toy, not his cartoon counterpart. You can see here I had trouble getting the little vent areas to form nicely, and the way I painted them only highlighted the screw ups.
Starscream is my personal favorite. I feel like everything came together with this particular paint scheme. I stopped highlighting the vent areas with black lines, and instead opted to paint them all one solid color. I continued using the mold without the nose lasers, but I began casting them seperately out of copies of the HOC seeker jets' arm lasers. I'd make a resin casting of one HOC jet laser, then cut the tip in half and glue the pieces on each side of my tetrajets. This was extremely time consuming. You might notice the size of the Decepticon insignia sticker is a tad bit smaller than the one on Thundercracker. I changed to this smaller size because I thought it was more proportionately correct.
I was making sets of Starscream, Skywarp, and Thundercracker for some freinds and then I kind of got tired of doing the same paint jobs. I wanted to do something different, so I painted some jets in the color scheme of the three tetrajets that caused the acid rain storm in the episode "Divide and Conquer". You know, those three guys with the most hideously awful color schemes of all time? I wanted to do tetrajets in those colors and stay as cartoon accurate as possible. That meant painting them almost solidly one color. As I was painting this first one I thought that doing so looked rather boring. After I did this dark green guy I decided that maybe it was best that I didn't stick to the formula as presented on the in the episode. That's why the yellow guy and the light green guy have the red stripes on each side.
I was heavy into resin casting during 2003, so I decided that I'd make a few tetrajets especially for the guys on the Yahoogroups mailing list that I'm part of. I did a little poll and asked who was going to the Official Transformers Collector's Convention that July. Nine people said yes, and so I made up nine tetrajets in a special color scheme that I'd never done before-Sunstorm! I made one prototype to test the look of the colors and then I sold that on ebay. I came up with some pretty generic packaging and I gave the nine Sunstroms away at OTFCC to the mailing list guys. Oddly enough, I forgot to make one for myself, and I still haven't to this day. I'm trying to make these resin tetrajet giveaways a tradition, so with each convention I want to make some in different color schemes and give 'em away at each convention I go to.
