I’m not a paper craft guy by any stretch of the imagination. My folds are always sloppy and my fingers are never quite nimble enough to get intricate joinings. But when I saw James Fritzler’s G+ page featuring G1 Transformers-inspired robots that transformed and combined, I had an email out to him that day.
The Phase Bots Wave 1 and 2 line up are super-deformed bots based off some of the original Autobots and Decepticons: Prime, Bumblebee, Soundwave, Starscream, etc. But with later waves, James adopted a new core design that allowed him to do something more than just single bots, he could make Combiner teams!
What makes Phase Bots stand out is the superb artwork used for the designs. James is able to distill the essence of a bot down to something that works in a vastly different format, yet still remains recognizable.
Assembly is… not quite expert-level, but it will take you a few tries to get to where your bots don’t fall apart when you try to transform or combine them. Luckily, for the Combiner teams, they all use the same standard body, so you’ll get lots of opportunities to practice! My final team didn’t look nearly as crisp as the pictures up on the G+ page, but I attribute that to my poor craft skills.
James has also cleverly converted a Toothless model (from How to Train Your Dragon) into Sky Lynx! This model came together much easier for me and I had an adorable transforming dinosaur space plane in no time at all. The fact that these models can transform without having to pull them apart is impressive. It takes some intense engineering to accomplish that!
Phase Bots are free to download and require only good paper, ink, and a craft hole punch. If you’re looking for a fun weekend project, I’d highly recommend checking out the Phase Bots G+ feed and downloading a few PDFs today!
(Poplocks by Josh Buczynski at paperposeables.com)
