This add on kit was a spur of the moment idea driven by a desire to buy a new toy, so naturally it proved one of my most successful projects and the first one I ever put on sale, with over 40 copies of the files sold as of summer 2020. The project consists of a set of armour designed for Transformers WFC Siege Sockwave which can turn him into his character design from the short lived Hearts of Steel comic book series. I felt the core shockwave figure was not worth the asking price as the armour he came with was somewhat lacklustre and insubstantial. As part of the line-wide gimmick he was covered in 5mm weapon ports and I was trying to think of a way of improving his super mode when I had this idea one evening and begun work blocking it out right away

I started by designing rough components with approximately correct shapes for the character design in order to test fit and test tolerance before detailing. Once I had shell components which I knew would sit correctly on his body adding transformation engineering and detailing would be far easier. These rough components also let me pin down the proportions before work went into details and transformation. This proved an invaluable step in working out the engineering as it completely changed my approach to the shoulder assembly. As such, I will definitely repeat the process with future add on kits I design.

Once proportions had been blocked out I worked out rough transformation engineering by laying out all the components in a Solidworks assembly. I knew from the start that the figure would not be able to transform with the armour on, and as such I designed the armour to clip together to form the steampunk Paddle-Warship vehicle mode Shockwave had in the source material. This was by far the most detail I had ever had to add to a design, and Solidworks is not ideal for this process, but I made it work and added large volumes of rivets and panel lines which in the end all paid off. I initially test printed the parts in the purple and grey I had present at the time. This initial print could not form the vehicle as some of the tabs and engineering was missing, however I wanted to see how the detailed parts looked and fit

After printing the test colours version I went back to the assembly and added a series of locking tabs and flaps, along with some additional details in areas I had missed. Once finished, I ordered a new darker purple and a dull grey in order to better capture the colours of the comics and match the base figure. While the match is arguable equally inaccurate, the new purple complemented shockwave’s colours far better. This final print version could successfully form the vehicle mode and held on more stability to the base figure as earlier prints had an issue of the forearm-armour falling off. I was incredibly pleased with this final design, and I made the files available online for people to make their own copies, a practice I hope to keep up with future projects