Oh, by the way, this is my batgirl, Trifle. I built her because I needed something worthy of my misprint Rahkshi head. Digging around in these forums a bit finally provided me with all the inspiration I needed.
I originally wanted all her fingers to be dark red but literally don’t have more than one dark red Exo-Force arm and couldn’t even find six in any other matching colour so her hands are mismatched. I could have used Ben 10 hands but I will vehemently avoid using those accursed parts as much as possible.
Glad to see that the bats are still going after so long! You all make me so happy
And may I say that this particular bat is looking absolutely amazing! Unique colour scheme, cool building techniques and so many little flourishes that really help her stand out. Definitely one of my favourite bats I’ve seen!
Trifle has definitely earned her place as bat #83. All that’s left to do is tag the topic with bats and batgirl, it helps for documentation purposes
Seeing the matron of the batgirls react so positively to Trifle likewise makes me quite happy.
I actually had a lot of fun taking your simple batgirl frame and adapting it into my own character. Once I had something resembling a bat-in-progress the thing just oozed so much raw personality that I understood why they became so popular. That I had a misprint part that I so wanted to use only made me more motivated to finish her.
Speaking of that misprint, I must have payed less than a cent for it since I literally bought it in a $40 bag of bulk parts at a garage sale a few years before widespread BIONICLE nostalgia really started to take off. It’s clear that the various hands that thing must have passed through didn’t realize that it was something special. I’ve tried looking for other misprint Rahkshi heads online but haven’t been able to find any other than an honestly kinda ugly blue/white one. I presume that mine most likely came from a batch made while transitioning from black to dark red and for whatever reason at least one from that batch made it through quality control and into a retail set. Does anyone else here own or have at least seen a similar misprint to mine anywhere?
Also, I had to make sure that “Trifle” wasn’t already the name of one of the other 82 registered batgirls, and in doing so discovered that @Enbeanie has used the word “trifle” in casual commentation more than anyone else here.
My mom looked up many recipes in preparation for this and the majority of them were instantly rejected by me for being so catastrophically unbalanced that they sounded outright unpleasant. I believe most of them were American recipes. We started making trifle because most of the time the only dessert people seem to bring is pumpkin pie and I hate pumpkin pie and cannot comprehend how six different people would all bring two pies each to a family gathering where variety is the thing that’s most important like whatisthisfixationwithpumpkinpiepumpkinisn’tagoodflavour.
@Monopoly, are you planning on drawing Trifle at some point? Past bat-related threads very much give the impression that you doing so is to be taken for granted, though I’d rather make sure. If you are indeed doing that I’m very much looking forward to seeing Trifle drawn in your style.
Anyways, I went ahead and took more pictures because it was fun to do so:
This looks like it should be an illegal connection but surprisingly the axles through to the shoulders are perfectly angled and aren’t being put under stress. I also originally tried holding the inika armour up with an internal rubber band only to realize that the wedge piece was already doing that job single-handedly. I then tried to repurpose the rubber band by making it look like a pair of shoulder straps but couldn’t make it look good and had to give up on that. The realization that the Chima minifig wings fit perfectly around the inika armour was too satisfying to pass up.
When I was first building her I couldn’t find a dark red Vahki hip and tried to substitute by building this monstrosity. When I couldn’t make it work I gave up and managed to scrounge up the necessary part and am very much glad I didn’t double down on this awful hip design.
Bat drawings for every single moc made have very much been phased out at this point, as has much of my free requested art in general. I’m at a point where I’m largely satisfied with my art skills and I’m currently working towards setting up paid commissions. Sorry!
Trifle herself is still looking great though, and thanks for the torso breakdown. It’ll be very useful for the Bat Reconstruction Project
That is fine. To be honest seeing the general attitude in a lot of those threads amounting to “New MOC, Monopoly will draw” kinda makes me uncomfortable even if you were doing so with high enthusiasm at the time.
No, the inside is just dark red. The black is only visible on the cheeks and the rim of the pinhole at the top. That there was no black on the inside was what tipped me off that it isn’t a typical dual mold as I once thought, my first assumption was that it came from Thulox as I never owned that set as a kid and the promotional images make it look like it has dual-molded Vishorak feet, so it having a dual molded head didn’t seem like a stretch to me. I’ve since seen actual photos of it and looked at the instruction manual and now know that its only dual molded part is the Barraki armour on its back. I now believe that this had to have come from 2005 and was an in-between batch made when they went from printing black Rahkshi heads for Bomonga to printing dark red for Norik.
I have to wonder how many Rahkshi heads the injection mold could make at a time. Assuming mine was from a batch that snuck through quality control it’s possible that there’s a few others out in the wild somewhere.
In that case, it is possible that the black is just marker? I’ve never heard of an accidental dual-colour misprint before and wouldn’t think it to be possible, though I’m admittedly not very familiar with how Lego uses the molds.
This method for angling the shoulder ball joints is pretty cool.
The black parts have the same texture as the dark red plastic and attempting to scrape it off will only damage the Rahkshi head as the only way to remove the black parts is to remove the plastic itself.
LEGO’s injection molds are fed using a series of tubes that force pressurized liquid ABS plastic into the mold. To change colours they simply put a different colour of plastic through the mold. I have never visited the factory and am only speculating but I imagine that they don’t clean the tubes when switching colours and just make a dirty batch to flush the residue of the previous colour out of the system. That is what I believe happened to my little misprint here, they switched from black to dark red and neglected to remove at least one of the dirty prints from the system before it could go into the warehouse and be packed into a retail set. This is why I’d like to know how many Rahkshi heads could be made at once in the same mold; if one slipped through, I find it likely that that whole batch must have slipped through.
