Toy envy.
Not many people know this but i'm a novice customiser of toys. Only did a couple here and there. Now back when i was a kid i had a friend that had this back in the 90's.
The Gi Joe USS FLAGG. This thing was humongous, like the size of a coffee table and it was VERY expensive.
His dad bought it back in the 80's for 4144.10 belgian francs ($109.99 dollars). That would be 332.48 US dollars now. Yeah, those people were loaded. I allways was jealous of that thing and 30 years later, i sometimes caught myself looking up how much they would cost now, just for a goof. For a second hand semi complete one you can get it for almost 3000 dollars. So i tought to myself. "You have some skills, and you have a Dremel tool, let's try to make one ourselves." "Maybe just a small one, like a amphibious assault ship instead of an full fledged aircraft carrier." So i looked up what the smallest gi joe fighter jets were. And it were these.
Gi joe TigerHawks. So i bought two of these and a Gi Joe GhostHawk.
Next i had to find a viable platform that already existed. And you never guess where i found it. Fisher Price. That's right, the company that made toys for babies made an aircraft carrier. Introducing the Fisher Price Imagine Next aircraft carrier!
Yeah...........disspointing isn't it. But it was the one platform that was close to 1:18 scale. And it had a lower deck that perfectly fitted the TigerHawks.
Now came the hard part. "Would i have to make a deck and a island (command tower and bridge) from scratch?" I figured i didn't have the tallent for that till i noticed these two things online.
Just some random chinese made aircraft carrier toy. Now wouldn't you know it, "that deck would fit the lower deck almost perfectly if the measurements were right" i thought. Now for the island. Every option i sought up from existing toys were either too big, or too small. Till i by accident hit this.
The kid connection battleship playset found at your local wallmart (which there aren't any of here in Belgium) for 15 bucks. So i looked one up on ebay ,bought it for 25 bucks, and then spent 90 bucks just on postage to get it here. XD "That was an expensive piece of plastic" i thought. And then i got to work with the Dremel and ripped all three boats apart ,put them together and SOMEHOW it turned it into this.
I call her the USS Ledger.
She can easily fit two TigerHawks on her deck and below because of their folding wings. (It's like they were made to be carrier jets. ;) )
And thanks to the deck modifications it could even store a Ghost Hawk below.
I realy had fun making this. And i was planning on sharing this on a Gi Joe forum called Histank but well......... lets just say the aren't realy tollerant if you accidentally fuck up making a profile, so you make another profile aaaaaaaaaaaaaand you get banned for that.
apparently you can't have two profiles (which wasn't said on the disclosure) and you have to be vetted by the administrator before you can even change a thing on your profile. I wonder why a toy forum has to have such draconian rules. Is the toy collecting/toy customisation business that competitive? So i decided to share it here with you nice folks who probably aren't realy interested in it. Enjoy!