More MB Joe vehicles!  Don’t ask me why, but the AWE Striker was always a favorite vehicle of mine.  It didn’t have much use in a battlefield setting, but for small recon teams and harsh terrain, it made a tad more sense.  My grandfather had a street-legal dune buggy when I was a kid, and I loved riding around in that thing, so maybe that’s where my affection for it comes from.  The driver that came with the original toy, Crankcase, was a zero.  He never had any kind of role in the cartoon, and given that the vehicle only held two people (four if you hung two off the sides), he seemed like a waste of a valuable slot when you were loading that bad boy up for a mission.  So I haven’t customized a Crankcase figure, but my Joe team hasn’t complained.

For a vehicle that isn’t all that large, this design took far more time to create than I thought it should have.  Picking out the right tires and  deciding the correct scale of everything was more time intensive than I would have preferred.  But by far the worst was the roll cage.  There just aren’t many parts from Mega (or Lego) that allow for a good looking tube-frame roll cage that goes off at all sorts of unusual angles.  I had to get creative, modify some pieces, and break most rules of brick building to get that thing right.  But in the end, I think it turned out pretty good.  I thought about painting the black parts green, but ultimately, I decided to let it look sort of cobbled together.  It is a dune buggy after all!

In the end, I was very pleased with the final results, and I’m glad I made a second one while I was at it.  It slowed down the build doing everything in duplicate, but it kept me from have to disassemble the first one or re-engineering the second.  Sometimes it pays to be slow.

‘Til all are one, collecting is half the battle.  (The other half is making things that should exist but don’t.)