Re: Classic MPC C-3PO and R2-D2 uber detail build

Well I did a test fitting of the grabber and cpu arms.  First thing first, I stretched out a piece of sprue over a candle to get a correct thickness for the support rod.  The nice thing about having two kits is that you can play around with one and know what to keep in mind for when building the other to make sure it's perfect.  The two kits I got off eBay several years ago.  The first kit was mint sealed in the box, was never opened.  The second, looked like it was missing a couple of small pieces (I think one of the foot rollers was missing), nothing was on a sprue and several parts were already glued together (very badly I might add) so I use that one for all my test fittings and messing around with.  I was actually thinking of scratch building a R5-D4 out of it.  Since most of the pieces I've used are from the head, shouldn't be much of a problem.  We'll see.

Anyway, after stretching the sprue and cutting off two pieces, I glued the support rods to the attachments and test fitted them in the badly prebuilt body cavity.  They look awesome when they are pulled out straight. 

But there's a slight problem when you attempt to fold it up into the body to store.  The attachments make the arms too big to fold into the cavity.

So I have two options here.  I can attempt to cut the piston holder from the kit down to give it room.  Or, I can leave it alone, and make the attachments separate so that they can be inserted whenever its desired.  Either way, since I have two attachments, I was actually thinking of using the other and opening the other side of the body cavity and use the part from the second kit to do so.  Not sure if I want to do that yet or not.  Would mean flipping the cavity part around and cutting out a new hole in the back of it, filling in the old hole and cutting the panel off the front.  I don't know... what do you guys think?