The Beginning of the New Chronicle

Although it's been four months, the journey of these two is just beginning. Nevertheless, reaching the threshold of 500 supporters is the perfect time for the first changes.

So I decided to make a few modifications to the design of my Matoran. I noticed that the tube I used in his torso is a brick, which loses its elasticity and becomes brittle over the years. And since the center of this element in my MOC was exposed to forces that could cause it to burst (this is unlikely to happen to new copies, but we don't buy sets to be forced to replace their components after a few years, right?), I decided to replace the tube used in the original with a pneumatic tube, which is significantly more durable.

I also made changes to the design of the elbow and knee joints. Although they did not require any changes, many people accused me of using illegal connections here, in form of inserting studs into the pin holes. The issue of the illegality of this technique is all the more questionable, since LEGO itself used it in many official sets, and it is hard to find evidence on the Internet that clearly indicates that such a technique exposes bricks to any stress.

Making changes to the structure would not have been the slightest problem if not for the fact that many bricks crucial for BIONICLE MOCs has been withdrawn from production, or if LEGO had introduced Axle 2l with stud to their offer, which would have solved many of the problems I encountered when designing both figures, but since I could only operate on bricks that were still in production, I had to make a few changes that I wanted to avoid. As a result, the Matoran grew slightly, which further reduced the disproportion between his height and the height of the Toa. The structure also lost some of its stiffness in the elbows, although with such small limbs this is not a problem. The friction forces easily prevent the forearms from falling. The articulation in the knee is slightly worse than in the case of the original design, but my Matoran can still be posed in many dynamic poses. I miss the slightly awkward posture characteristic of the 2003 Matoran the most, which the previous design reflected much better, but unfortunately I had to compromise on this issue.

As you can see in the attached photo, despite changes in the basic assumptions of the construction of this character's limbs, I managed to keep the look close to the original with almost unchanged articulation.

(Minikit is not part of the project)

As you may have noticed, among the project's photos, there is one photo of both heroes with strange black, orange eyed heads. These are the alternative heads mentioned in the description, compatible with all Kanohi masks from 2001-02. If you still have any copies of masks from the golden era of LEGO, which was the early years of the first generation of BIONICLE, you can replace custom masks of my design with them, thanks to which the whole project will keep the G1 atmosphere even better, by reducing the number of system bricks included in the submission :)

Here you can see a Matoran wearing Kongu's dark turquoise Great Kanohi Miru:

And the Toa warrior wearing Tamaru's lime Noble Kanohi Rau:

Remember, LEGO is no longer able to produce any of the Kanohi Masks from BIONICLE series, so I cannot include them in my project (in theory, I can but they wouldn't be included in the final set anyway), so the photos above are for illustrative purposes only and do not represent the content of the project.