Voltar (Iron Grenadier General)

This is the first in a whole series of Iron Grenadier customs I'm working on. As a kid, I always thought Voltar was pretty cool, despite his silly fuscia uniform. This is the way I think he should have looked in the first place.

Parts: Head (Tri-Gate Creations), Entire Body (SRO Iron Grenadier Officer), Pistol & Holster (UBP Steeler), Sword & Scabbard (SRO Destro), Submachinegun & Backpack (ARAH Voltar).

Supplies: Dremel, X-acto knife, Super glue, paintbrushes, Testors paints and Testors Dull-Cote.

Reference: I took Voltar's vintage look and tweeked it to my own liking. (Note: As I said, this is the first in a series of Iron Grenadier customs. Unlike the vintage ARAH Iron Grenadiers, all of mine will utilize the same body style. There are two reasons for this. First, I like the uniformity it brings. It never made sense to me to have an entirely new uniform, body armor and equipment for each job function. Most militaries run on uniformity. Second, around the time I was starting to work on these guys, large numbers of 25th Anniversary figures started showing up at Family Dollar stores for three bucks each. While there were no single carded IG Troops in that line, there was a Battle Armor Cobra Commander which used the same exact body, except for the lower legs which were more armored than the IG legs.)

For Voltar, I wanted him to look very similar to the Iron Grenadier Officer from the Toys R Us exclusive Senior Ranking Officers 3-pack, but a bit more grandiose. So I started out with that figure as the base and removed the shoulder strap. I replaced the head with the new one, which was ordered from Tri-Gate Creations. The head was painted to match the vintage figure as closely as possible. I then painted the holster black and superglued it to his chest, in a similar manner to the way the vintage figure had it. I replaced the existing sword scabbard with the one from the SRO Destro figure only because I liked the purple for Voltar. The shoulder armor, chest armor and the codpiece were all painted gold to match the helmet and wrist armor. After all the paint was dry, I gave him a light application of Testors Dull-Cote.