Okay, not 50, but a few. More than 1. Closer to 7. Anyway more Blowtorches than anyone really needs in a collection.
Like most of us, when the ‘’Heated Battle’’ 2-pack was shown for the first time, I decided I wanted to build up a small squad of HEAT Viper. Unfortunately, Rather than packing him with a useful character like ZAP or Sci-Fi or even Barbecue, big H went and gave us Blowtorch… again. Surely then it would have been a good opportunity to produce him in concept colors right? Wrong, we get the same red and yellow color scheme… again.
Ok, enough whining, back to the situation at hand. What to do with all the spare Blowtorches. Well, instead of packing them into a box and burying them in the backyard, I decided to give them a little paint and repurpose them. Hence, 50, err… 7 shades of Blowtorch.
Shade 1 is probably the most obvious: Concept colors. A while back, an early design sketch showing Blowtorch in tan and green surfaced in the interwebs. Dated 1983 (I believe), the image shows off one of the possible colors schemes that could have been. Several people have already done this custom, but since I wanted one for my collection, I did the same.
The original Blowtorch mold has been used a few of times in Argentina to create different characters. One such character is TNT. The Club has this character in their first FSS. However, I never bought him, so I made my own.
Another character that got an Argentine make-over is Back-Stop included with the PersuaderTank:
Fourth, I thought that Blowtorches suit was bulky and padded enough to be credible in the snow, so I made Arctic Blowtorch:
After that, I thought it would be cool to include Blowtorch in some special teams.
So, Night Force:
Eco-Warriors:
And finally, Tiger Force:
Oh, yeah, and I made some spare Concept colors Blowtorches for some friends:
After all that, I still have Blowtorches left. What to do with them? I was thinking that one could be painted in urban colors, another could be part of the Anti-Venom squad, Heavy Assault Squad or even Slaughters Marauders. So the project may continue in the future.
OB
