Toyworld TW-T01 Grindrod - Pictorial Review

Toyworld first made their appearance in December 2011 with a prototype of TW-01 Hegemon, their own take of G1 Megatron. Considered a daring attempt by the fans as G1 Megatron have a unique robot mode that's hard to be engineered. Personally, even Takara's MP05 Megatron failed on that

Pic Credit : Web

Skipped him due to the fact that I settled with Classics Megatron but Toyworld pulled this off nicely, especially considering it's their first product. And after that, Toyworld's next offering is the homage of G1 Throttlebots, all six of them (although the last 4 still haven't got any actual pictures yet)

Pic Credit : Web

The Throttlebots are more or less a G1 Season 3 - Season 4 version of the minibots, consist of 6 members which are Rollbar, Chase, Searchlight, Goldbug, Freeway and Wide Load




 

Pic Credit : Web

The Throttlebots made their appearance on G1 Season 4 The Return of Optimus Prime Part 1, joining Rodimus Prime's mission of rescueing the body of Optimus Prime, before being infected by the hate plague .And then again during G1 Headmasters series, defending Cybertron from Galvatron's siege





  
Personally, I think it was in 2009's IDW Spotlight : Metroplex that gave a fresh breath to The Throttlebots with their heroic act defending a secret from the deadly Sixshots. And that turned the fans to the Throttlebots again

Rollbar and Goldbug standing their ground

And for the first of the gang, Toyworld released TW-T01 Grindrod, homaging Throttlebot Rollbar. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm happy none the less




In Package

In Package - Front View

Here he is, the brand new Not-Rollbar. First and foremost, Toyworld improved the quality of their packaging for this compared to Hegemon. Nicely design packagin which somehow reminded me of Alternators/Binaltech

In Package - Side View
Box a bit dented during shipment

Simple design on the box, showing alt mode on the side. However if you notice, the green of Grindrod seemed different compared to the item itself (which can also be seen at the internet) which made me wonder whether it's a matter of the photograph or there was a version Grindrod in that color during prototyping

Bottom View

I'm gonna skip the backside of the box and move on to the bottom side. There's appeared to be picture of TW-T02 Aurora (Not-Searchlight), their next release which schedule to be by the end of February

Forgot bout the plastic encasing it

Unboxing, it came with the figure itself, an instruction sheet (not in picture) and also a biocard. Now, this might be considered petty but the biocard is really hard and high in quality.
















Ok, now let's get back in time to see how Rollbar was, just for kicks

Pic Credit : Web

 Okay, thank you, bye bye~

Alt Mode

In a way a perfect homage of G1 Rollbar (without the scenery stickers on his windscreen of course), finished with a slightly different color, green instead of the brown/green (I'm not good at telling colors)

I must I was suprised with the great detailing he possesses. Toyworld didn't go half-a** on him, giving fine detailing and a great paint job.

Pro and Cons, high detailing! But the windshields are solid plastic instead of translucent. That's my first complaint (small though)

Size Comparison

Here's some comparison shots of him with Voyager Classics Optimus Prime and Universe Deluxe Hound

Grindrod fits in nicely with the Autobots above. That's important to me as unlike Decepticons, I want my Autobots cars etc to at least be almost in scale with each other

Nicely scaled

Like the rest of Autobots car releases, he can fit nicely in Fansproject's G3 Trailer

Autobots, Roll Out!

Robot Mode

Gorgeous, that's what I think of him. He is nicely design with both complex look but also not falling into the new trend of Transformers with Skeletal body (Shellformer)

The spare tyre transformed into his gun in Robot Mode and can't be stored elsewhere. And I noticed that he has the same kind of light-grey plastics that Hegemon use.

Great light piping

He has a really clean robot mode with no kibbles interrupting his range of movement.

Another thing that impressed me was the fact that despite looking complex, he actually has quite a simple transformations (example, the leg).

It's nice how Toyworld manage to come up with such great design

He is roughly up to Optimus Prime's chest which roughly is the case for most Autobots Deluxe. It's better (to me at least) than the size of iGear Minibots which roughly scout sized.

With Universe Deluxe Hound

 Articulations wise, Grindrod is better than average. He has most of the articulations that should be present in today's standard Transformers toys. Few that i thought as lacking would be no ankle tilt and also the fact that his head is on a swivel instead of ball joint

Double-jointed knees

Quality wise, Grindrod came with  a really sturdy and solid plastics. On top of that, he isn't at all felt light despite his size and really stable

Okay, there was a rumor going on that Toyworld's Throttlebot will also be a combiner team which to me doesn't really make sense (but I remembered that Toyworld themselves declaring that). So, for the fun of it

Please note that there is nothing in the instruction sheet that implied him to be part of a combiner team. And the transformations above could be purely coincidental. I guess we'll see when they are all release