Yay, it's Rotorbolt!  You might be thinking, meh, why should I care about Rotorbolt?  Well, let me tell you.

The premise of the Beast Wars was that there were two camps of Transformers stranded on prehistoric Earth, the Maximals and the Predacons.  But the thing is, the Predacons seen on the show weren't your normal everyday Predacons.  They were criminal outcast Predacons, even among their own kind.  So you really got the impression from the cartoon that all Predacons were all scheming thugs, even if they're not.  Also, that they transform into animals by default.

Enter Rotorbolt.  He's just a normal Predacon!  He's not a criminal or a thug or a warlord or a mad scientist.  He's just a Predacon.  And, as fate would permit,  he's one of the handful of Cybertronians that escaped Megatron's virus.  So he gets to hang around with the Wreckers.  He's got a problem, though, you see.  He's hung up on his reputation that he's stealthy.  And he is!  His rotors are as quiet as a sigh... in vehicle mode.  In robot mode, however, you can't even hear him talking (constantly, about how stealthy he is) over the roar of his rotors.  Why the decibel change?  I don't know, and I don't care.  It's just endearing.

And of course since Rotorbolt was never in the Beast Wars, he doesn't have a beast mode.  He's just a helicopter.

The original plan way way back was that Rotorbolt was gonna be made from the show-accurate Beast Machines Deluxe Class Obsidian.  However, that toy never got close to completion before the line fizzled out, so we're stuck with him being the original slightly-less-show-accurate Basic Class Obsidian.  Later, Obsidian was redecoed for the Universe line in indigo and brown with red rotors, which was veerrrrry close to Rotorbolt's colors.  Close enough that people used Universe Obsidian for their Rotorbolt, anyway, and certainly close enough that it guaranteed a real Rotorbolt would never be made.  Why would you pay buttloads of convention-exclusive cash for something that's 30% different from what you can buy in stores?

So this is my Rotorbolt.  I started with a Universe Obsidian, of course, expecting that I'd just strip the "energon surge" deco from him, paint his brown purple, and be done.  Ha ha ha ha ha no.  Stripping the paint took about 36 hours of soaking the toy in alcohol.  And even then I had to sort of sand what was left away.  Finally, I started painting the guy's legs, but it was then I realized that, wow, U-Obsidian is waaaayyy bluer than I thought he was.  It's hard to tell when he's got silver-and-purple energon surge deco all over his torso, but with that gone, and his legs painted a more vibrant purple, it's way more obvious that the guy's just dark blue.

And so, after having spent 36 hours stripping paint deco from him, I ended up just painting over all that anyway.  Rats.

I'm less satisfied with him than with Devcon.  Devcon's paint application is pretty even, but Rotorbolt looks kind of sloppy to me.  Plus those legs of his just do not want to keep their paint.  And, yikes, a good portion of the front of Rotorbolt's torso is just gearing for his transformation, and painting gearing is just kind of a no-no but it's right in front and a not-small area, so you kind of have to do it.