MOC: Turaga Bakmei

 Today's Klaanon creation is Turaga Bakmei, often known as The White Turaga. He lives alone on jungle island of Bio-Klaani. The island was formerly base and home of the Brotherhood of Ämköö, a group of skilled Le-Matoran led by -surprisingly!- Toa Ämkoo, former admin of Bio-Klaani and a scumbag turncoat traitor. Bakmei was his instructor and sort-of-mentor. He's not the cute and a bit eccentric nice old man you find in the senior home. Alright, he is a bit eccentric, and good at removing invader's guts, liver etc. with some cool kung-fu moves.

Building-wise this was a one challenging old-timer. I bought some mask and other stuff fom Bricklink store Bricksy, which was excellent one with solid 6,5€ packing and shipping fee for EU. Now I have all the basic-color Toa Mata and Turaga masks except dark grey, orange and lime Rau - I wonder if that mask is rarer than the others?

In the story, Bakmei has a white Huna, but that mask is a super-rare misprint promo thingy, so I went with Nuju's light grey Huna. The most iconic part of Bakmei's character was his moustache and extended beard (you know, the overhang on Huna is a beard) inspired by Vakama's additional eyebrow in Mask of Light. I achieved that with a rubber band, 1x3 tile and a couple of minfig catanas. With them the character was done and the rest of the design was just something to make the facial hair sit on. The torso was rather easy. It is supposed to be kind of a cloak you would expect for a Kung-fu master.

I'm quite happy with the hands. The design is similar to Oracle's. The legs were pain though. As you can see, he can't really walk, but at least he's got those Matoran feet and he can pull a split if he wants to... Boy, I wish we had some more ball socket pieces!

The staff is quite a simple thing to finish the build, and the bolts in his hand are some sort of elemental energy burst. This geezer has still a few tricks left.

-Pate-keetongu