About three years ago, a group of my friends came together for a collab based off of the ill-fated 2016 Bionicle Sets - the Toa Uniters. It took a lot of hassle to get here, but we’ve finally made it - the Uniter Collab has been unveiled (wooo!!).
I'm really proud of my friends and I for how this collab turned out, so make sure to check out everyone else's builds!! And thank you to Ari for making these amazing photo edits for us!
Building this collab was a bit of a journey, so I thought I’d take some time to document the development of Pohatu (and Ketar!).
Conception
I chose Pohatu as my Toa to reimagine. He’s my favourite Toa, but probably my least favourite Uniter set, and so I wanted to do him some proper justice!!
71306 Pohatu - Uniter of Stone has some cool elements to him - I like the idea of his “scrapyard” colour scheme (even if it’s a little ugly), and so I wanted my build to reflect that with some nostalgic old brown to balance the dark orange, and a few splashes of yellow and azure. Another defining feature of Pohatu Uniter (and his 2015 version, Pohatu Master) are his fully silver legs. I like to imagine that these were supposed to represent robotic prosthetics, so I wanted to try and capture that with my rendition. Early on I had the idea to give him a prosthetic arm too - maybe being involved in his “uniting” function.
The Build Process
Pohatu first took form on January 1st of 2022 (amidst other events…). He started out a lot scrawnier, but honestly a lot of my core ideas were present from the get go. Maybe to a fault, lol. His robotic legs are based around the Nynrah Ghost Blaster Piece to form some springy looking piston. I also tried to style his shoes to look a little like sneakers, to add some sportiness.
This was the first point where I actually considered Pohatu somewhat “finished”, and he even travelled to the USA with me to meet an early version of Alex’s Onua. They both look so malnourished…
Pohatu kinda just sat around in this state until the following January in 2023. Most of these changes involved strengthening the legs (which had previously used very floppy bar and mixel joint connections), and giving him some weapons. I kinda miss the boomerang I made for him, but it was way too unwieldy and lacked any good connection points.
Pohatu would remain dormant for almost another full year, not seeing daylight again until December 2023. I had grown insecure about his short stature and stumpy torso compared to the other Uniters, and so I made attempts to elongate him. The immediate success of this was dubious. Lol
The next major change involved giving Pohatu some big ol paws :3
I got to use some more interesting pieces here, like my brown Matatu and a Kraata Canister Lid.
We’re pretty close to done by this point, but there was one thing still missing. Something integral. Something that defines these Toa as “Uniters”. Something I’d really been putting off…
The Creature
I was really stuck on what to do for Ketar, the Creature of Stone. I had built most of Pohatu without really thinking about it, but the group was really pushing for everyone to have a little companion for their build at this point.
My first attempt was a little desert rat. I still really like this guy, but he didn’t really have any interesting way to interact with Pohatu.
The second attempt was something a bit more traditionalist, directly referencing the original Ketar set. It was ok, but just kinda boring. And again, didn’t really interact with Pohatu very well.
The third attempt combined aspects of both into a… roly-poly thing. Idk lol. I just like little cute guys ok!!!
Next, I tried to take some inspiration from the concept art for Pohatu Uniter, giving him some sort of saw blade snake arm. Or a saw blade tail? This one was a little too unstable though, but gave me some better ideas for Ketar’s shape.
One of the other ideas for Ketar that got scrapped was this set of large mechanical arms, which slotted over Pohatu’s arms. I really liked this, but I was really struggling to translate it into a creature, and it was starting to get a little too removed from the reference, and so ultimately was abandoned. I’ll probably use those arms for something else in the future though.
In the end, I arrived at this little crystalline critter for Ketar. I really liked the way that the head piece from the Power Miners Crystal King flowed with the creature head piece, and jammed a gatling gun barrel inside it to give Pohatu some extra firepower.
The Last Stretch
With Ketar done, all that was left to do was to tidy up Pohatu. The last changes I made were bulking out his upper torso, adding some cables and hoses, adjusting his crotch area, and redoing his mechanical arm into something more stable.
I also ended up changing Ketar’s position from an arm attachment (which was horribly unstable) to a shoulder mount. I’ll never not be nostalgic for Nuparu Inika…
Final Pics
Here’s some of the final unedited pics I took, without the edits!! Ignore the miscoloured pulley wheel. Could you tell it was edited (and could you spot the other part I had to paint brown?).
That’s all I have to say about dear Pohatu!! Thanks for reading
woof