Well, of course the thigh pistons were not the only parts on the missing gate, the crouch plate was also on there. That meant that another highly visible part is missing. So I hade to dive back into the bits box to see if I could find something that could replace it without me having to build it from scratch. In the end I settled for a writs guard for a thunderstrike gauntlet from a knight kit. Problem is that the plastic is more clunky than the resin so I decided to shave it down somewhat. I removed the trim on the edges and rounded the edges of a bit. I also thinned it out a bit from the backside. Then I added a banner from the chaos war dogs kit just to fill it out some more. In the end I am quite happy with how it turned out.
Once that was sorted I started to assemble the legs and got the legs pinned to the base (it is still removable for painting) so that I could sort the rest of the pose. Then it was on to the dreaded cable bend. I first tried to bend just the cables to go from the body to the arms but I do not have enough hands to hold everything in place while I bend them and I do not want to glue in the arms before they are painted. In the end I ended up gluing the cables to the arms, then holding the cables in boiling water and bending them to the body. I think they are fine for painting. Once the arms are glued in I can gently reheat them a bit and make the final fit. Or I just glue in the cables on the body as they have some spring to them. Once everything is in place I will heat them with a hair dryer to release any tension in them.
The legs really do not have any great opposability in them and I did not fell like doing to much conversion work, instead the pose will come from the upper body alignment, the arms and head. I have not yet settled on the final pose but I think it will be ok. I noticed that I put the legs a bit to far forward on the base so the model looks a bit front heavy. But it is what it is now. I will not redo the base.