the handclamp (otherwise known as the surgeon’s gloves, catcher’s mitt or crab claw) is an ingenious and brutal form of torture, originally devised by the Decepticons. it’s designed to take advantage of a medic’s naturally sensitive hands, inflicting increasing amounts of damage and pain over a long period of time.
specific designs vary, but constants tend to be:
one to three shackles around the forearm, making it difficult if not impossible to transform out weapons or tools
narrow bars that fit inbetween the fingers, forming a painful and constant friction as the hand is bound tightly against them
a Y or W-brace against the wrist, keeping it bent backwards towards the chest at an extreme angle
adjustable joints allowing for graduating degrees of binding
long-term use of a hand binder can lead to joint stress and snapping, nervous wire damage, numbness, hand paralysis, and ruptured energon lines, just to name a few.
As ever, such things tend to vary by continuity. There’s plenty of examples of a bit of a Transformer being removed, and all that’s revealed beneath is a basic mechanical skeletal structure of struts and wires that’s you couldn’t believe is ever supposed to be “exposed” at any time.
In instances like these, human analogies aren’t perfect, but its probably best to think of a Transformer’s armor, or exoskeleton, as their “skin” which goes over their “skeleton” – not something, generally speaking, that they’re supposed to “take off.” Take a look at what’s going on inside Ironhide’s forearm, for instance:
Or these shots of a damaged Megatron from the Marvel comic – you can see there’s no “head” underneath his “helmet,” just internal robotic matter.
Protoforms from Beast Wars suggest something similar – a basic endoskeleton existed at the core of a protoform, but the substance of its outer body, well beyond simple armor, is formed from living liquid metal. The protoforms seen in Transformers: Prime also follow this course – they formatted from featureless mannequins into exact replicas of Starscream, armor and all, all formed from the same living metal as if they were one body.
But you’re quite correct in also recalling an un-armored Overlord in the IDW comics, whose external armor was removed so his endoskeleton could be fused with indestructible ununtrium:
And even Transformers: Animated showed us that certain external parts of a Transformers body were armor that could be harmlessly and painlessly removed like “clothing” – witness helmet-less Bumblebee:
We would later seen that, although protoforms can be brought to life and given form, as seen here with Yoketron:
…in order to be “complete,” rather than this minimalist look, a protoform would have to be placed in a pre-existing “mold” that included certain key parts of the armour, into which it would then grow, filling out the rest of the body (this, then, explains shared body types among robots).
You raise the subject of movie ‘bots, and per the details given in the Transformers: The Movie Guidebook, they seem to rather split the difference between these two ideas. For them, the protoform is the core body of the Transformer, but it generates the robot’s external armor (in accordance with the shape and colour, etc, of the alt mode) from both its own mass, and from any additional matter it can absorb and reformat into living metal.
Similar to that. the Transformers: Shattered Glass prose story “Blitzwing Bop” has noted that Cybertronian technomatter can accept replacement parts and repairs made using conventional metals, plastics, and circuits, because a Transformer’s biology is such that it will break down any such matter and convert it into living metal. It also feels like IDW concept of a spark’s “animating force" factors in here – that’s something that’s only come up in regards to Ultra Magnus, and his spark’s rare ability to animate the very large suit of armor that surrounds his body, but it makes it seems that we can’t think of it just as something that a Transformer “wears,” but something that is genuinely part of them, animated by their lifeforce.
Cybertronian Database 