The assembly was harder than I expected. The model came in thirteen metal parts, including a front and back torso. Nothing seem to fit quite right and in some cases the contact surfaces for gluing were pretty small, which is not good for superglue. I thought I was pretty proficient with pinning but I was stretched with this model - and improved my technique.
The front torso was pinned in place simultaneously with 5 pins. This was not for fun. One for each arm, one for the waist post and two for the body. Getting that precisely lined up was tricky. In short I put all the pins in one side, aligned them all carefully and drilled some over-sized holes in the other side and jockeyed it carefully into place.
Once assembled it was obvious that a fair bit of filling was going to be necessary. A few hours later I had bogged up:
- left and right torso joins
- left and right armpit/shoulder joins
- top torso join
- waist
- hip
- head and neck
- wrist
- exhaust pipe thingies on the shoulders.
The figure comes carrying a sword, but since I had equipped my Prince with the Lash of Submission ability I decided to give him a physical whip. Rather than butcher the hand with the sword I carved a new hand for him holding the handle of the whip. The handle is a section of styrene tube that I formed the fist around. The handle will be trimmed to size and detailed further, including the addition of the lash and tails of the whip.
This is my first attempt at carving anything at all and I must say I am pretty happy with the result. The fist is larger than the original, but seems to fit the model really well. His thumb is a bit deformed looking, but rather than make it worse I decided to just leave it as is.
The big ticket item remaining with this figure is the creation of some wings. I found that wings were really useful for this guy in play testing, so now I need some way to model them. I have been studying the structure of bat wings (the things we do!) and figure I will make the bones out of a few different sizes of styrene tube. The skinning of the wing is still a bit of an unknown at the moment.
I initially wanted to have his wings at full extension like he was had just landed or was about to take off, but figured that this would always be banging into terrain, so I figure now that he will have his wings furled up at rest.
Back to Games Workshop again: why can't a company that insists on WYSIWYG modelling actually supply all the options for the models? Even old models could have some add-on bitz. How hard is it?
Here are some photos for this stage.
The Prince with one of his marines for size comparison.
Close up detail of the new hand.
