Stage 1: Feet of DoomIt all started when I walked into my local GW:
"Hey, how do you fancy an expense paid trip to Nottingham?"
"What's the catch?"
"Well there's a Fanatic Games GT and we're looking for somebody to do the IT work for the weekend....."
Well it sounded easy enough, so I signed up, booked some time off of work and then waited for the fast approaching date to come. Then the week before I got hit with:
"There's been a change of plan, we need you to ref the Warmaster GT."
"Ok..... You do know I don't play Warmaster, right?"
"Don't worry, here's the rule book, go learn it."
So off I went and tried to cram a new game system in just 3 days (With mixed results) after all being a Fanatic event most of the players would be well knowledge in the rules and chances are the worst I'd have to cope with would be a couple of 'Can x see y?' questions....
Of course it didn't quite go to plan. The weekend of the GT one of the players didn't show up and we were left with a odd number, suddenly we needed a stand in and I got the job of having my butt kicked in Warmaster all weekend (Well 3 butt kickings, 2 close games and 1 where it was over in about 15mins and 2 turns..... Still the extra drinking time in the bar was welcome.)
Anyway I digress, there I am in GWs flag ship store suffering from to many Elves and not enough Boltguns, it was time for some retail therapy.
2 Weeks later and the result of that therapy turned up in a little cardboard box.
Well not so little......
Now I've put together plenty of Forgeworld models before, they take a little extra work than the plastic kits, cleaning, trimming and bending parts to fit, but they are still pretty straight forward. So I set about unpacking and storing through a number of bags of parts looking for a good place to start, in the end as much as starting with the guns was tempting the logical place to start was the feet.
^Well that's 24 main parts to the feet, more parts than some complete kits have (And all the hydraulics piled in the top right hand corner) On the bright side the flash on them was minimal (For a resin kit and nothing that couldn't be cleaned off with a pair of snips.)
With the toes cleaned up it was off to the sink with them for a drip in some warm soapy water and a good scrub with a tooth brush.
With the parts cleaned and tried I moved on to the first dry fitting to try and get and idea of how to best position the joints, a local super market turned up a cheap wooden chopping board that would serve as a base and blue tac helped keep the parts together
Now it was ok, but I've seen a few Warhounds at campaign events now and they all seem to have the same (Somewhat static) pose (Except for one I've seen that looks like it's just tripped over and Ewok) and so I went looking for something that would give my Warhound more of a sense of movement while still keeping both feet attached to the base so the weight of the whole Titan wouldn't be left on one leg.
Well that was the dry fit, after playing with it for a while I realised the toes were slightly over extended for the hydraulics to fit them and so went to plan B:
The front slope of the Rhino helped raise the toes into a better position and after only a little adjustment I set about pinning the segments of the foot together, to try and get a solid join I drilled through the entire length of the 2nd toe joint and ran a single pin in each toe that linked from the 1st to the 3rd segments.
Now with the idea of the Warhound moving forwards and stamping down on the Rhino I had a better sense of how I wanted the 'back' foot to look.
Bring the foot up onto the toes provided a new problem in aligning them, solved by the shorter pins connecting joints 1 and 2 and the horizontal pins linking 2 and 3. This also let me leave the 2 outside toes so they would pivot a little, something that I hoped would help me when it came time to fix the foot to the base.
With everything pinned and most of it glued I moved on to the hydraulics, most of which come in 2 parts so they can be cut to fit depending on how the model is positioned. This turned into an hour long trim fest, cut a little off and try and dry fit, cut a little more off..... Then as I was nearly finished one of the parts pinged off across the room never to be seen again, this left me with one toe with no hydraulics to fit and so I went back to the old Chaos stand by of 'If in doubt add tentacles'
Well 48 parts done and I've got 2 feet mostly together, must admit I'm not sure if I should start working up the legs now or pin the feet to the base and add a few more details to them.
Or there's always a big plasma gun to play with.......