Weekend hobby madness

After finishing the Hive Tyrant I had only four remaining figures to paint in my whole pile of shame, according to my 2022 project plan. But of course the new Horus Heresy came along which added a bunch of things to my pile.

As I want to keep my pile as close to zero as possible, I decided that I would have a weekend of hobby madness and would prepare, mount and prime all figures I own. I thought hey they are not so many so probably I can do it... I was wrong :)

The goal was to have everything ready to be primed by Sunday lunch time and dedicate the afternoon for priming and mask taping the tanks.

There were a few projects that I had been procrastinating for years so it was the right time to tackle them... this is how my living room table looked like for 3 days.

From my 2022 plan I had:

• Legion Falchion Super Heavy Tank
• Sumothay (54mm)
• Balrog
• Winged Nazgul

Recently acquired Horus Heresy I had:

• Land Raider Spartan
• Contemptor Dreadnought
• 10 MkVI
• Legion Praetor
• Maloghurst

Therefore, on Friday evening I decided to start with the Falchion. Removing all pieces from the resin holder and washing them, then letting them dry for the night. That took already more than 1 hour.

After letting them dry I took a look at the instructions and I was horrified. Not because of the amount of pieces, that does not scare me, but because of the lack of clear instructions. It is just mind-blowing that after spending more than 200€ on a tank you get these four sheets of paper in black & white with low quality images and quite cryptic instructions. And yes, these four pages are all you got, actually considering one is just a list of the pieces, you only get three pages of instructions, definitively not for beginners.

After fiddling around with the pieces and cleaning them thoroughly I started to dry-fit the Tank. Another 2-3 hours gone.

I noticed that some of the pieces were badly bent so the next picture shows my fix, not cooking resin in a pan but actually warming up water and gently bending the pieces.

The assembly itself was done in batches.

Because the different pieces take a long time to sit well and I wanted to let the glue dry before next step it was the only logical way. It took me most of the Saturday and Sunday morning to assemble it. Most of the pieces did not fit well and require a lot of work, adjustment and green stuff. You can see in some of the close-ups that the exhaust are quite bent and needed a lot of patching.

Finally on Sunday lunch time the Falchion was ready to be primed. Including magnetized sponsors for easier transportation.

In parallel to the Falchion I wanted to mount the new plastic kits as well as magnetize them.

I wanted to magnetize all weapon combinations for the Dread and make them compatible with the ones I already own; magnetize the backpack of the Legion Vexillum and Nuncio Box; as well as magnetize the different weapon combinations for the hull on the Spartan.

There is one thing I must say about the new kits. They are incredibly amazing!

Not only you can pose them in any way you can imagine, but they also fit in place without any additional greenstuff or fiddling around required. The difference with the old resin kits is striking!

I mounted and painted a Land Raider Spartan back in 2018 and I can tell you that in the time it took me to mount the resin kit I could build five of the new ones, or more. In fact, I mounted and magnetized the Spartan, the Dread and 12 Infantry miniatures in the same time I mounted the Falchion. Instructions are super detailed, contain high quality pictures and step by step guide of everything so there is no chance to miss something.

The amount of individual components is quite something, I have to say. Here you can see the pile that is supposed to be a Dread and after the Dread with all possible weapon combinations magnetized and compatible with the old ones I own.

The Land Raider is even a bigger pile of individual components, but it all fits so nicely that you do not mind. I cannot wait to see more models coming in plastic and forgetting about old resin models :)

You do not even need to magnetize the sponsors because they are built with hooks on the side in such a way that you can snap them in place easily and remove them for easier transport.

I did not take any pic of the Infantry being mounted, but I took a quick pic of size comparison to see how well or bad the new MkVI would size up compared to the older models. In other words: how bad is the size creep?

As you can see, they are pretty much the same size, the main difference is slightly longer legs.

All Horus Heresy models were ready on Saturday evening, so I had the Sunday morning "free" for other miniatures.

While the Falchion was being still in the process of being assembled on Sunday morning, I decided to tackle the remaining miniatures from my pile. First, I picked the ones from the Lord of the Rings. I thought I could mount them fast and go for Sumothay next. That did not work out well.

Because they are the old models which is metal and resin, I needed to clean them A LOT. They required a lot of work and spent most of the Sunday morning cleaning all components and glueing them together.

After they were glued I spent another couple of hours applying green stuff basically everywhere. I run out of time to assemble Sumothay (54mm). It is right now the only miniature in the whole pile that is not assembled.

On Sunday afternoon I primed all the 30k miniatures as you can see below. Unfortunately, I run out of black spray halfway through so I could not basecoat the Nazgul and Balrog!

After letting the basecoat dry I mask tapped the tanks to preserve the black and prepare the tanks for an airbrush session. As I do not own one a kind colleague from the ITGC Berlin offered to help me.

This is how the tanks looked like on Sunday evening all my miniatures were mounted save for the 54mm which will probably stay there until 2023... I was happy but exhausted.

And this is how the tanks look like after the airbrush session. A bonus was the Dreadnought which we used as test model so I could learn. It was my very first attempt at airbrushing and it went kind of ok thanks to Mirek who guided me through the whole process.

I hope you have enjoyed my report on the weekend I spent assembling all* the miniatures I own :D

* only one remains