Tuesday 20 November 2018

The paint-before-assembly conundrum


Meet Mogthrash Kilzogg. Mogthrash is a Bad Moon Speedboss, and his interests include speed, krumping, dakka and teef. Not necessarily in that order.

Now as you can probably tell, this Defkilla Wartrike is a bit of a conversion, and if you're interested there's more info about him (and an even more ludicrously sized image) over on my Deviantart. What I'm going to talk about here, though, is something that's become more of an issue the more I've worked on the new Ork models.

All of the wonderful new Ork vehicles have a lot of detail and most of them have quite a few very characterful krew models. Even the most obstinate hater of painting models before fully assembling them- and I place myself firmly within that proud company- has to admit that they're going to have to leave the Krew unattached until they're painted. However, with several of the new kits things are a little more complicated than that. Here's a WIP shot of the Deffkilla:


As well as showing off the parts that I nicked from the Speed Freeks box (hint: they're yellow) this also shows the bitz that I ended up leaving off until the model was painted. The driver was also left loose, he's just in his seat here to make the photo easier. What's perhaps not immediately obvious here is that his right arm comes attached to the handlebar of the trike, and that handlebar then slots in to the support for the dashboard. On top of that, because of the way the Boomstikks are designed (I think the idea is that that driver fires them by pressing the top of his toes into the triggers) they also get in the way of the driver's body to the extent that I was fairly sure that if they were attached, I'd never get the git back on. So in the end, the driver, dashboard, both Boomstikks, fuel grot and Speedboss all had to be left off the model. It would be very easy for an inexperienced modeller to either fall into the trap of building the whole thing and finding it almost impossible to paint, or worse, paint it with just the krew left off and be unable to finish building the damn thing! *

Do I have a point here? Well firstly, if you've not picked up any of the new Ork kits yet consider this a bit of a PSA- it's really, really important when building these things to dry-assemble them and make sure you're not going to get in your own way later. They look awesome when built, and it'd be a real shame for someone to accidentally spoil such great models. Secondly, I do think GW need to think a bit more about this side of things when they make models and instructions. I've been doing this for almost 30 years now (dear God, I'm old) and I still get caught out occasionally. ** I was really surprised that the instructions for the vehicles didn't have any 'paint this bit first' notes which those for other kits have had in the past, and with Speed Freeks and its coloured plastic the danger of someone falling into the trap is particularly acute. The whole set practically screams at the new player to get everything built as fast as possible so they can play the game, after all.

So anyway, there's that. I'll probably pop up again later in the week to bang on about chaos theory or something.



* It might also be possible to forget to attach the little 'axle' parts of the front wheels of the Shokkjump Dragster until the hull was fully assembled, meaning you had to drill a hole in the wheel mounts to get the things in. Hypothetically, of course....

** Not by the Dragster, though. Like I said, that example was hypothetical. Honest.

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