I finally got around to doing one of the major modifications to the Varangian. So far I have mostly added things, placed them differently and so on, but it has all been reversible. One of the major issues I have with the way the model is put together is the knee and thigh armor, which for some reason are cast as one piece. This is bothering me as the pose I am going for leaves one knee joint very exposed, and the idea with the knee cap armor must be that it, like on the reaver, is supposed to move to protect the joint when the leg bends. So I have been thinking about trying to separate the knee cap from the thigh armor. This is however a very non reversible thing if it goes wrong. When I first though about this modification I had not seen the actual pieces and thought that it would be straight forward to just separate them with a saw. Once I had a look at the actual thing I realized that the curve of the armor would prevent such things. Instead of making one cut I had to make three cuts, two at an angel between the two armor pieces and one across the back of the thigh armor. I could then breakaway the thigh piece from the knee cap, leaving a the tip of the thigh still attached to the back of the knee cap. Using a 1 mm drill I managed to machine away the tip from the back of the knee cap so that it could be re-attached to the thigh armor. Once that was done I just cut everything down to shape and smoothed it out a bit. A few layers of green stuff later and I have something that looks like it could work. This could have gone horribly wrong, but it didn't so I am happy. The next step was to cut the brackets holding the knee cap of from the thigh, clean up the cut surfaces and carve out the ring structure on the side of the knee. The brackets will be reattached later on once I have the lags put together so I know at what angel they should hold the knee cap. All in all I think the surgery when well and I do not think my mended pieces will stick out to much compare to the rest of the model one I get some battle damage in and some chaos growths.
