Finally, this week I finished the last pieces for Fenrir, the armour plating's for the arm weapons. I am really happy with how the extensions worked. But the next time I do something like this I will cut away the bottom of the armour trim so that I get a single plate rather than the divider at the middle.
I am really starting to like the look of the chaos growths coming up through the armour rather than just sitting on top. This does however take longer both to sculpt and to paint so I will probably be a bit restrictive with this.
Well, that is it then, Fenrir is done? Well, noop, not really. As I was mounting the last laser blaster to the titan, Fenrir decided to take a nose dive, and not only onto the table, but the floor. That meant that instead of having a completed titan I now have a titan in its constituent pieces. Luckily no resin parts broke, some of my GS work got a beating and broke of, but other wise it was just the glue joints that came apart. Also the paint job was mostly undamaged, There are some small chips on the edges that hit the floor first. So now I need to go over all the parts, fix the shipping and re-glue the model.
As this is the second time it does exactly the same stunt I need to re-evaluate the waist joint. So far I have relied on a strong magnet to keep things in place, and it has worked when the model has been sitting by itself, but when I have interacted with he arm joints things has gone badly. The problem with magnets are that if they are subjected to a torque/leverage they quickly come apart if they can not stay flat against its mate (that is how you normally separate strong magnets). To counter this I used a steering pin in the centre of the magnet to prevent it from tilting and coming loose. However, lately I have come to trust in the magnets inherent strength and skipped this pin (I found larger and stronger magnets). So after Fenrirs first nose dive I re-introduced a pin for the waist magnet, but it was just sitting in the lower part and was not fixed to the upper part. So when I accidentally tilted the upper body it just rose up and of the pin and then rapidly onto the floor. Now I have glued the pin to the top part so that it can not lift of the pin, and the pin needs to be lifted out of the bottom part and that can only be done straight up (have not tested if I can separate the waist at all now).
Now, this has me worried about Varangian, that has a similar design in the waist and arms. I will need to take him apart and introduce pins to the magnets here also to prevent him from also collapsing. And I think for the future I need to come up with a better way of fixing the body to the legs and the arms to the body with out relying to much on magnets.
It would have been nice if the models could have been designed with this in mind, as the AT titans are prepared for magnets.
As soon as I can reliably get Fenrir together again I will take some finished picture.