The Sneakiest Carp

So while I was at gamesday I was going to let the universe decide which I should purchase, the Stormeagle or the Assault Ram.  I figured I’d see which one they had in stock, and which ever one it was would be the one I bought.   I wasn’t expecting for them to have neither.  So I went ahead and ordered the Stormeagle.

Flash forward a week and a half later (not actually that long of a wait for a FW order) and behold my new shiny stormeagle in the mail.  Except it wasn’t all that shiny.  The thing was in pretty rough shape.  One of the cowlings for the engines was damaged beyond use and the other was incredibly flimsy.  My model had damaged the mold it was made in pretty bad as I was pulling out chunks of blue rubber and quite a few pieces were majorly off set during the casting process.  I know that there is a certain amount of work expected to go into a model but I always found it to be a little much to expect your customer to re sculpt parts of your products.

Anyways, I contacted forgeworld hoping to at least get a new left side panel and some lascannons, cause oh yeah, they sent me two of the same sides.  Its been quite a few days, and I still haven’t heard back.  Considering they have Gamesday Germany this weekend and GenCon in Indy next weekend, I don’t anticipate hearing from them any time soon.  So I decided to fix the problems myself!

Out came the ol’ bone saw as it’s affectionately known and I lopped off the problem cowling and carefully constructed a new one with plasticard.  It’s not perfect but it was good enough for me.  I also used Tamiya modeling putty to strengthen the other cowling.

Once that was finished it was on to assembling the rest of the model.  Now I’m going to chalk it up to how poor the mold of this individual model was but, this was a pain in the ass to assemble.  It took about 6 hours from start to finish to get it to where it is.  I’ll probably spend another 2 hours green stuffing it.  I’m not saying this is a bad kit, I’m just saying this was a bad batch.  I’d like to purchase a second one at some point and see if it is any better.

I assembled the floor to one side panel and the roof to the other and glued on the front ramp as well.  I decided from the moment I first dry fit the pieces that I wasn’t going to be painting up the interior because of the poor fit of things so I just glued the assault ramps closed.  Once this was all dry I mounted the two halves together with a series of rubber bands and a large clamp.

The rear ramp was tricky as I had to sand the sides and the bottom to fit.  I actually had to cut off the little mounting brackets on the back to get it to fit right.  This was disappointing but, it didn’t look too bad.  I decided to go with hell strike missiles if for no other reason than I couldn’t use the lascannons and figured while I was at it I would make it a missile boat and add the typhoon missile launcher in the nose.  I have the canopy glued up without the glass so I can paint it without having to mask the glass parts off.  Also the landing gear is all magnetized for ease of transport when I get this thing a case.

Currently it’s ready for green stuff and I can’t tell you how happy I am to have all the construction of this thing out of the way.  Oh, and I think from now on I’m going to have to start taking detailed notes when building a model for a wip.  I swear I had a lot more to say about this things construction while building it.  That could have been the frustration talking.