Horus Heresy - XII Legion Dreadnought Drop Pod

Crunchy McCrunchie-Face is complete, so now he needs to get to the fight. For this fight his steed will be a ForgeWorld Dreadnought Drop Pod. Now a bit of forewarning, this ForgeWorld Miniature is one solid chunk of resin. Word is they don't sell these bad boys, anymore. No listing on the site. Did somebody say, plastic re-make in the works?


The doors are heavy, with thick points for the hinges. The base plate comes in two thick pieces, with a little indent in both to place a rod. This makes it a little easier to fit the two together. The rest of the model is really easy and  straight forward to put together. The uprights do have a tendency to ship warped. A little work with the heat gun straightens them up pretty good. Be careful when you straighten the uprights, though, you might end up with a bit of helical twist, like I did. The Helical twist is a real bugger to fix, as you'll have to heat the whole model, clamp it three ways from Sunday, heat it up again, then dunk it in a bucket of water so the resins anneals/normalizes.

After all these hobby heroics, don't do what I did next.

Long story short, I was washing the resin and preparing it for painting and I got to find out how easy it was to snap the doors off the drop pod. Now I did say this is a really solid resin model. Well solid except for one thin little point on all hinge joints (see picture below).


To say I was pretty pissed about this, was an understatement. In fact I got so annoyed I forgot to take a picture of the damage. But that being said, I only damaged one door, so I didn't think it would be too difficult to repair.

Then somehow as i placed the pod to the side, another door opened and cracked through the hinge.
Grr. Two doors now. This REALLY made me unhappy. I was now faced with a full rebuild.

Time to crack out the Pin Vise, Magnets, Files, Emery-boards, Clippers, Green-stuff and a butt-load of superglue.
First piece to tidy up were the broken hinges. Starting with the heavy nobs on the doors. Now there are two schools of thought with how to deal with this problem. 
1) Drill out the hinge and place a decent size magnet.
2) Cut the hinge off entirely, with clippers, file the spots flat and then glue a big-ass magnet right where you just cut the hinge off.


Now for the kicker, fixing the thin little hinge.  
1) First you need to find a magnet that will fit into the hinge seating. 
2) I found the slot was not quite big enough for the magnets, so I had to shave some of the slot on the inner side. 
3) Once this was widened out, I stuffed the void with Green-stuff. 
4) Wet the magnet and the press the magnet into the Green-stuff and make an indentation.  Make sure you get your polarity right. 
5)  Now for a pro-tip, carefully pull the magnet out of the Green-stuff. Put a dab of Superglue onto the magnet and poke it back into the Green-stuff. The Superglue will speed up the Green-stuff hardening, making the bond solid.


Remember how I said the doors were big heavy pieces of resin? Well, because of their weight, fixing the hinge will only solve half the problem. So you now have to offset the weight with magnets in Engine Housing.


And then lines those up with the top of the doors and add some corresponding magnets.


Now some of you say this is ugly as hell, you're probably right. A little Vallejo Plastic Putty and some sanding should fix this up.

All in all, for something so simple to assemble, the hours lost because of a flimsy hinge really soured the Dreadnought Drop Pod experience for me. So much so, I built an Anvillus and a Kharybdis just to prove that I haven;t lost my hobby mojo.

More about these to come.

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