Many thanks for your patience. I lost two weeks, really. One week I was at Texas Frightmare. Then last Friday I didn’t
have anything to post because I’d been at Frightmare the week before (when I’d
normally be building stuff).
That said... let’s move on.
I had most of the big torso section together, with some
extra details on it as well. I wanted to
get the shoulders done and also finish up the lower torso and hip
sections. I decided to start at the top
and work down.
The shoulders go together almost exactly like the head, except that the edges come together at the corners of the backing piece
rather than the front. I ended up
clamping the edges one by one (again, just like with the head) until the whole
piece was dry and ready to mount on backing.
It’s a bit of a pain, because the shoulder pieces are so large (almost
the size of a tennis ball) it’s hard to hold all the edges in place at once. I highly recommend having a few small, heavy
objects that you can use to brace the sides (I had two boxes of baking soda
handy).
While the two shoulders were drying, I cut out the two
detail strips. They’re the trim on the
shoulder pads. It was very easy to bend
these around my hobby knife and drag them across it once or thrice, giving them
a nice curve in each direction.
Helpful Hint—If you wanted a Chaos Knight,
this would be a good place to start tweaking details. It’d be easy to do something like I did with the Defiler to create either standard Chaos shoulder pad points along
the trim or a more Nurgle-ish decay pattern.
Just add any points before cutting the trim out of the template.
Now that the trim-strips were curved, it was very easy to
wrap them around the shoulders. I made
sure the corner piece was as square as possible to the shoulder corner. It took a few moments to make sure the
details were as tight as possible and lined up.
This would be one of those attention areas, so I wanted to make sure it
looked as good as possible.
Alas, this is where I also confirmed something I’d
suspected. This really is a paperhammer template. It’s all done off the assumption I’d be
working with material about 1mm
thick. Cardstock isn’t much thicker, but
this is one of the places where it makes a real difference. The trim pieces don’t line up. Everything is just a tiny bit too thick, and
it all adds up here.
Fortunately, I have a plan to deal with it.
Once these were dry I glued them onto the main hull
section. The shoulders are more or less symmetrical
(there’s a little oddness, but that’s from the assembly difficulty I mentioned
above). I spun the knight’s right
shoulder (left if we’re facing it) so the side where the details don’t line up
is in front. The left shoulder had the
good side to the front and the bad side to the back. I had to hold the whole thing together for
about three minutes, but there’s lots of surface area and the glue held fine.
This was also the last time I’d need to worry about opposing
force inside the torso, so I finally sealed up that bottom flap.
The lower torso’s a simple box. It goes together with no problem. The only thing is to make sure it stays
square and doesn’t lean off to the side while I’m assembling it. Once it was together, I glued it onto the
bottom of the big section.
Okay, now I’m going to veer away from the template
again. This piece on page three is the
Knight’s waist/abdomen. I’m not going to
be using it, for three different reasons.
One is design—getting rid of the “wasp waist” will actually pull this
model a little closer to the GW one. Two
is height—this model’s just shy of nine inches tall as is, and losing the waist
section cuts an inch from that, which also brings us closer to the GW model.
Third is stability—this is already a top heavy and front-heavy model. Anything I can do to create more a more solid
connection between sections is a good thing.
So this goes away.
I’ll need to adjust a few things down the road because of this, but I
don’t think it’ll be that hard.
Famous last words...
Last bit for now was the hip section. It’s the big odd-shaped piece on page
four. It’s important to note that this
isn’t just an octagonal piece—it also tapers in at the top. It isn’t difficult, just a bit more
time-intensive. Make sure to score that
secondary line where the upper half folds in.
I put one side of the hips together and clamped it at the
top for a few minutes. Then I folded the
other half around so it was open at the bottom.
Once that was dry, I sealed it up.
I had to hold it for a few minutes and tweak a tiny bit here and there
to make it nice.
And that’s where I am now.
The Knight’s entire body is done at this point. Questions? Comments?
Next week will probably be legs, armor, and then weapons.
Looking really good so far!
ReplyDeleteMany thanks. If I can pull off the legs, I think this is going to look great.
DeleteThat is coming along very nicely. Are you going to make weapons interchangeable?
ReplyDeleteI really thought about it. I'll probably scribble more when I get to weapons, but the quick answer is no. I think cardstock is too soft to either give me a solid bond or a lasting one.
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