Archangel: Trimming and Disappointment

Ok, first the good news. I got some solid progress in this week on assembling the Archangel. Here you can obviously see a big chunk of assembly in getting the main body attached to the base along with the back half of the head, the left leg and leg chitin, and the upper half of the tail. I've done the vast majority of the gap filling as well which really feels good. Not pictured here, but I also got the upper and lower half of the head put together but didn't get them attached to the neck yet. Ok, good news over. Let's take a look at the bad news.

In my "quick scan" of the parts in the store and from before I totally missed a major problem: one of the claws on the wings is entirely missing. You can see it here. There appears to be a small hole as if to receive a pin, but there's no claw in the kit to go there. My plan at this point is to try to sculpt one myself. A friend of mine classified this project as a "collaborative sculpting experience" which is turning out to be somewhat true. In any case, I'm mildly annoyed but not so much that I intend to delay progress by trying to request a replacement wing. I'd rather take this as a challenge in order to strengthen my sculpting skills.

The tail had a bit of a problem as well. At first glance it looks like a major issue, but it turns out this miscast is actually along the lower side of the tail and sort of blends into the surrounding base. I did some quick greenstuff work to smooth it out and then once it was attached to the main body and base it's basically unnoticeable.

And what do we have here? Nasty mold lines. This is actually the more frustrating thing about the wings to me. It's going to take a while to clean these up so that I'm sufficiently happy.

More on the wings, even though one claw was flat out missing, several of the other claws aren't really much better. Due to how the flashing braced the whole thing, the claws really were a mess. I just did some basic trimming to start but there's going to be a lot more work to do in cleaning these up. I may even just surrender on them, sculpt a whole new set, and replace the stock ones. I've got to think that one over though.