Wednesday, August 14, 2013

From the Desk: When Disaster Strikes

As a painter, I really enjoy the hobby aspect of the game and take a great amount of care with the models I paint. Thus it is with some frustration that I share these pictures with you today.

I was headed to play a game the other night and included in my force was my Archangel. Now I've put magnets on the bottom of it and I was using my metal toolbox which it sticks to fairly well. However as I was crossing the street, disaster struck, and I heard the sound of plastic landing on asphalt. I turned and to my horror, my Archangel was on the ground, broken. After spending time collecting up the pieces and making sure I had all the bits. What follows is a documentation of the damage, and the repairs I did last night.

So here's a view of the model itself. It looks worse than it actually is. The left wing is broken, but it was a fairly clean break. There's a bunch of paint chipping on the nose and the wing talons.
Here's the broken pieces. As you can see, it looks bad, but the breaks are pretty clean for most of them.
When it landed, the nose took a pretty hard hit as well.
Here you can see the pieces that were all broken off. The one wing really did snap pretty cleanly, but it was still ugly to see. There were also several broken talons from the wing. 3 were broken off entirely.
Another talon was just severely bent. The pin held, but at the cost of surrounding area.
And here you can see another talon that although not terribly bent was really scraped up.
So the first repair I made was to reattach the broken talon on the unbroken wing. Some super glue worked wonders here. The only problem was I got a bit of glue on my finger and it tore up the paint a bit more. At this point though it was a minimal addition to the overall damage. The nice thing was that the piece bonded quite well though.
Next I reattached the tip-most talon on the broken wing. Again, it bonded nicely. I also made sure to avoid spillover glue causing more paint damage.
Next I attached the other broken talon on the broken wing. This went very smoothly.
Finally I reattached the wing. This also went quite smoothly and bonded really well. This is a view of the top side of it.
And here's the underside.
So here you can see my original 3 magnets that I had trusted to keep it held fast. That plan has clearly changed.
Now I have 6 magnets, and kept them strategically placed as far outward as possible. I'm debating adding a couple more in the middle, but I need to test a bit more first.


I'm leaving on another flight in about 8 hours so I'm not doing any further repairs. There's a lot of paint touch ups to do, but fortunately my painting diary will really help out here. All things considered, it could have been far worse.

Thursday, August 08, 2013

Angelius (take 2)

My second Angelius. This marks my second duplicate of a heavy warbeast for Legion. Nothing particularly insightful here. I had the idea of putting together an Angelius using a variety of alternate parts more to help build my own skills at making modifications.

Monday, August 05, 2013

Battle Report: CoC Event Tournament

Quick photo dump of the CoC event at my LGS. Mostly pictures of all the armies that were submitted for the best painted army competition.

This was my buddy Bryan's sweet Ret army. Love his colossal!
Another nice Ret army. I didn't get to play against this one either.
This pirate army was from another guy I've played before, Matt, who I got to play. He crushed me with a Damiano list. And by crushed, I mean it was super close. At dice down, he won by 1 destroyed army point. Doh!
This pStryker army was fielded by a new young player named Keb. He'd painted this whole army over the course of the last month. It's the first painting he's ever done too apparently. I was not only impressed by his painting already, but also at his poise during the game. He beat me by clocking me out actually. He had the presence of mind to play to the clock when he realized I was running myself out.
A circle army that I neither played against nor even actually saw in action.
Likewise, another army I never played against. I was quite amused that a second Archangel appeared at the event though.
Another army I didn't play against. I think all said and done there were 5 colossals/gargantuans at this event.
This was a really nice Cygnar army that I spent a bunch of time looking at. I didn't get to play against it, but between games I was looking it over a bunch. Honestly, for the painting competition, this was my top vote. If he'd had a jack heavy list, I bet he would have won best painted.
This Haley (from the above army) was really striking to me. The orange set into the cloak really helps tie the overall appearance together so well. Just really like this paint job a lot.
Like I said above, if he'd had a jack heavy list, he would have won best painted. Love this jack!
This was one of the custom terrain pieces that someone made for the event. Really liked this one.
A second one created for the event. Also pretty cool.


So how did I do? I went 1 and 4, and only cause I had the bye round. Otherwise I got shut out completely. However I won the best painted army with my Lylyth3 list, probably mainly due to the Archangel being in that list. I had a great time and really fun games overall. Honestly I kinda like being in the losing bracket cause then I don't stress about winning as the tournament goes on.