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.