The Roost of Turkadactyl

This is the official halfway mark for Spartember and the beginning of week three.  There are five participants who have set their own goals with a Forgeworld super heavy project. Le’t check in and see how everyone is doing this week.

So last week I left you with this picture of my Spartan Assault Tank in the loving embrace of rubber bands.

Now I have to work on the tank walls.  Thankfully I have a newer kit and the tracks are already part of the model.  I have to glue the gun turrets and the gun shields.  The gun shields were the most warped pieces in the kit.  After dunking them in hot water I also drilled holes to pin the shields to the tank.  I didn’t want to take any chances of the shields wanting to move back into their original warped position.

The guns were a bit of a nuisance.  The turrets were warped and no matter how many times I tried they would bend back to their original warped shape.  I made the decision to glue the lascannons in place.  The resin was a bit of a mess and I cut off too much, hence I had to glue the pieces together.  I’m indifferent if the turret moves so I wont lose any sleep over this.

One of the power cables wasn’t fitting properly.  I said screw and decided not to glue it to the model.  It’s on the bottom of the gun so it won’t be noticeable in my opinion.

Huzzah, let’t get this beast together.  I used the power of the rubber band to help the glue set.

Now for the finished assembled process.

Not all of the pins lined up when I glued the pieces together.  Another issue popped up to and you can see in the photo below.  There is a slight lean in the model and that is because the tracks are not lined up.  This was a mistake I made when I pinned the model.  You can see one track sits flush to the table while the other side is raised a bit.

This side sits flush.

And not so flush…

This is a minor inconvenience.  This is a problem of my own doing since I decided to pin the model so I can accept this fate.  It could have been a lot worse.  Another issue that popped up was when I was cleaning the model.  I was cutting the bits from the resin stems and some of the tracks snapped off.  In the end I chose to keep the “battle damage”.  I didn’t have the motivation to use green stuff and plasticard to fill the gaps of the broken tracks.  The Carcharodons have to make do with run down equipment considering their long voyages into the unknown so I embraced the chaper fluff so to say, or enabled my laziness.

My next step was easy.

I got a good coat of black on.  The next step will be spraying Army Painter grey.  Since the resin is grey I wanted the black on to tell me if I properly covered all areas with the grey spray.  So far I am on schedule.  The model is assembled and primed.  My final goal is to paint all the base colours.  I should be able to handle that.

Let’s take a look at the progress of the others.

Objective Secured– There is nothing new from NafNaf over the last seven days.  Due to the complications of his assembly I think he has spent all his free time scribing incantations to the Omnissiah.

Temple of Thutmos– Red has now been applied to the Spartan and it is looking sharp paired up with the black.  Now that the base colours are down Thutmos will apply some washes and do some weathering to the tank.

WeeMen– Siph has emerged from the warp unscathed and is still working on the cleaning process.  I truly feel for him since his Spartan is an older version, which means he has to attach the tracks.  It looks like the tracks don’t match up perfectly so the Techmarines have their work cut out for them.

Kharybdiss– no posted updates from Jerrod this week.  University has started so his attention is elsewhere right now.  He did get a good start on painting his Typhoon so I have no doubts he will have the super heavy finished by the end of the month.

That’s it for this week.  Stay tuned next Friday for the next update.  Thanks for reading.