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G'day Dakka,

As the title says, I am thinking of getting a few of their APCs, however every review I have been able to find says they are horrible kits to put together due to bad resin and casting quality.
Has anyone dealt with them recently as all the reviews I could find are pretty old and wondering if things had changed or not?
Cheers.

Oh man that is a great looking APC I would love to read a recent review as well. Is there a language option on their site? I couldn't find one on my phone.

There is a language selector on the right hand side.
I might bite the bullet and order one of the APCs and do a review after, got some holiday coming up so will have plenty of time to fix it up if it is as bad as the old reviews say.

I've got a pair of their APC's that I ordered in March. The casting quality is absolutely hideous. I will post pictures when I get home if you like.

There are huge gaps all over the place.

The pictures on the site show the little individual panels opening and closing, but it's actually all a one-piece sheet.

All of the wheels are split down the length, which is fine, but they have an enormous, inch-wide gate stuck on the back. There is absolutely no way to assemble the wheels with the kit other than looking like gappy garbage. I wound up replacing the wheels.

If you don't mind doing enormous amounts of reconstruction on them, they are very nice looking kits. I had air bubbles on mine half an inch wide.

Cheers for that mate,
So they have not taken any of the old reviews advice and improved their casting (in fact sounds like its worse). Its shame as even a moderate improvement and I would have bought one (or five).

Ho-hum, makes me doubt even more whether or not to get that not-Chimera commander for a Sentinel conversion I got planned.

I ordered two kits from them about 16 months ago. I was horrified with what I received. The resin was bent, covered in air bubbles, had chunks missing, and so forth. I'd been placing orders with about five other third party companies at the time (Maxmini, Vic Miniatures, Curious Constructs, etc) and they were by far and away the worst.

I managed to put the kits together in the end, but it required copious amounts of greenstuff to fill in gaps, plasticard to brace components that were too thin, and even then, it was touch and go. When trying to get them to send out replacement parts/compensate me, I got treated like a PITA.

I'd avoid this company at any cost. It's quite clear that the components are being hand cast without any sort of pressure chamber/vacuum pump, or even a vibrating table to try and ease out the kinks.

EDIT:- They say pictures speak louder than words. Here's a few of the tanks after I'd done more or less everything I could with them. As you can see from the first, they don't shape up too badly from the top, but a quick look underneath reveals the flaws. The tyres were so horribly cast that they don't fit together, and the way they cast them makes it 100% IMPOSSIBLE to get them to do so. The pour channels go so far along the side of the tyres that you can't remove the excess resin without removing the side of the tyre that's meant to connect to the other tyre half. You can see in the third photo the plasticard I have running underneath the wheel covers to support them and keep them aligned.

Jesus H, that's terrible.

Thanks for the feedback and pictures, guys. I felt tempted to order a pair of APCs as well. They looked really nice in their website, for a decent price. But it seems it's a no-no, shame

Sorry, I forgot to take pictures when I got home, I'll try after work today (mine are still unpainted). The job Ketara did on the tires is substantially better than I think I could have done, they are that bad.

How would you guys feel about the kit if not for those horrible tires? Is it still to nasty to contemplate?

ingtaer wrote:
How would you guys feel about the kit if not for those horrible tires? Is it still to nasty to contemplate?

I too was tempted to buy heaps of these too(since they are cheaper than GW chimeras) but I did not read much good about them.

Ramshackle games makes some cool vehicles, a bit more 40k ish (on the site they are painted very orky but with another paint-job they could be used for anything and look cool).





They are very modular so you can ask the guy to swap bits and pieces out etc.

Ramshackle is ok, but only ok. I got a fair bit of stuff from them including the spider tank, and I am not super thrilled. The spider tank in particular had lots of bubbles replacing detail and flash bits thick enough that removing it tended to break the brittle resin nearby. And their resin is really brittle, and rather stinky. Their blockier bits were pretty good though, useful for ork trukks and the like.

As an ork playa, I got a back of random goodies from Curtis at Ramshackle for conversions, and it's ideal for us. I'm not sure if I'd use it for imperial guard but for orks/post apoc, which it's actually designed for, it's good stuff and bloody cheap.

ingtaer wrote:
How would you guys feel about the kit if not for those horrible tires? Is it still to nasty to contemplate?

You see all those dots in the second picture? Those are air bubbles. The cannons I've put on mine and mounting plate are Maxmini, which is why they look half-decent. The actual turrets I got were wonky and dire.

I could genuinely cast better quality than what this chap sends out as finished product myself in my room. The tanks have a nice aesthetic, but you reach a point where it would only be slightly more effort to build the design yourself out of plasticard then to buy and repair what Warchimera sends you.

With regards to Ramshackle, the resin he uses is kind of heavy (it's difficult to describe), and it's not on par quality with what many other companies put out. Having said that, it's perfectly alright stuff, and if you get a defective piece, Curtis will replace it. I'd take Ramshackle over Warchimera any day.

Here are the 2 APC's I got. One was a lot worse than the other. I started assembly on these and then once I saw the tires, abandoned them and just put them in a box.

Here is the gap between the armor over the wheels and the main body. It took an enormous amount of water/heat retreatment just to get them "this good":


I'd guess the gap is 3-4mm. One of the top panels had a pretty significant chunk missing due to an air bubble.


That's one of the air bubbles, which leaves a lot of detail that needs to be reconstructed. Note also that the little individual hatches are all one piece, when the preview image on the website indicates they are individual panels:



Size reference for that missing chunk:


another air bubble.


Here's what the hatch one on one of them looked like.


Here's what the hatch should look like. Fair warning, even the picture on the main site looks pretty rouch once you know what to look for.


So, these are all pretty annoying, but none of them are really "problems". Filling the gaps between the panel lines is not super hard. Wrapping some wire around a rod to fix the hatch is annoying, but not hard. Reconstructing that one missing chunk on the top hatch is a little difficult but not super hard, although it's super dishonestly advertised.



... And then we come to the wheels.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
The wheels on this APC are what kill the whole kit. They are poorly cast and conceptually flawed beyond repair. The way they are designed, molded, and cast simply cannot produce a usable product. I'm not sure that just posting these pictures will adequately convey the difficulties they present in assembly, but it is essentially impossible to assemble these wheels in a way that looks good.

First, there is an enormous gate which is attacked very far up on the wheels. It is probably impossible to remove this much resin without using a dremel tool, and if you use a dremel tool, it's probably impossible to keep the surfaces of the wheel totally flat. Keep in mind each wheel is split, so you will need to repeat this 12 times per model. Even if you do a totally perfect job, they still don't line up quite right.

Here's how they come in the package:



Some of my wheels were fused together:



Note the paper thin casting on one of the wheels. About half of them are like that.


After you trim off the gate, you're left with something that looks like this:



Those raised ridges on the reverse side? I have no idea what function they are supposed to serve. On first glace, it looks like they are intended to be used to fit the halves together, but they're too long. The wheels will not fit together unless you trim them.



Once you get those pieces snipped so they fit, you probably wind up with something like this:



The wheels are not fit for sale, and if you have an APC, the wheels are half the vehicle. I think I can reasonably say this is the worst kit I've ever bought, quality wise.

Is it worth the money? Well, you tell me. When I bought them I paid $55USD shipped. At that price, I could surely have gotten 2 new in box Chimeras off Ebay. You also have to factor in the cost of replacing the wheels, because the ones it comes with cannot be assembled in a way that makes them look good. I thought the kits were sort of unique looking, but there are other companies who make APC's that won't take a fraction of the work to make usable.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

Cheers for that, so the long and the short is to avoid like the plague.
Thanks for all the links, super helpful.
Its a shame that Warchimera couldn't be bothered to invest in some vacuum casting kit as it is a nice looking model other than those tires, what on earth were they thinking making a mold like that! real amateur stuff.

ingtaer wrote:
what on earth were they thinking making a mold like that! real amateur stuff.

To be fair, they likely are amateurs. A garage setup isn't hard, and it's likely a couple of friends who made a few things and decided to sell them online. That's how most of these companies start up and operate, and very few make their living off it.

Thanks Ouze! After seeing that trainwreck I've also made up my mind, as small a purchase as the APC commander may be, I'm totes not going to risk it with quality like that!

Ouze wrote:
Here are the 2 APC's I got. One was a lot worse than the other. I started assembly on these and then once I saw the tires, abandoned them and just put them in a box.

Here is the gap between the armor over the wheels and the main body. It took an enormous amount of water/heat retreatment just to get them "this good":

Spoiler:

I'd guess the gap is 3-4mm. One of the top panels had a pretty significant chunk missing due to an air bubble.

I'm amazed you were able to get them that good quite frankly. My panels actually came in several pieces, with air bubbles to boot. Hence the plasticard support, and a crapload of greenstuff.

Well, I paid for them, so my options are to bin them or fix them. I'm going to go with fixing them since I have a day off.

If you already have these and have not assembled them, or decided you absolutely MUST have them, the Stinger wheels from Ramshackle Games are a very close match in height and width to the originals. They're about $1 apiece USD. I happened to have 12 on hand already because I once planned to use them for buggies and then went a different way; if I get this done I'll post pictures.

 -Loki- wrote:

ingtaer wrote:
what on earth were they thinking making a mold like that! real amateur stuff.

To be fair, they likely are amateurs. A garage setup isn't hard, and it's likely a couple of friends who made a few things and decided to sell them online. That's how most of these companies start up and operate, and very few make their living off it.

Still, QC isn't that hard, and those wheel gates are ridiculous. I was once an amateur too, and I would have cut up those molds and started over once I tried to put those wheels together. It is one thing to make a mistake and try again, and quite another to make a mistake and say 'screw it' and sell it anyway.

Dragging this thread back from the dead (with MOD permission).

So I recently came into possession of the Hammer APC due to a long and not very interesting story and thought I would relate my experiences with both Warchimera and the kit itself. Unfortunately my camera ate the unboxing pics but I will include some from later on.

An order was placed and paid using paypal, confirmation of payment was received and then silence. Contacted the company 10 days later and garnered no reply, a week later I send another message asking what is going on and receive back a tracking number (nothing else, just a tracking number which incidentally never worked on either NZ posts site or the Polish one).

Sixteen days later I got the package. The packing of which was substandard at best, the kit is about the same size as a GW Rhino and it came in a box that was around four times the needed volume with no packaging bar a small amount of screwed up brown paper. Amazingly the only damage was one of the tire halves was snapped in half.

So, the kit itself. Well the tires are still as bad as outlined above and promptly went in the bin (I had already bought some from Zinge expecting this), as for the rest I must confess to being pleasantly surprised, it is not in anyway shape or form a good kit there are still bubbles and warping all over the place but I was expecting far worse.

Pics, these were taken after about six hours of remedial work;
Overview of pieces.


Front view, the dark mass in the glacis is a piece of GW sprue that has been used to bulk out the resin.


Right side showing warping of guard (this after four hot water treatments).


Left side is better.


Rear showing warping of the crew compartment.


Turret.


Conclusion;
I am not overly unhappy with the model as I was expecting far worse and that is damning with faint praise if ever there was. I was less impressed with my interaction with the company as I cannot stand rudeness from people I have given money to (in general actually).
Overall rating 3/10 would not purge with again.