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"I really hate building these things."
This thought occurred to me tonight as I was assembling SM Drop Pod #3/8 (6 standard, +2 more customized for dreadnought delivery until I can track down a pair of actual FW Lucius Patterns).

Why was I building 8 drop pods? Because my Space Wolves have always been a 100% deep strike/teleport/infiltrate capable force.
Since 2e I've been using the rather crude (and inconvenient to carry around) pods Armorcast produced back in the 90's.
2 weeks ago the packs hit the table for the 1st time since 5th edition. The shop owner (a good friend) was mocking my giant chunks of 2e resin. So I jokingly told him that I'd have him order me a new pod for any squad that earned its pts. Or all of the armies pods (8) in the unlikely event of a victory.

This deal must've sounded great to the troops - for though they took heavy casualties doing it, they completely thrashed a Thousand Sons force.
So I had to have the shop order me enough pods to fully re-equip.
Free time on Fri/Sat was spent clipping/cleaning bits & priming.
Sunday was spent painting.
Monday afternoon/evening was assembly.

Bleh! If I ever decide I need any more SM pods I'll just EBay somebodies cheap cast offs, deal with the added effort to paint the innards, AND save some $....

So what models have you found that you dislike assembling?

Infantry holding weapons shooting weapons in two hands...

Oh, and the helbrute. Building the torso is really annoying and it always seems to have gaps in it, not to mention the effort needed to magnetize it properly.
And feth the damn power scourge.

The Tyranacyte. Never again. It’s like a drop pod but infinitely worse.

Necrons. Basically all of them.

HAIR long wavy hair!

Its a nightmare of curves and corners and a pain to get mould lines out of and always leaves me feeling that I've failed to get it all/gone over the top.

It's not tied to a specific model but anything with hair - Witch Aelves - Deamonettes!



Also split heads. Termagunats are a pain for these (and yet GW can make them from a single part for hormagaunts). Another part that just takes forever to look neat and to lose the join line.



Also anything like the Necron transporter - ergo models with lots of details that have to be build in parts (or just done with a really simple scheme) otherwise its nearly impossible to get into all the gaps. Some of the new high detail models like Necromunda Gangers are scaring me with how much detail there is in the GAPS between chests/tummies and weapons

Hellflayers. Fiddly as [Expletive Deleted].

Anything Necron.

The one thing I used to hate the absolute most however, were the Warrior heads. You have to carve out their cheeks to get rid of the leftover sprue.

IanVanCheese wrote:
Necrons. Basically all of them.

Pretty much this. Having said that, some of the Necron models have assembly that borders on genius levels of component arrangement, so simple and solid is their construction. The vast majority, however, are almost impossible to assemble, with the Warriors being especially bad. All those silly orbs that need cleaned up don't help, nor do the various little power cables all the pilots have plugging them into their machines.

 Valkyrie wrote:
Anything Necron.

The one thing I used to hate the absolute most however, were the Warrior heads. You have to carve out their cheeks to get rid of the leftover sprue.

I actually don't mind that - its a nice smooth easy to get to area to clean.
Now cables and gods anything with a crinkled surface (cables, plasma guns) those are the devil incarnate!

The Arks are especially bad.
You can tell they were designed by artists and not by actual hobbyists, because they look nice but are an absolute pain to build.

All those forgeworld mechanicus things with thin resin limbs on ball joints with oversized shallow sockets that don't want to stick together.

One of the arms on the tech priest for instance has about three separate linkages for positioning, each 2-3mm across, held onto by a 1mm resin 'pin'

And that's after it's all been cleaned, bent into shape in hot water, filled, and filed.

Anything with sprue attachment points on a concave surface (like the plastic Warhound's feet, for instance).

Off-topic for this forum, but I hate assembling Infinity miniatures; needlessly multipart, and they're all fiddly wee bits. At least the joints are square sockets now, which makes it easier to line things up.

I hate assembling Death Korps infantry with a raging passion. Everything's bent, getting arms to align requires putty and gap-filling, mold lines are in awkward places, and the most basic infantryman consists of approximately three hundred pieces expressly formulated to stick to skin long before they stick to each other.

I love the sculpts but they are a hideous mess to put together and really make me appreciate the simplicity and user-friendliness of GW's plastic kits.

Necron tomb sentinel from forge world. 20 tiny resin legs which come in two parts each, 20 secondary legs which are miniscule, 12 body segments which you can position as you please and looooong thin antennas made from resin.


It was a frickin Nightmare to clean and assemble.
The body needed a ton of green stuff and overnight drying to hold the shape, the fiddly legs were far too thin to support the weight of the body reliably so I had to pin the body to the base.
Then i had to position each leg with tweezers in a way that looked "natural" relative to the body position and the position of the other legs.

I hated every second of it but the result is stunning. Awesome looking model.

Edit: Sorry, I dont know why dakka decided to rotate my image

 Valkyrie wrote:
Anything Necron.

I have two of the old metal Wraiths, which I got about 15 years ago.

They are still in bits.

Every time I tried and glue the damn things together, they'd either completely refuse to stick (I've used about 4 different types of superglue on them) or else seem to stick only to fall to bits again a few days later.

It's like their Reanimation Protocols were programmed backwards and so they'll always try to disassemble themselves into their component parts.

Thought Eldar war walkers were fiddly little things with their legs.
Didnt enjoy finecast howling banshees (well getting them off the sprues anyways).

Old metal hive guard simply never got built. Woe was me.

Drop pods, if you get even the slightest thing wrong with the center or one of the up rights the whole thing ends up being wrong and it's hard to realize something is off until you've already glued things together.

Anything from Forgeworld.

Yo so we heard you like spindly bits made out of a super easy to break material, so we gave you all your ammo belts, tubes, wires and tendrils molded straight out with instructions to partially melt them and bend them into shape. When you break them you'll have that satisfaction of knowing the model you paid a 4000% profit markup on will now never look right!

Another for drop pods here. Built a bunch for a friend of mine.

Monoliths. Feth that thing.

The old metal thunderfire cannon.

Metal gargoyles (shudder) that wouldn’t balance and would snap off their flight stand every time they fell over.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
Hellflayers. Fiddly as [Expletive Deleted].

Yeah, this. I only broke one piece (which wasn't a problem), but 'glue wheel to next wheel' got old really fast, and the joins between the 'body' of the chariot to the wheels is the one of the worst ideas ever.

Daemonettes in general are a comparatively minor annoyance with their flat joins rather than nice sockets.

I for some reason can't wrap my head around the backpart of Valkyires, to the point where i left one lying around for 6 months in it's box after building the first one.
ironically i liked the ork planes though.

Anything resin - whether Finecast or Forge World. It might look great at the end, but the actual process of cleaning and assembling is a chore.

This is in the 40K forum, but I'll also mention the old metal Warmachine Warjacks for needing huge amounts of filing and pinning and the filling of substantial gaps with greenstuff.

 Asmodai wrote:
Anything resin - whether Finecast or Forge World. It might look great at the end, but the actual process of cleaning and assembling is a chore.

This is in the 40K forum, but I'll also mention the old metal Warmachine Warjacks for needing huge amounts of filing and pinning and the filling of substantial gaps with greenstuff.

Shudders in enforcer, melee weaponry, especially the finnicky chainsword!

Voss wrote:

 Excommunicatus wrote:
Hellflayers. Fiddly as [Expletive Deleted].

Yeah, this. I only broke one piece (which wasn't a problem), but 'glue wheel to next wheel' got old really fast, and the joins between the 'body' of the chariot to the wheels is the one of the worst ideas ever.

Daemonettes in general are a comparatively minor annoyance with their flat joins rather than nice sockets.

I see people complain about Daemonettes a lot but I'm with you, they're a cakewalk so long as you file the sprue artefacts off the shoulders and flat it out.

I hated putting together the wheels 'cause of the tedium, then when I joined the wheel sub-assemblies together they sagged. The connection from chariot to the pulpit is bad and difficult to glue and the connection from the chariot to the wheels is bad and if you make the slightest mistake none of it will match up unless you glue and then pinch them together.

So of course, I built five.

I had "enjoyed" metal models but my top 2 involve metal models:
- Land Raider Crusader: The metal side sponsons were utter pain. Plastic model kit all the way.
- Thunderfire Cannon: Spindly, needs pinning in a bad way, had to add a base because I was afraid it would fall apart anyway.

I do admit, I have no love for SM Drop Pods.
They are the only models I have received "short-shots" on molds where even GW has trouble with them.
They look cool enough when done, just getting good fits and painting is a wee bit of a pain.

I find the SM Skimmers I do not enjoy as much, the front fuselage tends to like to develop gaps when glued together and is VERY bad to try to paint the two guys in it rather than separate from the vehicle.
The stand join is very bad as well, I usually have to beef it up a bit with larger clear rod.

Resin and "finecast" are in their own categories.

I love the look of the Necromunda models, HATE building them. I've only gotten 2 gangs Orlock and Van Saar and they are not meant to be compatible with other GW kits or each other. And have to be built just right (arm #45 links to gun #46) making them about as much fun as doing taxes.

I had the same issue with Dreamforge.

I don't mind a lot of parts if they are there to give me options, but if you're including seperate neck bitz that only work with a specific head, then @#$% you.

My worst model to assemble by far is the Mutalith Vortex Beast/Slaughterbrute kit. It is an absolute jigsaw puzzle of a kit, no matter how you build it.

Heavy Bolter Chaos Marine... that stupid thing was a huge pain the butt for a stupid heavy bolter. The left arm only connects on the top via a verticle stand that never wanted to glue. The right hand connect at the wrist and the stupid thing was off horizontally by a full wrist legth to the point I messed up putting it together, but the pose was same as the box. I had to finally cut the stupid forearm in half and add a hair of green stuff in to change the angle of the arm to match up.

I've put entire squads together easily in the time it took me to put that one thing together.

I found hard to assemble the Inceptor of the SM. Maybe it is just me but after building my LR Crussader I was thinking they would be more easy, but they were hard for me.

I typically enjoy building just about any model, but if I had to choose one that was the most frustrating, I'd say it was the Ork team from Blood Bowl 2016. I think I ended up with as many holes in my fingers from spikey parts as I would have in a real life Ork battle.