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I've been pretty lucky with my stuff. Never had any real accidents.

I've seen two heart breaking ones though. Years ago, when my current HE army belonged to my father, he spent about 40 hours building a custom base for, and painting Eltharion the Grimm and his Griffon to a beautiful standard. He even bled into the plaster that made up the base when he was carving it up with a dremel tool and hit his finger.

A couple weeks after finishing it, we were at the club, and the local "tool" was admiring it. While my father was on the other side of the room talking to some othe guys, he picked it up and had an oops moment followed by a four foot fall. The whole room went silent, because they fully expected someone to about to die. The guy was lucky, had my father been the man he was 10 years earlier, he may have been eating from a straw for a couple of months. Instead, he kept his cool, advised the guy it was best he left, and proceeded to begin the process to rebuild the model.


The second incident was at Flames of War night at my current FLGS. While one of the players was taking his army out of his case, he somehow tipped it over the worst possible way, and the entire army went flying everywhere. Hundreds of models got scattered around the store. Everyone in the store wept a little on the inside in sympathy for the guy.

Most of my models have survived well over the years, all the horror stories belong to others. I saw one of my dad's modelling group drop a 1/35th vehicle onto the pavement outside an event and it totally collapsed into a heap of pieces because it was almost entirely made from brass etch. Another I heard of rather than saw was someone who dropped a 1/35th Churchill bridge layer, largely constructed from plastic card over many months, down the stairs, that needed a dustpan and brush to clean up as well.

Not a big accident as such but I was paint stripping some models earlier and the end of my brush fell off inside the paint stripper leaving me with the brush handle. I guess the stuff was sostrong it had eated through the paint and glue holding the brush together. D'oh!!

The worst one for me wasn't really that bad (especially compared to some of the stories on here) but meh.

I keep my army in a clear plastic bin from JoAnn's. One night, as I was coming home from a long gaming session at my FLGS, I got out, opened the trunk, and carefully piled everything into my arms, since I don't yet have a way to carry my two cases + battlemat without just lifting it all at once.

It was night, I was tired, I was lazy...so of course, I used the hand holding my vehicle case to close my trunk door, paid no attention to the click I heard from the case, and started to walk away. Well, of course, the click was the latch coming undone from the bin cover, so as soon as I moved away, the entire box dropped to the ground.

Thankfully, there was no irreparable damage, but I did wind up knocking two of my three Space Wolves off of their Thunderwolf mounts.

I don't really have horror stories with my models, since I seldom play at the moment. The worst that happened to my models since I resumed the hobby is a few broken pieces on my monolith after shipping my necron force over the Atlantic. Though I remember when my stepdaughter was taking a look at my carefully converted and painted scorpion lord and let it fall (she was 4 at the time). It landed on the carpet and, thanks to the heavy pinning (20+ pins inserted within the model) and several varnish layers, wasn't damaged at all.

None of my models have ever really been damaged. But I have damaged my best friends models plenty. Fortunately, I have very patient and caring friends.

The first thing I did was back in college, back around 2004. My best friend and I had taken a little time off from 40K since 3rd edition and I decided to get back into 4th edition. So, my friend let me borrow his eldar models. Well, I left them in my car during a summer day and painted eldar falcon took a melta hit from the sun. Fortunately it wasn't too bad and I joke with him that it's battle damage. He still doesn't think it's funny lol.

The worst one was when me and 3 of my friends were playing an apoc game down at the LA Battle Bunker. My best friend is an art teacher and is very good at sculpture, so he made an eldar titan out of clay. Here is the link to what it looked like. http://awakeningynnead.blogspot.com/search/label/Titans (he tells his own version of the story here)

Anyway, the freeway from the Antelope Valley to the LA Battle Bunker is pretty bumpy at times. And he was holding the titan in his lap to make sure nothing happened to it. But he was also reading either the BRB or the Apoc book, I can't remember. And my car hit a bump and the book went down right on top of the titan and broke one of it's arms off. Now, this wasn't actually my fault as I can't control the bumps in the road. So, he took the blame for that because he was reading.

He fixed the titans arm miraculously with super glue or something. Then, in the first few minutes of the game I rolled a dice that landed around the base of the titan. So, I went to grab it and when I brought my arm back I broke off the other arm!!! I felt so bad! But he was cool about it, albeit upset.

Then a little bit later, I bumped the remaining arm and it broke off!!! I broke both arms off!! I felt even worse this time! But he was cool about it, albeit a little upset. It was one of those moments where it's so horrible, that you just have to laugh and not get mad.

Later in the game I knocked a metal obliterator onto the floor floor from my other friends army. It also broke apart. By then it was almost a running joke that I was just going to break everything. Like I said though, fortunately my friends are really chill and cool. I apologized profusely to them.

This has to be my worst moments in gaming. I'm seriously not normally this bad.

A friend's Old One Eye in a game and one of the little mouth-claws just popped off. It was a beautifully painted model, and I felt really bad about it.

Even worse, he had loaned some of his Tyranids to a local shop and the shop started loaning them out to people and then the entire shop went under and his minis disappeared.

I had all my Tau suits stacked in their sabol trays. They were apparently poorly positioned as the whole stack fell. I had about two dozen suits. Broke off most of the arms at the ball socket and broke every ankle.