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My modelling-fu has been rather unused recently, largely due to the loveliness that is Starcraft 2, damn its eyes!

Hence after I managed to pick up a cheap baneblade off E-bay I thought I would document the renovation. This will form part of my 51st Dunedin battlegroup and will likely never see the light of battle, however when I get to the painting I thought I might try some new techniques etc for weathering and suchlike... Time will tell how successful this actually is

So onto the introduction - Mnemosyne was chosen as a name as I felt referencing the Titan of memory and mother of the Muses of Grook mythology was a fitting name for a super heavy tank (also its an ace word and M hasn't been used as a callsign in my force yet)

The model was fully assembled when purchased and actually in reasonably good condition. The main obvious damasge is to the aerials and these can be easily replaced.







However, whoever put the thing together was obviously a novice or just wanted to rush it to the tabletop ASAP. As can be seen in the pics below the outward condition covers a multitude of horrors in terms of poor glue use and random jamming of bits together. I've managed to dissassemble the worst offending bits, but there are still some poorly fitting chassis joints that I might need to break or cover up somehow.







I'm not sure if it was deliberate but the sponson TLHB mounts are backwards and might need to be totally chopped up to replace. The resulting look is pretty neat, but in this case I might actually prefer the standard sponson look with the weapons sticking halfway out. It might depend on how hard it is to strip out the supporting frame.





Various bits might end up being magnetized to provide a more secure fixing, but otherwise the thing will stay vanilla. Thankfulyl the turrets seem to have been put together with a reasonable amount of care and the main superstructure is pretty solid.

Anyway. This will be an on-going project to say the least

I have a devilfish JUST LIKE THIS.

Glue is everwhere, I had to sand about an inch down just to find real plastic.

Good luck with it Looks like you got a pretty good deal there, apart from the minor things you mentioned it's in pretty decent condition.

@ Ordo - Yeah, there are some horrible gluey patches. I thnk I've managed to trim off the worst, but I won't be able to get all of it. However I'm hoping a good dose of camouflage will mask the worst of it

@ Valkyrie - Thanks Yeah its in decent shape for an E-bay win. AS mentioned in the original post the thing wasn't put together fantastically well so there are quite a few armour plates that don't fit flush, however I'm thinking again that some paint will be able to hide the worst of it.

I didn't notice to begin with quite how much flash had been left on the thing. This has now been rectified and the newly trimmed, sanded, fiddled and re-glued Mnemosyne is now feeling much more sturdy. I also added another comms array to the turret bustle. Better aerials will be added in due time.







I guess the pictures don't quite look that different to the original ones, but trust me, it feels better

The one major thing left to do before the paint is to fill the horrible gap that I was unable to rectify between the hull and the track unit. The other track unit isn't glued yet so I can more easily jam GS into the gap and smooth it off. I will also need to fill some other minor holes and gaps. A job for another day, however.





I have decided to keep the TLHBs more recessed than normal, as it was too difficult to trim out and re-set to the right depth. I also quite like the snub-nosed look. The sponson turrets have now been magentized. This leaves a bigger gap than normal between the turret ring and turret, but on the table I don't think anyone will notice, and the turrets are much more secure this way.

that baneblade is mean looking lol. cant wait to see it painted