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Hellow guys

Well my day just turned to Awesome the fedex guy juat arrived with a box from forgeworld and after a few bribes and loving kisses and so on I was allowed to wrap it and my wife said make sure everything is inside it. So now I know for christmass I got the chaos reaver titan thing, then she took it wrapped it and said now to wait for christmass....so life is a tease but still.......gahhhhh

Ok from the looks of ings it is the body back shooty thing the claw and the gatling gun thing. I only ever built a war hound several times but am competely lost here..... What do I pin how do you prime and clean this thing... Time to get ready tp lock my door for christmass. Lol any and all advice would be loved guys.

With any large, resin model do the following:

1) Check all parts are present and correctly cast. Check them off as you go, make a list of ones you may need replacing to get photographs and list for the FW customer support team. They're very good at replacing parts, and from recent experience, photographs of faults help them ensure the replacements do not have the same issues, or at least not so bad.

2) Wash all parts in warm water with dish soap and a toothbrush to scrub them.

3) Tool check. You WILL need decent files, sandpaper/sanding sticks, a good model saw, good new x-acto blades, superglue, later epoxy adhesive for large joints.

4) Clean up parts individually. Large casting gates should be sawn off (wear a mask), nubs sanded and or filed down (again, wear a mask). If using a dremel to grind things down, again, wear a mask. Resin dust is not toxic but it is a small particulate that will bugger up your lungs something chronic. I happily airbrush without a mask for the most part, but even I slap on a filter if I'm pissing about with resin.

5) Work parts in sub assemblies. Decide on a pose first, and work to it, ensuring the pose is workable within the allowed range of movement - be aware that hip and ankle piston assemblies will limit this. I tend to use 1.6mm brass rod for most assembly of medium size chunks, or 3mm steel rod for coring legs and footings.

Dry fit everything as you go. You will most likely find that parts are warped - these can be corrected by applying heat evenly (a hairdryer, hot air gun, hot water etc) and then holding the parts together as they cool.

You can work on some assemblies while waiting for replacement parts if needed.

Use blu-tack for pin alignment - drill a pilot hole in one part to be joined, wet it with spit and layer blu-tack on. Press the parts together and the blu-tack will stick to the other part, leaving a nub showing where you need to drill, and at what angle. Don't use epoxy at this stage, just a tack of superglue to hold pins in. That way if you need to remove them it's easy enough with a pair of pliers.

You should be able to pretty much assemble the whole thing 'dry' just with pins (glued in to one part), leaving off things that don't need pinning (pistons, cable details etc).

Prime and paint in subassemblies - if you're painting the internals, you can leave this in halves.

Small assemblies can be mounted up on cocktail sticks or overlong pins and stuck into open-cell styrene foam (the stuff DVD players and TV's come in). This stuff's great because unlike expanded polystyrene it self-heals to some extent when pierced.

Large assemblies may need to be primed in two stages, allowing you to hold the other while working. I put these down on a couple of layers of bubble wrap when not working.

You will need a LOT of space if doing the whole thing in one go. I found a warhound basically took up a whole build table (2' x 5'). Can't see a Reaver taking less. If space is an issue, consider splitting the project up some (so build the legs first for example, then the torso & arms). The semi-complete model can then be put aside while you work on other parts.

If you haven't got an airbrush, buy one. Simply for priming and basecoating (and varnishing) it will pay for itself. Vallejo's PU primer is great, and very, very cost efficient.

When finally assembling very large joins (arm balls, hip balls), you may want to sand off and drill pits in mating surfaces for epoxy to bite into (in addition to the load-bearing core pins). Drill shallow pits (with a small pin bit) off-axis to the join. This provides a 'hook' for the epoxy to grab.

That should get you started, I think.

There is a really good video with Duncan on building FW models. I think there's a link to it in Tutorials If you've never built a large resin model, the video is a must-see.

Honestly? If the Reaver is your first big resin model put it away for a while until you've built a superheavy tank or two and figured out the process. A mistake has the potential to be very expensive, and if you're asking basic questions like "how do I pin it" you have a pretty high risk of making a mistake.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

winterdyne wrote:
You should be able to pretty much assemble the whole thing 'dry' just with pins (glued in to one part), leaving off things that don't need pinning (pistons, cable details etc).

And this. You should NEVER have glue joints taking any load on a kit like this. The only thing glue should be doing is keeping your pins from sliding back out of their sockets.