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I love metal models.

There's that rush of the feeling of overcoming adversity when you finally get those 5^%$&^$%&^%& parts to mate up properly and it stays together.

Plastics just don't do that.

Trevor

Anything from forgeworld is god awful - Warlord Titan, Storm Eagle, Fulgrim

Chinese recasts - I got a box of stuff in a bulk deal on ebay, jesus it could be 1/10th the price and still not worth it - so terrible to work with. Injection points in key areas, flashing like crazy, double mold lines, warping, pitting. I honestly know why people do it to themselves

For small models the Robotech ones I put together were probably the worst plastic kits I've ever built. (defender & tomahawk)

For large models a resin FW Thunderhawk, half the parts did not fit correctly and not meaning warped but were actually 15-20 mm larger than what they were supposed to fit into. The canard wings were more than half an inch longer than the brackets they were supposed to fit into, the assault ramp was a good quarter inch too wide and long to fit properly into the teeth grooves along the side and top, the hinge for the ramp likewise was far too big to fit the bracket. Underside of the main body was neatly half an inch too long and the piece that forms the ceiling and rear wall of the assault bay was a half inch to wide to fit within the hull. Either they didn't use any heat resistant filler and several key parts shrank massively or they accidentally mixed molds from two different sized master models as a number of pieces were far larger than what they should have been. I spent several weeks correcting the parts by cutting away material and rebuilding sections of the model with styrene and greenstuff.

On top of that the underside has dozens of these cool raised vents which look great on the model but they are paper thin and almost impossible to avoid crushing while you handle the model during assembly. The thing weighed a ton and there's no way to lay it down without running the risk of damaging a lot of the fine details. The landing gears are also made from resin and don't properly support the weight of it, it's a good 7-8 lbs when built and rests on tiny 3-4mm thick pegs. The wings also need some serious, serious pinning to keep in place. I work with resin on a daily basis and never run into difficulties like the ones posed by that kit. The model looks amazing when built but it's painful as hell to build.

I've had a few fiddly models in my time. Oddly enough I've never glued my fingers together, even when assembling metal models. The Tau Sniper Drones are pretty fiddly and come apart way too easily, although that could be the result of the cheap glue I'm using for them (not superglue, but something called 527 Multi-use Glue). I'm thinking that from now on I may use my Krazy Glue for assembling Finecrap models. I saw early in the thread that someone mentioned the Stormsurge's ankles. Those were a bit of a pain for me, I had to stack books and stuff around it to get it to stay in the right position relative to the feet. The rest of the model was a relative breeze.

Wyrd's Insidious Madness was probably the worst kit I've ran across.

It's not so much the materials – plastic, so no pinning / weight issues – but it's typical Wyrd cuts (ie, 10-15 pieces for a single 30ish mm fig) for Cthulhu monsters that have no real "up" or "front" or anything.

Everyone I've talked to about them has spent at least 10 minutes just staring at the tentacles and wondering, "Where the feth does this one go?"


Similar problem on the metal Beast of Nurgle from the big Daemons revamp a few years ago. Very little in the way of clear anatomy, combined with a precarious metal sculpt.

 Dysartes wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
This miniature:

Spoiler:

feth this miniature.

I'm morbidly curious, HBMC:

a, What is it (other than some sort of walker)?
b, What was the nature of your disagreement with it?

As stated in the post below yours, it is a BattleTech miniature. It's actually one of the larger ones, part of Iron Wind Metals' problem with scale creep.

Anyway, it consists of the following parts:

Torso
2 Shoulder Guns
2 Arms
2 Arm Guns
Hips
2 Legs
Feet

Note that I list 'Feet' as one component. They're feet moulded to a kinda hex-base, that fits inside a larger hex-base. The feet are not level, the pegs on the legs do not fit into the holes on the feet. The pegs on the hips do not completely fill the holes on the upper legs. You have to balance the enormous torso on the tiny hips that don't get into the holes on the legs that have to keep it together. And it's metal. And did I mention that the feet aren't level, so you have uneven legs not holding onto the hips properly trying to hold up the rest of this monstrosity.

When I built my resin Stormblade the experience was so maddening that I almost threw it against a wall at one stage. But reason overcame me, and I did not do it.

This fething mini though? That got to take some flying lessons the second time I tried to put it together. A friend of mine tried to do it and he gave up as well.

Sounds hellish.

I've always liked the IDEA of having a Thunderhawk, but I've seen the numerous blogs on the internet, that suggest it's anything but fun lol. Can't imagine what the Stormbird will be like!

It's my experience with the Stormblade, and tales like the story above of the resin Thunderhawk that made me swear off buying any FW mini where there was even the tiniest hint of a rumour of it becoming a plastic mini at some stage.

It's why I never bought a resin Trygon or Valkyrie, and in both instances my patience paid off.

I did have a resin valkyrie.

The less said about that abortion, the better. FW's QC was less than stellar and it was the last thing I ever bought from them.

Whoever designed Land Speeders deserve to be shot. Put me off a WS army making one.

 angelofvengeance wrote:
Can't imagine what the Stormbird will be like!

I was sooooo tempted to convince some lovely pom to send me a stormbird, but I keep looking at this storm eagle.

Why make 31 flavours if you cant get vanilla right

 paulson games wrote:
For small models the Robotech ones I put together were probably the worst plastic kits I've ever built. (defender & tomahawk)

For large models a resin FW Thunderhawk, half the parts did not fit correctly and not meaning warped but were actually 15-20 mm larger than what they were supposed to fit into. The canard wings were more than half an inch longer than the brackets they were supposed to fit into, the assault ramp was a good quarter inch too wide and long to fit properly into the teeth grooves along the side and top, the hinge for the ramp likewise was far too big to fit the bracket. Underside of the main body was neatly half an inch too long and the piece that forms the ceiling and rear wall of the assault bay was a half inch to wide to fit within the hull. Either they didn't use any heat resistant filler and several key parts shrank massively or they accidentally mixed molds from two different sized master models as a number of pieces were far larger than what they should have been. I spent several weeks correcting the parts by cutting away material and rebuilding sections of the model with styrene and greenstuff.

On top of that the underside has dozens of these cool raised vents which look great on the model but they are paper thin and almost impossible to avoid crushing while you handle the model during assembly. The thing weighed a ton and there's no way to lay it down without running the risk of damaging a lot of the fine details. The landing gears are also made from resin and don't properly support the weight of it, it's a good 7-8 lbs when built and rests on tiny 3-4mm thick pegs. The wings also need some serious, serious pinning to keep in place. I work with resin on a daily basis and never run into difficulties like the ones posed by that kit. The model looks amazing when built but it's painful as hell to build.

I have to ask, are you sure you have a legit thunderhawk kit?

Because the only issue I had with mine was a little bit of warping in the rectangular main body piece which was by fare the biggest piece of resin. There are no delicate vents that make me worry about handling it, and the landing gear are more than adequate to support the weight.

Could be mold age, could be luck.

Look at this obviously genuine storm eagle build - mine is about this bad

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/507545.page

 Bookwrack wrote:
I have to ask, are you sure you have a legit thunderhawk kit?

Yes it was a proper FW kit, I bought it direct from the Chicago Bunker about 15 years ago back when they actually stocked FW in store. It came in the FW bags and had one of their certificates, I was also there when it arrived in their delivery from FW and saw it come out of the box which is primarily why I decided to buy it. At the time it was a little over $900 and a very expensive impulse buy, but I had the money at the time.

After going through the nightmare of fixing the kit I sold it as I just didn't want it anymore and it's kinda of hard to find good pictures of the underside as I didn't take any at the time. There are sets of round vents on the main hull shown here and some oval shaped ones that sit slightly forwards of those, the oval shaped ones were the vents on my model that had very thin walls and easy to damage. The oval shaped vents are also in several locations in the middle of the main hull and under the nose. They are pretty tiny and easy to miss but they are there and until you have the landing gears in place to lift the model the hull wants to sit on top of them while resting. Even though I was being very careful I damaged the ones towards the middle while I was trying to rubber band the hull so it'd hold while gluing.

edit- found a better pic:







The main shaft of the landing gear is thick enough to hold the weight but there's one part that forms a sort of "ankle" where it gets very narrow right before it meets the pad I found that it bowed a decent amount under the weight. If you look at the pic below you can see where the narrow part on the landing gear is about the same width as the heavy bolter barrel which is only 3mm.

Built an eldar Bonesinger once. The assassins were kind of annoying, specifically the Callidus.

Other than that, I play spess mahreeens. What's a fiddly bit?

Some of Flames of War's Russian Anti-tank rifles were painful to assemble.

 angelofvengeance wrote:
Sounds hellish.

I've always liked the IDEA of having a Thunderhawk, but I've seen the numerous blogs on the internet, that suggest it's anything but fun lol. Can't imagine what the Stormbird will be like!

The Stormbird will probably be fine, newer kits tend to be better. The biggest problem kits are the first-generation stuff where even new casts are done with worn-out molds and kit designs that were questionable to begin with.

Well, there's this little guy:


He has been resculpted, but I have built two boxes (each box has one of the humanoid "combat forms" and one of the crab "mobility" forms).



The bases are 40mm.

Pictures aren't mine, obviously, first one is by Angel Giraldez, Infinity the game's official painter. The second one is by Penemue in his really good blog http://penofpenemue.blogspot.com.es/

The entire skitarii infantry range. Such regret. Dang things take forever to build/paint.

 paulson games wrote:

 Bookwrack wrote:
I have to ask, are you sure you have a legit thunderhawk kit?

Yes it was a proper FW kit, I bought it direct from the Chicago Bunker about 15 years ago back when they actually stocked FW in store. It came in the FW bags and had one of their certificates, I was also there when it arrived in their delivery from FW and saw it come out of the box which is primarily why I decided to buy it. At the time it was a little over $900 and a very expensive impulse buy, but I had the money at the time.

After going through the nightmare of fixing the kit I sold it as I just didn't want it anymore and it's kinda of hard to find good pictures of the underside as I didn't take any at the time. There are sets of round vents on the main hull shown here and some oval shaped ones that sit slightly forwards of those, the oval shaped ones were the vents on my model that had very thin walls and easy to damage. The oval shaped vents are also in several locations in the middle of the main hull and under the nose. They are pretty tiny and easy to miss but they are there and until you have the landing gears in place to lift the model the hull wants to sit on top of them while resting. Even though I was being very careful I damaged the ones towards the middle while I was trying to rubber band the hull so it'd hold while gluing.

edit- found a better pic:







The main shaft of the landing gear is thick enough to hold the weight but there's one part that forms a sort of "ankle" where it gets very narrow right before it meets the pad I found that it bowed a decent amount under the weight. If you look at the pic below you can see where the narrow part on the landing gear is about the same width as the heavy bolter barrel which is only 3mm.

It might be the age of your Thunderhawk that caused all the problems. Mine is 'only' eight or nine years old, and in the intervening time between when we got ours, they might have managed to fix the really egregious problems you encountered. I never had any fragility problems with the vents, although I definitely made sure to try and not run the rubber bands across it during assembly. It's been sitting on it's landing gear mostly in a display case since 2010 or so and they've held the weight up without deforming.

Which is definitely a good thing, considering how many variations of the Thunderhawk they're pushing now.

StarHunter25 wrote:
The entire skitarii infantry range. Such regret. Dang things take forever to build/paint.

Oh god I forgot about these.

Those were the first infantry kit in plastic I've ever seen where you need to follow the instructions to the letter. Any other kit you can use it for one squad and then be good to go, but for skitariii it's insane just how many parts and bits they have. They look incredible put together, but getting g the coats lined up, properly lining up the hands, trying to get special weapons just right where their power cable lines up with the backpack, ooofda that was a long day.

Onager is pretty nuts too, but that's just because it has a million parts. It's not particularly hard and they are very clever with armor and bits placement to hide areas that might not line up properly. That said gluing in 10+ footsteps per Walker was not an enjoyable experience.

My Caestus Assault Ram.
It took me copious greenstuff just to fit it all together and make it stick, and superglue!
and me being stupid, I then knock it off my desk and have to REASSEMBLE it.
This sucks

leopard wrote:
Bretonnian metal trebuchet was a bit of a pig, a case of "and with your third hand fit this bit". Not helped by the metal refusing to accept superglue even after a whole slew of degreasing products and washing.

This one so, so much. Even with a dremel and pinning it would not stick together well. An honorouble mention also goes out to the shields on the Grail Pilgrims and to the old metal Dark Elf executioners. My boyfriend and I ended up hand-pinning all those little swords they hold up above their head 'cause they would not stay on.

The worst models so far have been the 4th edition dragons: the one from Rakarth and the Zombie Dragon. The metal is so soft that your drill bit gets stuck in it if you use a dremel, nothing fits where it's supposed to fit, it warps and bends easily and it doesn't take glue. Same with Eltharion on Stormwing where one side of the metal fits and leaves a 2mm gap on the other side ):

Okay, now that I'm building Sammael on Corvex I have to say that it is the fiddliest model I've ever done. That eagle on the front just did not want to go on. I had to trim stuff on the back several times just to make it sit right and still there are small gaps. No worry, even the one shown on GW's website has small but noticeable gaps there.

 Imposter101 wrote:
Some of Flames of War's Russian Anti-tank rifles were painful to assemble.

The ones in the metal infantry company box? There were "interesting" for sure, team of two guys with a guy carried between them, sounds easy... you just try lining them up on the base with no guides Ended up with the rear guy for two of them standing on a 2mm bit of card as I glued the front arm on a bit wrong.

They look good when done though, debatable if they are worth the effort though on the table...

MKI Satyxis Raiders. Each horn was a separate piece and far, far too small to pin. The ankles used to break if you looked at them too hard.


Then, Master Necrotech Mortenebra. Each little tiny leg was separate. Rumor is, folks have pinned them all before, but you have to sacrifice a game dev to Cthulu first.

Mine has got to be the Tau Riptide. It was probably the first time I had put a "large" model together and it was definitely the first time I chose to go for a dynamic pose. Without a care in the world I snipped off the pips that allow the legs to sit in the default position!

OMFG I got so wound up trying to use blutack to hold one leg together so I could then hold the other leg together by hand...trying to gauge where I needed to glue things so that it all fitted together.

I think in the end I just gave in and glued the legs by eye...I seem to remember it came out pretty bad. The knees where way too bent and the body was far back from the centre, it looked like my riptide was having a massive poop

Nightmare Whiskey Golem (pictured golem is not mine, which is unpainted).

You see it and go 'AWESOME A KEG GOLEM YEEEAAAAHHHHH!!!!'.



Then you see the instructions. For scale, those Gremlins are the size of your fingernail.

Fiddly? Pah! Just try detailing a 1:35 tank kit with photo-etched brass...

*whimper*

Loki, was your Nightmare edition golem translucent plastic? I assembled the translucent Bete Noir and that put me off the material entirely.