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FW Storm Eagle

Step 1: build a square box out of these 4 bananas

Last time I bought original FW.

Do not advocate piracy on this site - ingtær

Well, for me its always the next one.
The next one which I haven't assembled yet. Repeated assembly then works quite well.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
FW Storm Eagle

Step 1: build a square box out of these 4 bananas

Last time I bought original FW.

A refusal to embrace saucepans of boiling water as part of the modelling armoury makes me question your commitment to hobby

Most of mine are irritations rather than flat out nightmares

The metal Eldar Warwalker, the socket for the weapons could just about support the weapon bracket but adding an actual gun was usually unwise

Nyss Hunters for Hordes, usual PP brilliant tiny contact points on metal mini, the Metal/Resin Gallows Grove was likewise annoying

+3 for the metal bloodthirster. I didn't have it but a friend of mine did. The logistics of assembling that bugger at the age of 14 was no small feat. It still fell apart.

The 4th/5th edition metal/plastic hive tyrant was a nightmare for me as well. Great model but the gaps associated with the three piece torso were awful.

 Breotan wrote:
The Forge World Storm Eagle model was enough to stop me from buying large model kits from them ever again. The model I got literally changed shape from a squared interior toward the front to a trapezoidal interior at the back. The back ramp would not fit/close properly no matter what I did. Other parts were literally shorter or wider than the identical part for the opposite side. Hot water and elbow grease can do a lot with resin but it can't fix shrinkage.

Seconded-
worst kit ever. took a heat gun to get it straight enough to assemble and even then i had to fill gaps.

Drop pods. You need an extra hand, and everything has to line up just so.

Old hybrid metal/plastic devastators. You needed to line up multiple arms and the backpack, all at the same time, before the glue set. And you couldn’t use plastic cement which gives you more time. Needed an extra hand, but it wouldn’t help, as there wasn’t space to get it on the model around your regular two hands. Frustrating.

Old metal Hive Tyrants/Wraithlords. Big metal limbs sticking out with tiny contact points is never a good combination.

I never built an old 5th ed Slaan mage priest, but heard the laments of many a Lizardman player trying to build them. In theory you could build it nice and square, so it would fit in a unit. Never saw one that neat. Also had the issue to large chunks of lead held up with inadequate flimsy supports. Lots of table casualties where the second half of the game was part of one being shuffled around.

This thing:


... can die in a fire. I've never thrown a model across the room after the third time it fell apart. Well, not until this time came along.

Victoria Miniatures female Tannenberg.

Lovely models but infuriating for me to put together. me, superglue and small models lead to skin loss!


Anyone try the metal 40K Thunderhawk?

The worst model for me was GW's Man O War dark elves Black Ark of Naggorth. I just got used to gluing sails on the mast. Then the masts broke off twice. It was the first model I pinned together. Not bad until I drilled through the side of the ship. The worst part was having to fill a huge gap in the three pieces that made up the skull with green stuff from a tube. The model turned out great but that was a learning experience.

alphaecho wrote:

Anyone try the metal 40K Thunderhawk?

Sure. The guy on EBay that I bought mine off of when the original FW resin launched.
I don't know how much trouble he had with it, but he did a great job.

For me it's anything where the model is holding a weapon in both hands. That generally means you need to have four arms so that you can hold all the various sections of the mini in place long enough for the glue to dry. Nightmare.

The Storm Eagle wasn't that bad, honestly.

40k Tau Manta while not a nightmare it came to the local shop in 6 boxes to start and I had to take inventory on little sleep and distractions from folks marveling at it. After that it came down to warped pieces and my second Forge World piece. So very little experience on top of a big project glad to have a friend help me. Now I have it sitting waiting for Da Orks to loot it. Which is in progress.

Metal Hive Tyrant.

Bad enough I struggled with my own, but as the. GW Till Monkey, I’d wind up helping customers build theirs.

And as if to spite me, once I moved on from that job, they released the plastic one :(

In terms of GW plastic kits, the Doomsday Ark, ugh. Wasn't even that difficult as such, just soul destroying. So many small pieces, took me a week to clip and clean everything and another week to build it

Oh, and the Dark Elf Hydra. This one.



See those heads? See those sodding heads?.

The joints were dimples. Enough of a gap that it laughed at superglue. Enough of a curve to making accurate pinning a complete pain in the arse.

Everything about it was fragile. And it was pretty rubbish in the game.

It’s successor, this one...



Much better in the game, to the point it was considered OP. The kit was still pretty sodular, perhaps a Sodocity of 6/10, but at least the neck connected to the body with fairly (for a metal kit) flush fitting square pegs.

It still needed pinning, but the pegs at least acted as a solid starting point. I had one, but no idea where it went :(

One more vote for the early version plastic land speeder. In the end I just filled the gaps with green stuff and painted the seams up to look like battle damage :p

Any model from Arena Rex or Infinity that has the smallest of connection points. My kickstarter for Arena Rex was almost all completely ruined as you had almost no contact points and some of them were then holding metal weapons that were too unbalanced to ever reasonably work.

Honestly they should ban amateurs from buying Forgeworld, all the whining about the models not fitting is totally down to lack of model building experience.

I can't remember if I got my metal land speeder together or just hucked it when the plastic one came along.

I'm not sure what's worse - the metal hive tyrant or the failcast resin version. That thing is a nightmare even with super glue - I'd never had a model that wouldn't stay together with the application of superglue, and had to switch to expoxy to get it to finally stick together - then three weeks later came the much easier plastic version...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Rolsheen wrote:
Honestly they should ban amateurs from buying Forgeworld, all the whining about the models not fitting is totally down to lack of model building experience.

Wow. Gatekeep much? Maybe they ought to make models that regular gamers can put together instead.

The Legs on the Reaver Titan drove me mildly bonkers. Especially having to dry-fit the toe/ankle pistons, then cut, then place again quickly before the super glue dried. Plus the badly cast bits, all the heating and bending and reshaping... Frustrating stuff.
And I can second the pain of the Storm Eagle. In my local 30k group the Storm Eagle is infamous.

A lot of the older Forge World models were absolute nightmare fodder.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Rolsheen wrote:
Honestly they should ban amateurs from buying Forgeworld, all the whining about the models not fitting is totally down to lack of model building experience.

Except that I have had Forge World kits come in where the parts have shrunk and just don't fit properly.
I've been doing this stuff for decades, and have built ludicrous amounts of Forge World.
But sometimes a kit shows up with bits that are that just screwed up.

Worst model for me conquests abomination 4 legs each made up of three parts all with ball joints i can see the idea of maximum pose ability but with only online instructions I 2asnt even sure which were front or back feet

The FW XV-9 Hazard battle suits; no problems with casting or instructions on those, but each of the limbs is in about 4 separate parts. Great from a point of view of being completely poseable, but an absolute bloody nightmare to use in practice; you need three hands per limb to try and dry fit the bloody thing!

 Rolsheen wrote:
Honestly they should ban amateurs from buying Forgeworld, all the whining about the models not fitting is totally down to lack of model building experience.

No it's not. The litanies of complaints about the Fire Raptor and the efforts required to fix that kit do not stem from people purchasing FW products (or even resin products) for the first time.

Your post is perhaps the most arrogant and gate-keeper-y I've seen here in quite a while.

+1 for the toe pistons on the Reaver - cutting them to the right size, glueing them into the sockets and then getting the toe and pistons lined up and into the ankles before the glue cured was not a fun experience.

And Rolsheen, that’s the laziest trolling I’ve seen in a while. Either that or you’re too much of a noob to have experienced a proper FW nightmare kit.

When I was getting a friend into 40k mid 3rd edition he wanted a flying Hive Tyrant. Well, we used the metal Hive Tyrant and found a cheap 3rd party metal dragon to use its wings.

1. Tac wings to hive tyrant's back with super glue.
2.Drill and pin with a small piece of paperclip.
3. Use high temp soldiering iron to literally tac weld the wings to the body.
4 greenstuff into the cracks and sculpt over everything to make it look decent and add extra strength.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
This thing:


... can die in a fire. I've never thrown a model across the room after the third time it fell apart. Well, not until this time came along.

...what is that, HBMC?

And Mad Doc, I'm not sure if it is just me, but the Hydra pics aren't loading in the thread, for some reason.

I know its silly, and I am sure it is just me, but the only model I have ever given up building (the bits are in a draw) is the Death Jester.

I don't know what it was, but I just couldn't get the whole thing to line up/fit! I have built bigger things, and more complicated things, but for some reason that model just wouldn't work (to my continued shame)

 Rolsheen wrote:
Honestly they should ban amateurs from buying Forgeworld, all the whining about the models not fitting is totally down to lack of model building experience.

Hi.

I’m Mad Doc Grotsnik. You may recognise me from various threads of utter drivel and mind weasels set loose.

I’ve been into GW since 1989, and indeed have worked for them as a Till Monkey on three separate occasions.

I now have a really, really good job, which allows me to spend frankly outrageous amounts of money on my hobby. To the point I could, if I wanted to, pay my rent and bills each month, and still buy a Forgeworld Warlord Titan. Sure dinner would be instant noodles, but I could do it if I wished. And didn’t have a girlfriend to treat and spoil. I’m nice like that!

My cupboards have more ‘stock’ than some FLGS. And I’m always buying more. I’ve built more deeply awkward kits for both myself and my one time customers than most. To the degree some might think it was less a job and and more a Sisyphean punishment from a god with a crap sense of humour.

I can pin. I can hack things up to get the right fit. I can scratch build and kit bash quite nicely. I can even, more or less, green stuff gaps. I can certainly chop other bits up to replace lost or damaged bits and bobs and smooth it all over so it doesn’t look repaired. I have a hair dryer and am fully trusted with hot water and rubber gloves.

I also loathe Forgeworld models. I will not buy them. Any of them. Not only do I utterly detest resin kits, but Forgeworld has a well known pot luck approach to casting quality. Some suffer no more than the inherent issues of resin as a material (warping whilst curing). Some are so hideously miscast, you might think the delivery driver was that guy in Robocop that drove his van into the toxic goop, and my stuff was in the back at the time. They’re a premium product, and really shouldn’t have such a patchy record.

My main grief is the glue needed. If you balls it up, your kit is ruined. Now, if I’ve been hamfisted, or perhaps knock a sub-assembly that’s on me, and not the design. But when you’ve spent a decent chunk of time filing, warming, straightening, pinning and gluing, only for the sodding panel to remember its glory days and warp back to its wonky state, that kit and that company can sod right off. Even if it was a cheap kit, it can still sod off to Soddery City. When I’ve paid over £100 which could’ve been spent on beer, Necromunda terrain, my Lass or even a few take away Curries (I love curry, me), it can sod off even further.

That’s right. Coming up 32 years experience. And I used to get paid to do it, which (please do correct if I’m wrong) makes me a genuine, if now retired, professional.

But guess I’m wrong, and I was in fact an amateur, all along. Thank heavens for gate keepers, I guess?

 Dysartes wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
This thing:


... can die in a fire. I've never thrown a model across the room after the third time it fell apart. Well, not until this time came along.

...what is that, HBMC?

And Mad Doc, I'm not sure if it is just me, but the Hydra pics aren't loading in the thread, for some reason.

That is the second attempt to sculpt a proper blood asp mech from battletech




The first sculpt-





The 3rd "correct" sculpt-




One does not speak of the second attempt

Is that first one Mecha-Cornholio?