More Randomness

A whole posse of gatormans.  

If I've learned just one thing about creating things it's to go with what feels right.  While I should be working on Empire or Infinity I felt like putting together gators today.  By going with what felt right I got a unit (plus a solo) assembled that had been sitting in a box for far too long.  The alternative was to tell myself I should be doing something else, dicker around with the phone/tv/whatever, and make little to no hobby progress on anything.  I think I made the right call.  Now if I can roll into assembling the lingering Hex Hunters I can try out the Bethayne ideas that made me order these things in the first place.

Magnets Are Tough

Witness my amazing conversion skills.  

Continuing my recent trend of thrashing around between projects, this morning I dug out and assembled that lingering third Legion heavy kit.  To be fair I only did the torso, but that's all that I need for the moment as I have a number of limbs and heads ready to go.  It wasn't all step by step assembly though.  I made two vital modifications to this latest chassis.

Foremost is the epic conversion work I did to make this torso stand out from the others.  The first two I've affectionately dubbed Lefty and Righty, thanks to the choice between left- or right-pointing tails that come in the box.  What to do for the third?  I'd already exhausted the tail possibilities, at least the ones that are easy to execute.  I suppose I could have made a straight tail or an upward-pointing tail, but those would have required a lot of work.  Instead I decided to mess with the only permanent (meaning non-magnetized) limb that doesn't connect to the base.  I thought this would be as easy as shaving down the peg so the arm could turn into a different position, but I soon found this was to be a more involved project.  The shaved peg had no real contact with its hole, so I pinned the arm and stuffed the hole with greenstuff to keep it from spinning.  I also had to cut down the meat on the shoulder to have the arm stick closer to the body.  PP did a nice job of making all the bits fit together well, so it shouldn't have been surprising that I'd have to fill gaps when I moved a piece around.  All my effort turned out decent even if the results came nowhere near justifying the time invested.  Worse still is that the new pose doesn't really inspire.  It's a bit limp wristed, which doesn't suit the heavy chassis at all.  It is different from the others, so I guess I'll call it mission accomplished.

The other modification isn't as obvious visually (which is saying something considering how little the limp wrist stands out) but is vital for usability.  It is, of course, magnetization.  I took my sweet time coming around on magnets, but now I'm fully on board.  With this third kit I can now field a pair of Ravagores and a Scythean, or a pair of Scytheans and a Ravagore, or (provided I put the bits together and suffer enough head trauma to make this seem appealing) five Carniveans.  My first excursion into using magnets wasn't the smoothest ever, but since then I've had a few more reps and feel confident that I can do the job right the first time.  That said, you've probably already guessed that I screwed everything up and had to take all the magnets out.  I thought that both arms had the same polarity, so I wasn't too particular about which one I used to make sure I put the magnets in the right way.  This was a large mistake as it turns out that the arms aren't the same.  I also had to swap out the magnet in the neck for a larger size thanks to putting it far enough off-center that the smaller one wouldn't hold enough to stay in place while moving the model around.  At least my prior practice digging out magnets came in handy.