Bling Dreadnought, Part 3

Next up is what has been the biggest hassle of this kit. (Sorry I didn't take before shots, my bad.) The torso halves joins horribly, I'm not talking gaps but gross misalignment. I think the molds distorted the original pieces or something because every painted version of the dread I have seen has this problem.

The solutions were fairly drastic to try and get this sorted out. 1st I had to remove all the locating stubs then file the joining faces smooth. Then on the shoulder tops since I knew I would be doing a LOT of filing to smooth out the plates I had to clip off the raised edges detail along the sides only leaving the front and back edges. Then I eyeballed I could at least get one shoulder to match up, so glued the parts together using zap a gap. I probably should have pinned them but hopefully I won't drop this fella sometime down the track

Now the left shoulder had about 1-1.5mm of panel sticking out at a funny angle where it should flat joining the rest of the panel. To fix this I had to dremel it down.





damn I really should have taken a before shot, oh well. Anyway you can still see on the edges how it's going to need some putty work to get them in line.







Here it is after a couple hours of hand filing it smooth from various directions to try and get a flat plate. I recut the panel line after it was smoothed down. I'm still not totally happy with the panels, hopefully puttying the edges will fix that.

Next up is redoing the assault cannon arm. On regular dreads the cannon looks quite snubby compared to the other gun options but on the venerable it looks totally out of balance with the large powerfist arm so I've cut it off at the base of the barrels and will be making a proper vulcan gatling gun in it's place.