kill vehicle not exoatmospheric, but slightly more plausible

Thunderhead WIP

Tonight I pinned and assembled a Cygnar Thunderhead, which is by far the biggest and most complex model I've put together:

It's also the heaviest model I've put together. There's a good bit of hollow space in the torso, but even so it's a big chunk of pewter. I hauled out the kitchen scale and the damn thing's over six ounces. You could put someone's eye out by flinging it at them.

Building it was fun. Lots of pieces, decent range of pose options, a little thinking about the best way to go forward. It did end up taking a lot longer than I expected, though, which was kind of a bummer. I'd hoped to have time to paint after building it, but getting it all set chewed up the time I had.

There was a lot of pinning here, since all the pieces are so big and have such small joins between them. The head, pelvis, and arms are all pinned and therefore nice and sturdy. Those were time consuming but overall pretty straightforward.

I also spent a while trying to find a good spot to pin the shoulder pieces to the torso before giving up and solving the problem with extra glue. I'm still a bit worried that they'll shear off if I drop the thing, so possibly I should try and epoxy the gaps a bit to give a bit of structure.

The main weak point is the hoses between the lightning coils and the arms:

They look awesome, but the fit isn't great and there isn't much surface area to secure them with. I'm a bit worried they'll break off, especially since the right-hand one got weakened a bit while I was trying to fit it.

I'm also going to be experimenting with priming and painting bits that haven't been glued yet. The shock coils on the forearms are so close together that they'd be pretty much impossible to paint in place, so for now they're just stuck in with sticky tack. I'll try and mount them somewhere to prime and paint on their own and then glue in afterwards. Hopefully that'll go smoothly.

Overall it's a great model, and I'm hugely looking forward to painting it. I haven't tried to do the glowing-blue Cygnar electrical effect yet, and this 'jack has a ton of it in all the coils.