Cygnar: Storm Strider Part 1 (assembly)

New project: Privateer Press, Cygnar, Battle Engine, Storm Strider.

I was super excited when I saw this model. I began what turned out to be the long process of filling, cleaning, pinning, sanding/file, and did I mention filling this model.

Out of the box there are the following pieces with notes about cleanup/pinning/green stuff:

1 120mm base (has front and side arc markers already on it)
--Minimal cleanup needed
4 Identical lower legs (plastic)
--Heavy trimming and cleanup of mold lines along the sides near edge rim.
--The foot pads were especially bad and 2 of 4 were a little warped, some of them needed careful flash removal. Where the foot pad connects to the main lower foot often had a miss aligned mold line that was impossible to fix nicely. I did my best to cut and fill with green stuff.
--Each foot has 8 lightning coil rings, 2 of 4 has heavy corrupted detail inside the rings, that was impossible to fix.
--Added one large pin to connect to upper leg segment per leg
4 Identical upper legs (metal)
--minor flashing to remove
--minor pitting on top of main gear joint that needed filling
1 leg assembly (plastic)
--Bottom had miss-aligned mold that needed heavy fill
--Added rare earth magnet so it could easily be transported in two pieces
1 large platform (metal)
--Very nice piece, needed minimal flash removal and minor file work to clean up sharp spots.
--Added one large pin to connect per leg to center piece
1 large electrical sphere (plastic)
--Very nice cast, unlike the lege the lightning coil sphere spots were very clean
--minor -- needed to saw off extra mold on bottom so it fit nicely into the platform piece.
2 Safety rails for crew (metal)
--Clean mold, added tiny pins to one of the two ends.
2 Crew members
(crew 1) 4 pieces (torso, arm 1, arm2, control plate) (all metal)
(crew 2) 1 piece (metal)
--All these metal pieces were clean, minimal flashing to remove. I added tiny pins to the arms of crew 1.
1 Top triple lightning coil (plastic)
--This piece needed a little work, it has miss aligned mold on bottom (where the sphere would be closest to. Had to fill and smooth a large chunk. Also needed some fill and file work on the top. Also had some bad holes on the first of the triple lightning coils, they had to be drilled out with one of my smallest bits to make it look clean. Also the bottom of this piece where it connects to the metal platform was a bit mangled and thus needed greenstuff fill to make it connect correctly and at an angle where it would not rest on the sphere.


Difficulty level and time investment to clean this model turned out to be much higher than I expected. It was not that it was hard to assemble, it was that there were so many pieces that needed a heavy time investment to remove mold lines. I was a little disappointed that I could not fix a few of the pieces completely to what the model "should be". A less picky player who is not planning on spending 20-50 hours painting this beast may not need to spend the time I did cleaning it up. I would always recommend pinning it to any one assembling this model.