WIP: Nemesis Dreadknight pt2

All the work traveling has kept me away from the modeling table for a few weeks. Was happy to finally make a little progress on my Dreadknight. Check out the latest after the break.

The Dreadknight is a pretty cool kit, depending on your feelings about Baby Bjorns, but it's not the greatest kit in terms of pose-ability. 50,000 parts, and we couldn't give us knee or hip joints, huh? I decided to do a little bit of hacking and see how much flexibility I could get in the knee. Turns out not that much. I sliced along the bottom of the knee and carefully broke the bottom of the leg away, trying to leave the cables in tact. All of this is covered up by armor later, so you don't have to be an amazing kit basher to get away with this.  It really doesn't have that huge an effect though. The little pistons representing the calf muscles and hamstring run in to each other quickly if you rotate the leg back much from its starting position.  Oh well, you can see in the header image it's a little bit better than before. Wish I could rotate that front knee to point forward...suppose I could if I hacked and pinned the hip. We'll see.

I've decided to handle this one a little bit differently than previous models. Usually I keep all the parts completely separate while painting. I'm not going to completely assemble this model before I start spraying, but I've decided to minimize parts this time around. I'm a little tired of keeping track of 50 tiny parts and inevitably forgetting some tiny piece while base coating, or worse yet, losing a part as I did on my Stormraven.

That in mind, I'm starting out by gluing as many chunks together as I can. I'll live with some small amounts of painting difficulty in favor of speed, but keep the important/potentially frustrating chunks separate. Both legs are now one part, including the feet and the weird little bar that connects to the hips. I'm still leaving all the shields/armor separate as some of them will be different colors and would really block the airbrush from doing its thing. The torso and arms are glued in place, as are the top part of the pistons that connect at the shoulders. Everything else I'll keep separate, but this should hopefully save me some time and make life easier.

I've started working out parts for the base as well, but decided this guy needed something a little more epic, so I've got some more Scibor parts on order to spruce things up. There's a lot more in that order than I need for this one, so I'll be set for base parts for years to come.

Last step before I start spraying is to do my magnetizing. Fortunately, not a lot is needed.  Just the right hand accessories, as everything else is snap on. Too bad I already glued the arm together, as I could have made my life a lot easier by gluing in a magnet before I sealed it up.

What's everyone else working on? Any fun projects planned for the nice long weekend (for the Americans anyway)?

~Deet