Land Raider Ares, part 5

I knew what to expect going into the armour as a friend of mine had already had challenges with his.  Use lots of rubber bands, he said. So I did!

After I washed it up, I trimmed the pouring gates and all that good stuff that comes with owning Forgeworld product.  I find that an old toothbrush loaded with dishsoap does the job so that you can get into all of the places and stuff, rinsed well under cold water and air dried.

Then I started on one side, figuring out which of the rivets I needed to remove from the body of the Land Raider and dry fitting the pieces until I was satisfied with the way they would sit. Then I glues the back piece in, making it nice and snug.  Then the front piece which wraps over the tracks.

 

Then I noticed something that unsettled me quite a bit.  I put the centre panel in on the side to check for fit.  Well, I didn't have to trim anything as you can see here. It doesn't look like this on the "instruction leaflet" that you get from FW.  I can only assume that the piece shrank as it set due to some sort of phenomenon.

The gap is fairly even all the way around! I tried assembling the panels on the other side and moving stuff back and forth to see if I'd messed up during the fitting but no - still gappier than Madonna's smile.

I measured the gaps with my trusty 6" steel rule (every hobbyist should have one) and found the gap to be 1.5mm x 2mm.  The only thing I could think of was to head to the hobby store and once again employ the fantasticness of Evergreen Scale Models strip styrene.  What do you know - they sell strip styrene in that very size.  Marvellous! When I got home I cut some to size and glued it to the body and the fore and aft panels with Plastruct.  When I inserted the centre panel it looked like this

As Ace Ventura would say - LIKE A GLLLLLOVE! Glued it in and went to work.  Actually, before I committed to gluing it in I filled some gaps with liquid green stuff, just to keep things smooth.  Buddy was right - many rubber bands were required to hold it all in while good old Loctite Gel Control set up.  I used plenty to maximise the area of adhesion. 

Kinky!

Once the glue had dried I went into finishing the gap filling on that one side before going to work on the other.  The gap around the centre piece was a little smaller on one side so I had to use a strip of sheet styrene that had which just happened to be the right thickness.  Then I did more filling with LGS.

 

Again the rubber bands and stuff came into play for the centre panel.  Then I had to work on fitting the door inserts.  The case of the centre panel MUST have shrunk, as the plastic door inserts wouldn't fit into the doors and I had to do some trimming.  If you look at where I painted highlighter on these spare inserts you can get an idea of where I used my hobby knife to cut back the panels. It was a case of trial and error to get this right.  When they did fit I bonded them in place with two part epoxy to stop any shenanigans.  The sponsons will be glued after the model is painted. 

 

So that's it, pretty much.  The model was ready for priming I test fitted the tracks and the section that goes at the front under the track guard will have to be trimmed so it slides into place under the resin, but other than that - job's a good'n!

I'm basecoating it this weekend as I am using it at an upcoming tournament.  Then in September there's a 3000 point Apocalypse tournament happening so I'll be taking the Ares, my Damocles Rhino and a Linebreaker Squadron! The Vindis are getting basecoated this weekend too.  BOOM!