Fiddler WIP Part 1

This is the first part in a mulit-part process documenting the build up of the the Fiddler Mech by White Dragon Miniatures.  It is a really cool original design, it comes in 1/35 scale, but if gamers were interested in using it in systems like Infinity or even 40k, it does scale nicely with 28mm figures.

In this project I am going to attempt to replicate the pose of the Mech that is in the artwork on the White Dragon Website. When I saw this artwork I knew immediately I wanted to build it.

The kit is a multimedia kit consisting of mostly resin pieces and some brass rods for the barrels on the weapons.  I felt the packing was a little lax as far as the pieces went.  They were organized loosely
into 3 bags and then packed with foam.  I think some better thought could have gone into organizing the spurs.  There is a lot of pieces in this kit and it was hard to keep everything straight at first.




 I found the pieces of the kit to be, for the most part well cast, albeit a little soft on the details in some spots.  The 2 areas I was disappointed with the most was the wench and the greeblies around the shoulder joints.

There was a few parts that the casting was quite horrible on.  The lower leg sections seemed to suffer the brunt of this miscast.  In addition to the legs there were several pieces that had  sleight mold lines, sometimes I feel like the small mold lines are at times worse than the big ones, to me it seems like it takes more effort to putty and clean those, than it does the large ones.  But, this is resin and semi-professional casting so I am willing to live with some imperfections.

Over all I am really happy with this kit and I am looking forward to finishing it.  I have already seen a few wip's on it, with a variety of colors, but I think I am going to be going with a light blue-grey color.  I have also sourced some appropriate scaled decals to add a bit of realism to the over all build.

Onto some build up info...

So have assembled the Fiddler into its major sub-components, upper and lower hull, weapons and base.

 During assembly I also took care of some of the softer details, I replaced the wench with a scratch built one, and I drilled out all the anchor points as well to add a little more detail to the model, at this point I am not sure if I will be doing anything to the detail on the shoulders as it is all well hidden when fully assembled. I am pretty much ready to move forward with primer and paint, I am going to need to wait a few days for the snow to stop before I can prime, but once I do I will get more pics posted of the progress.

Here are a few more pics of my favorite part of this model, the big ass gun!!