The brutally honest truth about hobbying is that occassionally you come across projects or miniatures, that do not go as smoothly as planned, and instead become an arduous test of endurance to complete, and leave you feeling somewhat dissatisfied with the overall outcome. Whilst I completed the 4th Great Company’s Praevian in May of 2021, his first set of charges, the “Chittering Widdershins” have had a tortuous path to completion, and languished on my hobby desk for many, many months awaiting their finishing touches – The end of 2021, ended up being the sole motivator to actually get them done and not have them lingering like a bad smell into the New Year.
Don’t get me wrong, Forgeworld’s Vorax Automata are a superb kits, with an excellent pedigree harking back as they do to the original ‘Crusader’ class Imperial Robots from the Rogue Trader era. The updated design has accentuated the various iconic features, such as the insectoid nature of the head, the hock-legged stance, and back-mounted heavier weapon. They did however, choose to up gun the newer iteration, adding rotor cannons with underslung blades to the armatures. This is, unfortunately, where things started to go wrong for me…
Forgeworld have become notorious for choosing to make many of the their weapons chain-fed (especially the Horus Heresy man-portable heavy weapons – Whilst this does give its miniatures a very dynamic look and appeal, it actually requires considerable expertise in bending and aligning thin resin pieces on the part of the modeller to be successful. Now whilst resin can be heated (either using hot water, or a heat gun), it cools rapidly and is incredibly brittle when set. This makes it trickier to work with than say the silicone feed components you see on something like MaschinenKreiger or Gunpla model kits.
With hindsight, when constructing the subassemblies for my automata, I should have constructured the ‘arms’ then attached the straight, unbent ammo feeds for the rotor cannons to the rotor cannons themselves and the rear-mounted ammo boxes, then used hot water to curl and position the ammo feeds so the arms fit comfortably in the arm sockets. I did not, however, do this, opting instead to construct my various subassemblies, paint, and build the automata, and leave the cabling to last to be bent to shape, assuming this to be the easier option.
It definitely was not.
Consequently, I had a truly tortuous task to bend and shape the individual ammo feeds to the fully constructed automata. This led to imperfect fits, and in one instance a snapped cable. I ended up bodging the attachment points with some clunky use of milliput, and just accepting the broken feed, and painting/weathering as if it had been severed in combat.
So, whilst I was pleased with the construction, painting, etc., of the Chittering Widdershins, and they do still look rather formidable, my view of them is tainted by the mistakes I made along the way, and the overall feeling of failure. All which seems rather fitting for the charges of my bloody-minded, unlikeable Praevian…
