It wasn't immediately obvious that I had a lemon in my hands. The packaging promised me a Space Marine Gladiator tank. Certainly that's what my friends thought they'd bought me for my birthday, and very grateful I was too. And as proven the first time I built one of these things, a Gladiator can also serve as an Impulsor - just don't glue the arse on.
With this new lad, I set about building it just the same way. I remembered how easily it had gone together the last time. All was well.
Except, of course, it wasn't. Because it was a lemon.
The citrusness first emerged when I dry-fitted the hull plates. That's weird, I thought, those are supposed to fit. And yet they didn't. I was looking at a 1-3mm gap, depending on where you looked. How have I got this so wrong? I wondered. But 'twas not I, oh no sir. This bitch had warped harder than the USS Voyager hijacking a Borg transwarp conduit. Maybe it's just bent, I thought. That's fine, I can bend plastic.
But no.
It had also changed size. The Impulsor comes on two sprues, and one of them was, minutely but fatally, a different size. When I dry-fitted the Gladiator top plate onto the Impulsor chassis, it straight up wouldn't go. Even the Impulsor's gear mount, the one that drops on to the front of the passenger compartment, couldn't drop on. It literally didn't fit. I found this again and again, every time a part from the shrunken sprue met another component.
A rational man would have gone to James of James' Workshop and asked for a replacement, but I am not a rational man. I thought to myself I wonder if, using my many years' experience of building miniatures, I can get something useful out of this citrus stoma bag?
Given the impossibility of a drop-on Lancer section, I sacked that off and elected to try and at least turn these bits of plastic into a usable Impulsor. The green stuff came out of the packet. The modelling files came out of the toolbox. The tongue of concentration came out the side of my mouth.
The gaps were reduced as far as possible via the application of Vernier clamps and being left to set overnight. After that, I filled gaps around pretty much the entire hull with green stuff, then did my best to sharpen the work up with a knife on those bits of putty that still looked a bit dodgy after curing. Brown stuff probably would've been wiser, since you can sand that after it's cured. Sprue goo would also have been a good shout (sprue goo is where you get a bottle of Tamiya extra-thin poly cement and jam some sprue in there to make brush-on plastic for gap filling).
Still, my tongue and I concentrated our way to something that looked like putty-based success:
This image doesn't demonstrate all the weird little things I had to do. See those tow hooks on the front? Yeah, those didn't fit in their holes at all. I had to shave the locator lugs by a couple of millimetres so that they'd sit flush.
By this point you might be thinking "Charlie, seriously man, just complain and get a new kit," but god dammit, by this point I was in problem solving mode. To be clear, I am not suggesting other people should take duff products as some sort of test they have to pass. This was definitely a random quality failure, and I have no idea what science or damnation allows a plastic component to shrink, I was just enjoying the challenge. Admittedly I was also complaining about it to anyone in earshot, but with block-headed determination.
When it came to painting, I did of course have some sub-assemblies, most notably the passenger compartment cover, since it would've gotten in the way of painting the screens and door at the back of the cabin. Despite having shaved parts of this component down to make it fit, I ended up having to force the thing into place using a screwdriver handle (other large rounded objects are available). That thing isn't glued, but it ain't coming out.
I added a heavy stubber, since that adds APC charm, but I kept the Gladiator pilot camera thingy as it looks like it'd offer more situational awareness.
When it came to painting, I saved some time by doing the mud/dust stage before lining in the blue, and then just lined in those bits of blue that weren't muddy.
So here I stand, the owner of an Impulsor I didn't expect, having passed a hobby test no one asked me to take. I don't know if this makes me a waste avoidance champion, or a filthy enabler of a quality control cock-up by Big James. I don't hugely care, because when this thing deployed to the streets of Hive Massinissos a few days later with a passenger cabin full of flamethrowers, I had a much better time than the orks.
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| Not pictured: a mound of roasted tankbusta boyz. |
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