Mark Jones and the Chaos Hellcannon
The better part of a decade ago, Mark Jones wrote a hobby article for White Dwarf about putting together the Chaos Hellcannon. Back then it was entirely made of metal. Fast forward ten years, and Mark now works in the Games Workshop Mould Room, using the dark arts of Chaos to help produce incredible Citadel miniatures. Given that Mark is something of an expert in the field of assembling metal Chaos Hellcannons, we asked him up to the web team office to have a go with the new Citadel Finecast version. We wanted him to compare putting it together with how he remembered the old metal model to be.
It's safe to say that the old Hellcannon required a bit of skill and patience to assemble. One of the first things Mark commented on was the difference in the bulk between the old metal kit and the new Citadel Finecast version. He seemed instantly happy at the lightness of it in his hands. 'Because of the nature of the metal,' he said, 'whenever you got a model of a certain size and heft, they could be tough to glue. Large parts would require pinning together to ensure a strong join.'
Of course, as with any of our kits, they need a little bit of clean-up work before being assembled and Citadel Finecast resin is no different. Mark had a quick inspection of the model and, aside from a little flash and a few mould lines, he found only a few air bubbles. It was nothing that a touch of Liquid Green Stuff couldn't sort out.
Mark first used the Citadel Finecast Clean-up kit - scraping away some of the mould lines and then using the brush to remove any excess resin. He then had a look to check all the surfaces were straight. If any of them contained bends, then a bit of warm water would have done the trick. Mark actually said that because of the qualities of the resin, even warm hands were enough to straighten out some bends!
With the new Hellcannon, Mark could be more sparing with his super glue. He just applied a small blob to the model and scraped it along to create a thin line. 'Often with the old version,' Mark said, 'I got through a lot of glue, and I had to hold the pieces together with a Vice and had to wait ages for them to dry.'
Mark sped on and put the chassis together, added on the wheels, and finally finished off by adding the Chaos Dwarves (incidentally, these are remarkably crisp little guys in Citadel Finecast).
From opening the box to assembling the model, it took no more than a couple of hours. That said, there was a lot of reminiscing and chatting going on - if we had been harsher taskmasters, he could have done it in an hour easily! Either way, Mark was very satisfied with the new Citadel Finecast Hellcannon. It didn't take anywhere near as long as the metal model to clean-up - a dab of Liquid Green Stuff and using the Citadel Finecast Clean-up kit did the job in next to no time. All in all, the new Hellcannon was way quicker to assemble and a much more straightforward model-making process.
We've released a lot of Citadel Finecast kits for Warhammer over the past year and, as you've seen, these bigger kits are a lot easier to put together than their metal predecessors. If Mark's efforts have inspired you, here's a small selection of what's available. Get building and drop us a line to let you know how you get on.
