Wild West Exodus: Plastic Review and Assembly

Having only played Warmachine, the concept of plastic models was completely foreign to me.  Warmachine has gone from metal to resin, but I haven’t put a plastic model together since assembling car models as a kid. As I mentioned in the resin review article, the Hired Hands come in plastic as they come 10 to a set, 5 close combat and 5 long-range. While they might sound like a unit in Warmachine, they can activate and operate completely independent of one another and you can take any number of them you want, paying a specific point cost per model.

Here’s the way the Hired Hands are packaged, all 10 plastic models on one giant sprue.

 

This is the Lawmen Hired Hands sprue. Thankfully each piece has a letter/number pair adjacent to it, with all the same letters belonging to the same model.

Zooming in we find A1, the main body for our first model.  I use my clippers to snip the connections and get each of the A pieces separated from the sprue.

Then I cleaned up the sprue attachment points with a knife and laid the model out to see that everything was there.

Excellent, looks like we’ve got it all.  Time to assembled…but wait…plastics?  Don’t they use a special glue? After much googling it appears that while CA glue (super glue) will still work fine, using the special plastic glue actually melts the joint together, forming an incredibly strong bond.  Given how much I dislike assembly, a better glue sounded, well…better. So I picked up a bottle of plastic glue:

Now the arms are a oft-dreaded three-point attachment.  Luckily the plastic glue has a nice work time and the attachment points are keyed to go a certain way. A dab of glue  on each attachment point and we line it all up and hold gently in place.

Once the arms have solidified, we can move on to the feet.  At this point it’s worth nothing that each of his feet as a unique attachment point.  One has a shin-guard that makes bump on the front, the other has a step across the joint, making it impossible to mix them up.

Due to a mishap where I spilled 5 models worth of pieces all together, I also discovered that the joints appear to be unique across different models as well, and I was able to match all the pieces back up with no issues.

So with the feet glued on, we can attach the head.  Wait for the feet joints to be good and solid before drilling a hole into the sole of a foot and pinning him to the base. Being so solidly assembled and so lightweight, I only pinned most through one foot and just used CA glue on the opposite foot.  Note that the base is made of a different type of plastic, so the plastic glue will not work for attaching. (I know, I tried.)

Being my first exposure to plastic models I went on to assemble 20 of them and I have to say it’s a revelation.  Assembly, particularly with the plastic glue is so much easier than metal or resin.  The joints are almost impossible to detect, no gaps here. Mold lines are minimal to nonexistent and when they do exist they are in reasonable places (i.e.-Not right across the face – I’m looking at you PP). I’m still in the process of batch-painting a group of Lawmen hired hands, and they take primer and paint as well anything else.

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