Assembly: Cerastus Knight Castigator, Part 4

Final assembly diary entry! Woot! Had to get this done for an Escalation Tournament game on Wednesday. The pic above is where we left off. So, on to the final arm!

 I suppose I lucked out that the sword was the only warped piece in the whole kit.

Some time with a hair dryer got it back into a reasonable semblance of straightness.

Did a lot of dry fitting again to get an idea of how I wanted the arm positioned. You can see some of the orange poster tack in this pic. Once that was determined I systematically removed the tack and glued the pieces in place one by one staring with the top shoulder assembly.

And lastly, attached the sword arm piece.

Unlike the other armor plates, I decided to go ahead and attach the Sword Arm Armor Plate at this point. The other armor plates are more visible on the back side of them. This one not so much. So what is visible will be hit by primer.

Once the cyanoacrylate had set, here was the final pose.

Next up was to attach the head. The head is a single solid piece except for the hoses on the side (not visible in the picture). It sit in a bracket that gets glued to the body so you can swivel the head from side to side.

I set the top armor carapace on to see how it would look. Since I plan on this being a House Terryn Knight, I glued the Aquila on the top armor. The top armor is actually two pieces, the armor itself, and the pilot's hatch.

If you want, you can not glue the hatch shut (and not glue the top armor on, it kind of snaps into place) so you can open it and show off the Throne Mechanicum.

Last step was to glue on the banner. Unfortunately there's no obvious place to attach this. I went with attaching it right where the hip pistons attach.

 And here it is! Ready to go do battle!

Here are the armor plates laid out (minus the chest plates which can be seen in the background) ready to be primed and painted separately. As you can see I went ahead and glued the two part shoulder plates together at this stage.

And finally, here's a size comparison between the Cerastus pattern Knight and the Questoris pattern. Keep in mind the Castigator isn't standing fully upright.

All in all, this was a fantastic kit! Very fun and enjoyable to put together. It definitely had more of a "modelers" aspect to it, being slightly more complex to assemble due to the poseability of the legs and such. I had very few issues with the kit. Only one warped piece, and only the lower arm piece on the sword arm had any issues with not being cast well (i.e. bubbles and thin areas) and most of that can be easily fixed with some liquid green stuff. It's an expensive kit, so I'm glad it was well cast and didn't have too many issues. You can get two regular Knights for the cost of this one.

The only other issue I have (not related to the model itself) is that in getting the Wave Serpent to attach to the base, I somehow warped it. Not so bad that it can't stand up, but I will definitely look into getting some plastic card to shim the base to make it more stable. Now I have to find some info on making it look like the Serpent crashed and dug into the ground with mounded up earth along the length of the model. So I won't be ready to prime it just yet.

I hope you enjoyed following along with the assembly. I hope this diary helps to supplement the instructions in the kit to make your own assembly as smooth as possible.