Building, storing and transporting Terminators?

[Brother Lame]

Hey guys, gonna apologise in advance, I tend towards rambling to an insane degree. I've bolded the main questions and made a tl;dr if you don't want to deal with my prattling. 

 

So I'm finally getting around to starting my new army, worked out the army list and all that stuff and tomorrow I'm going into Games Workshop to get started on building my pile of Terminator kits for the Deathwing army. However, when I started clearing out a space in my current standard/classic Citadel army case (managed to clear out a full tray with the exact number of spaces for the number of models in my army), I found I had a rather significant problem on my hands. One which perhaps leads to a second as well.

 

Now I've built plenty of Terminators in my time, I've got loads kicking around and soon I'll have even more, but one thing I noticed when handling the Deathwing Terminators boxset last year was that unlike the beautiful standard Space Marine Terminator plastic kit, these Terminators have some atrocious hollow arm joints (as opposed to the lovely flat surfaces on the vanilla kit) on the inside of the arm, so you get a really dreadful job and Terminators that are ultimately absurdly brittle. I've built maybe three kits worth of these guys (two as Knights, two as a regular squad), and had about five arms coming off with minimal handling; one with a plasma cannon, two holding stormbolters, one power fist and the last was the DWK Master's Storm shield. The joints are a complete joke, if you've not seen them you basically get a ring of plastic on the arm where the shoulder joint meets the torso, which you have to connect to a flat torso. I'm guessing the shield and cannon were too heavy for for the joint, although the stormbolters and power fist arms are taking the cake.

 

I've got two squads of the normal Terminators that have survived about 8ish years of general handling, including repainting, dropping and bouncing off hard floors from standing height on numerous occasions, knocks on the battlefield plus a lifetime of being bunged into the aforementioned army case. These guys have never once had a breakage despite the banners on sergeants and the above list of conditions, but these new Deathwing Terminators haven't even seen the battlefield and they're falling apart like plague zombies.

 

Anyone else had similar experiences with the Deathwing kits, and/or suggestions for how I can reinforce these pansies?

 

As for the second point, this one follows on from the former issues with and whining about DW Terminator durability. My models built from vanilla kits will likely not have any issues with my current army case, but I'm worried about how best to store and transport this new era of glass joint Terminators. I feel like I wouldn't be able to put these in without the constant threat of breakages.

 

If you play with the new Terminators, or just play with Terminators in general, have you got any advice for how best to store and transport these guys in a case (i.e. do you keep them in a standard case, or have some special set-up for them)? I tend to alternate the bases with my current lot (so it's head, base, head, base etc.) to make them fit a little better and put less pressure on each other, but I don't think that'll cut it for the DW lot.

 

Tl;dr: I think the new Deathwing Terminators have terrible arm joints that keep breaking for me, am I alone with this or is this a common experience? I also could use help and advice with how to pack 28 Terminators into a standard army case without breaking the Knights and Deathwing kit models, or how you guys handle it.

 

Thanks for your time!

[Grotsmasha]

1. The arm joints - It seems GW has left a hole for you to magnetize arms.

 

Cheers,

Jono

[Dosjetka]

You could fill the holes with greenstuff, giving you a nice flat surface.

[Sothalor]

Question: are you using super glue or plastic glue for these Deathwing kits?

[Brother Lame]

Thanks for the replies guys!

 

1. The arm joints - It seems GW has left a hole for you to magnetize arms.

 

Cheers,

Jono

That's... a really good point actually, I don't know if that's GW's actual explaination for those holes (some are perfectly round, others are oddly shaped/don't look intentional), or if I could find magnets tiny enough/the right shape to fit in those holes, but thinking about it like that, it makes more sense.

 

You could fill the holes with greenstuff, giving you a nice flat surface.

 

Hadn't considered that actually, though I imagine I'd need to use super glue as opposed to plastic glue if I did that.

 

Question: are you using super glue or plastic glue for these Deathwing kits?

 

I've used plastic glue for them. I'm not sure if that is the right choice of glue, but I've always used plastic glue for the plastic models as it's typically so easy to work with unlike superglue which can get a bit messy and has given me less than excellent results in the past with plastic kits (but was obviously still good for metal and resin).

 

I built most of the army on Saturday, although it looks like I still need to go online for a spare set of plain plastic Terminator shoulder pads (the Deathwing box doesn't give you the plain ones, and I'm not actually doing Dark Angels, just using the rule set for a homebrew Chapter) and one more Terminator Power sword, and so far at least, all the ranged Terminators seem to have survived being packed in my normal army case with no further casualties, apart from another DWK which lost an arm on the way TO GW. I think I may have had a kneejerk reaction to the first load of Terminators (all of which were built from the DW kit, whereas batch 2 is a pair of vanilla kits and one DW), although I'm still not entirely convinced. I'm going to HAVE to pin these Knight arms on as soon as they come off I think, I don't trust those shield arms at all.

 

Cheers guys!

[Black_out]

I just went through magnetizing a unit of 10 cataphractii terminators for my Heresy era army. I can't quite recall the dimensions on any of my DW terminators but I *think* the 1/8 x 1/16th magnets I used on the cataphractii will work for the DW as well.

 

Magnets happen to also be a great bonus when you actually want to swap weapons and not buy a huge amount of extra models just to portray certain weapon combos

[FashaTheDog]

There is always the option of using epoxy on your models; then they'll never break where you've glue them ever again. I've got a few models that have glued joints stronger than the plastic the rest of the model is made from. You could also look to gel super glues as well as they will fill gaps and hold the model together. Loctite makes a decent one for this.

Now transportation is something of an issue I am facing myself. Behold my novel solution:

http://s2.postimg.org/z4v591zmx/Deathwing_Carry_Case.jpg

Since I usually give a friend a ride to the store we game at on Mondays, I make him carefully hold it in his lap so any bumps or sudden stops do not damage them. It works great because he hates it when his filthy traitors gets slaughtered by them and he needs to take care of them, so they all have the Bane of Traitors special rule. I do have a squad of metal ones in a pair of GW black case along with a trio of metal characters and most of the rest of my Dark Angels. As for a more permanent, less labor intensive means of transportation, I am looking at KR Multicase or Battle Foam as a potential, but my distrubingly massive Chaos Marine/Daemon/Warrior armies need a case first and this works so well now. Eventually I will spring for the quality case as I've seen them first hand from others at my local store and they are very much worth the money.

[Sothalor]

Not a lot of advice for transporting from me, but for building plastic terminators (especially with the hollow joints as you describe) I'd recommend scoring the contact points with a sharp hobby knife. You don't need to go nuts carving stuff up, but I find that giving those points a bit of "texture" helps the glue really dig in and bond the disparate pieces together.

[ShinyRhino]

I'm not familiar with the joints of the new DW kits, but the plastic glue you're using...is it the thick formula or the thin? I have two different plastic glues I use based on what the parts are. For large, flat areas, I often use a brush-on, thin plastic cement. It's thin enough to not squirt out of joints, and potent enough to weld almost any polystyrene together. You have to apply it on both sides of the joint, let it sit for thirty seconds or so, and then push the parts together, give a slight wiggle to "mix" the melted plastic from the joints, and hold for another thirty while it starts to gum up.

 

If you're using thick plastic glue, are you using too much? Too much glue is actually just as bad as too little. Plastic glue isn't really glue, it's a solvent. It melts the parts and joins their plastic. If you use too much, you're relying purely on the adhesive action of the thick cement, and not the melting of plastic together.

 

Do you happen to have a picture of your broken joints we could look at? We could probably tell you at a glance what the core issue is.

[MadGreek]

So, top of my head - 

 

Add some padding around your models to keep them still or, magnetize all the bases and then put some magnetic material in your carry box to keep them still.  My friend uses a cheap metal tackle box to transport his troops, and the magnetic bases hold everything still and stable.  If you don't want to magnetize the arms pin them and then green stuff the gaps.  The pins should hold the arms in place and provide more gluing contact surface.

[FashaTheDog]

The problem he is having is that every one has a huge gap in them where the shoulder pad and torso join.  They look something like this, although each one varies slightly:
http://megabitzshop.com/bilder/produkte/gross/Warhammer-40k-Bitz-Dark-Angels-Deathwing-Terminators-Arm-Right-C.jpg

http://megabitzshop.com/bilder/produkte/gross/Warhammer-40k-Bitz-Dark-Angels-Deathwing-Terminators-Arm-Right-C_b2.jpg

[twopounder]

Well, for transport, I recommend these:

 

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/285473-storehouse-aluminum-case-pictures-and-review-added/?p=3566146

 

Cheap and gets the job done. Looks classy too.

[ShinyRhino]

The problem he is having is that every one has a huge gap in them where the shoulder pad and torso join.  They look something like this, although each one varies slightly:

 

 

 

 

Ahh, ok. And do the torsos have the solid join like standard Marine Terminators, or some sort of hole in them as well? 

Not to insult the OP's skills or intelligence, but you are removing any paint or primer from the arm joins before gluing them, yes? Some folks spray their arms separately, and the paint would block any and all adhesion.

 

I would recommend trying the liquid cement. The 3502M stuff here (http://www.testors.com/product-catalog/testors-brands/testors/adhesive/cement) is what I use. It's available at US craft stores like AC Moore and Michael's and I figure any shop that sells a variety of plastic model kits would also have it. Apply a bit to each surface to be joined, wait 30 seconds, press together for 30 more seconds, and you're good to go.