Island of Blood Box: Assembly

So with a large legal assignment finished earlier this week and my homework done for the upcoming week, i ran out of things to do by mid afternoon Sunday this weekend. Like any sane person i decided I would bust open my Island of Blood Box and start assembling!

As I pointed out in my previous post, the sprues come inter-mingled with pieces from both High Elves and Skaven. This is extremely annoying. Even more annoying is that pieces between individual models were sometimes on different sprues (i.e the pieces of one of the rat ogres were spread between two sprues). I understand that in order to maximize the value with the least impact on their profit margin GW has to utilize as much space on those sprues as possible. However, it's really annoying.

The last gripe i have with models is the little pegs GW used in order to make them 'easier' to assemble. Each model comes in two or more pieces and GW put little pegs and holes in each of the pieces so that people new to the game could assemble them without glue. This is done, supposedly to make the assembly easier. Maybe I'm just no good with plastic models (a very real possibility), but i was struggling to get the pegs in their respective holes. Often the peg had additional plastic that made it so it didn't fit very well in the hole, or after test-fitting the models the peg fit so well i couldn't get the pieces apart to then glue for a more permanent fit. Ultimately I found it easier to just cut the pegs off and glue the pieces like normal. The pieces otherwise fit together perfectly.

An arm Peg.

An arm Hole.

The gap between the arm and the torso is the problem I saw with this method of assembly.

With that said, I can discuss the positives! The models themselves are really well done as far as aesthetics go. The molding and flashing were not very obtrusive to the models themselves. I've noticed that sometimes (with my little experience with plastic models) the flashing will be in a spot that is not easily cleaned, and by cleaning up the flashing some of the detail gets destroyed. The Island of Blood models suffer no such plight.

Additionally, these models rank up very nicely. Perhaps this is just a convention of the modern Skaven, but the older models seemed to NEVER rank up correctly. Again, no such problem with these newer ones.

Overall, I'm still very much impressed with the Island of Blood Box. Plus, the Rat Ogres are awesome! If i can get the rest of this box assembled (Only the Clanrats are left), Perrin and I should be able to get a WHFB game in sometime soon with a battle report to follow.