Yes! I have finished the simple commission I got couple weeks ago. I had ten boxes of Savage Orc Boys to assemble. To be exact I had to turn 6 boxes of boys and 4 boxes of boar boys into 3 units of 20 boys (2 hand weapons, hand weapon and shield, spear and shield) and 2 units of 10 boar boys (2 hand weapons and spear and shield). Me and the client have decided to build all of the Big Stabbas for effect! I must say, having a command group and two of those big thing sticking out of the unit makes you think twice before getting too close to them just in case you get charged.
Body building!
There are also couple things I would like to say about putting together such huge amounts of units at one go. Orginise! Organise! Organise! What I have done was basically take everything I need for a unit of the sprues and put it in one box. The remaining bits came off the sprues too and went into a separate bits bag.
Then I filed all mould lines carefully. Well, I say 'filed', but I actually used the exacto blade to do the job. These models have nice new moulds and there is very little flash or mould lining on the stuff. The worst parts were weapons; the ends of sticks of axes and spears. The rest was quite straightforward.
Don't glue the models to their bases just yet!
Next step was to group the appropriate hands to the models and put them into groups: body, head, missing arm, weapons. That makes it so much easier. You can dry fit parts and I really can't emphasise enough the importance of dry fitting. Most of the orcish heads have pony tails and they get in the way of shield and weapons in their left hands. But a little bending and quick cutting does the trick.
Ranking up!
Maybe you are amazing at ranking your models on the go. Maybe you are used to old models that look the same and are easy to rank up. These are not those models. These models will make you cry! Follow my advice and you'll be just fine.
I used a bit of cardboard to arrange the bases as they will be on the movement tray. You can use a bit of double sided tape, blue tack or the actual movement tray. I didn't have any at hand so I used a cardboard with blue tack.
The way my orc boys were arranged was as follows: front rank had the boss in the middle, standard bearer on his left, musician on his right and Big Stabbas on both sides. I started with the boss and the rest of the command group. Then stabbas. With the most important models aligned you can start playing with second rank and then the rest. I must say it was a bit fiddly, and you probably won't remember how they were ranked up exactly, but at least you're making sure
there is a way to put them together.
My client can now make a decision if he wants to keep them on the cardboard tiles for transportation and take them off one by one and paint numbers on bottom of the bases or just chucked them in his army case and not bother himself with details like that. You need to remember not to make any decisions for your client when doing commissions.
It was a similar scenario with the boar boys. The only difference is that I would strongly suggest to rank up boars first. Remember you can always put the front rank more to the front leaning out of the bases. This way the second rank will have enough space to the boars' snouts or what not.
All in all it was a fun project, but to be honest I'm not going to touch any orc boys for a while. And I have a feeling that after seeing those boys done, the client will want me to paint them too. But that's another commission, another story... another post.
Till Later gang!