A Big (but not really sexy) Dwarven Dirigible

So the dry run of fitting things went well enough. Pinning the pieces has required some heavy duty work. Digging into the material I was preparing with for busts I cut down 1/8″ brass rod (just a bit over 3mm) to set in and hold these things fast. After drilling I did some fill work with 5 min epoxy and let that cure so I won’t need to worry about playing with delicate pieces. This is not delicate. This is the Tonka truck of resin that you put on the table and wonder if the weight can be supported under it. (That gives me an idea as to where I can go with large figures. Damn you Rafael Robledo Jr. and your awesome YouTube channel)

Anywho, the issues with the balloon’s rudder was that it was split as two pieces. Not overtly a difficult thing but the tricky part is that it needed to sit with the seam perpendicular to the seam bisecting the balloon. Victory Is Mine! The pins were set with a smaller diameter of wire I normally use for putting into monsters. I will spend part of my hard earned overtime money on a true hard wire cutter for the difficulty I’ve had with a pair of needlenose pliers.

The hull and balloon are chunks of resin that can easily be palmed but just don’t quite fit right from the cast. It is indeed high quality material that effort has been put into. The problems I found were the fitting to align the strips of board running from bow to stern (historicals/naval enthusiast/devoted SAGA players don’t kill me for not knowing this) and ballon rigging(?) at the mold seams. In comparing the model from the Norba Miniatures website for the Zeppelin Karak Thel as a 3D render to the resin its really good. The physical model just has issue from the tolerance of the angles ground down after the mold was released. This was most apparent with the aft quarter section of the hull and the decoration of the balloon. I’ll be playing around with things to try and even those seams out.