Warchimera Hammer MK I APC Joins the Jailbird Division

A huge box arrived from Warchimera which contained the much anticipated APC and AA sections for the Jailbird Division and a very cool Bunker. 

Here you see the weapon options, Autocannon (from the vehicle accessories kit) a heavy flamer, a Heavy Bolter, er Machine gun, and a Las Cannon.









The goodies as they appeared right out of the box... a plethora of zip-lock bags.  These were loose packed in the shipping box with no padding or wrap other than the ziplocks themselves.  There was a fair amount of damage in the form of several cracked pieces but the shipment was generally intact.  Good enough for resin models anyway and certainly nothing a little glue won't fix.


You can catch the unboxing video here if you like.

To be fair these were relatively inexpensive as original 28mm resin vehicle kits go so no frills packaging was not a surprise.

 The Bunker looks very cool.  Almost no flash and the parts fit together very well.  Shown here with an Iron Empire for scale... shhh.

This will get fast tracked since its in such great shape.

Warchimera's resin is very hard, slightly brittle, and very dry.  Often resin has an oiliness to it that interferes with glue and paint adhesion even after washing.  This is not the case with Warchimera's material which almost instantly bonds with superglue, takes paint readily, and dries rapidly.  We'll have to see how it holds up over time.

The Hammer itself is not in as good a condition as the Bunker but this was primarily due to irregular quality control in the casting process.  The example that got painted up was in the best initial condition.  It required a lot of cleanup in terms of flash but the parts all lined up and fit snugly wit zero warping.

Between the Hammer MK I APC and the Hammer MK II AA version I ended up with eight vehicles which gave me a good look at Quality Control.  Most of them are reasonably well cast although there is a lot of cast on debris but several of the pieces were misaligned.    The most egregious of these involves the top half of a hull completely missing the mark at the rear doors.  This will have to be split and straightened.  Not impossible to work around but a bit of a pain.  Many of the fenders and even some of the rear door panels are significantly warped.  The fenders are an easy fix but the rear door panels are thicker and are warped in a transverse direction that will bit tricky to sort.

On to the worst bit.. the wheels.  OMG these suck!  They are difficult to separate from their sprue given how much of the tire is covered by the pouring block.  The brittleness of the material comes into play here as undue stress on the tab frequently damages the actual tire.  But the worst thing about these tires is that the tabs don't fit together.  all of the tabs are longer than the slot they are intended to mate with resulting in some minor surgery to shorten the tabs when assembling the tire.  The firse tire took me about 40 minutes to remove from the sprue and assemble.





Eight vehicles with six tires each..48 ties or 36 hours of work....erm... no!  After the first wheel I was much less careful separating the tires from the sprue and just accepted that there would be a bit of damage and that it was faster to back-fill the resulting gaps with greenstuff and re-sculpt the tread... not that the original tread sculpt was in great shape.  Using this method I was able to knock out the remaining five tires in about an hour.... much more acceptable.





Here are the parts all laid out for view. You can see the flash is typical of kits of this type although the center bench seat for the crew compartment is a hot mess the rest of the set looks pretty good.


 Here you can see the Hammer MK I with the Secret Weapon Rapid Assault Vehicle (RAV).  The Hammer is a bit larger and more boxy looking as I'd expect from a dedicated APC while the sleeker and more deadly RAV looks the part of dedicated fighting vehicle.

I got some barriers in the Bones II kickstarter.  These are from expansion set 3 and are already marked by the Cult of the Harbinger.  Mimi is calling it in.  The Expansion 3 has a pile of shipping containers, dumpsters, telephone booths, etc... more on them in future.

 Yoko the Psycho leaves the Hammer to check out the area.  The flagstone space is a Tabletop World Town Square.

 I added the vehicle accessories set to this model as well. That includes a female commander, an autocannon, and two stowage boxes that fit in the wheel wells between the front wheel and the middle wheel.  The clearances in the wheel wells for the stowage boxes is very tight but it looks pretty good when done.  the Autocannon is a great addition and the female commander is very in keeping with the Jailbird theme, although the quality of the commander's sculpt is a little crude when presented in the company of the RH Jailbirds.... shhhhh!

 Side by sides with the Hammer and the RAV.

 Bernadette getting ready to go to work!

 The Hammer deploying some Jailbird Division Veterans.

 Free Will... a good name for a Jailbird Division Vehicle!