Canned Failure

Everything doesn't always have to be perfect (I hope). The subject today is failure (Ooh, dramatic!). I’m sure everyone has at some point encountered failures in their hobbies or other things that bring them joy. I certainly have. With miniatures, the options are usually limited to starting over, accepting a result you’re not all too happy with (and taking it as a learning experience) or just leaving the project (I’m fairly certain there isn’t many a wargamer or miniature painter around without some projects “in progress” for n years at any given time). The mini I’m using as an example falls into the latter two categories.

When I started 40k again a couple of years ago the game was nearing the end of it’s 7^th edition (I missed about half of the 5^th edition and the whole 6^th, in addition to the start of the 7^th). I started again with Space Marines and chose Iron Hands chapter tactics (a moment of silence for the loss all Iron Hands players suffered when the edition changed) because they were cool, and allowed for a heavily mechanized force. With this in mind, I decided to convert a biker Techmarine for the army. It took a lot of effort and multitude of bits (besides the plastic space marine bike and biker used as main part of the mini, it includes 2^nd edition techmarine backpack and parts from the 3^rd or 4^th edition Iron Warriors upgrade kit, Rogue Trader Rhino, 4^th edition space marine captain and Forgeworld Titan Techpriest). The end result, in my opinion, looked great. I consider it the best conversion I’ve done so far (that’s pretty much the reason I decided to write this actually, since the paintjob is anything but). Alas, the ruinous powers were a foot when it came time to paint it. I don’t know what went wrong, but the primer came out all goopy and splattered, looking horrible and obscuring detail (this being one of only two such incidents I’ve had up to date – rotten luck that had to happen to this particular mini). I tried to fix the issue, but couldn’t find a way to strip the mini without having to start over and likely get some replacement bits (besides plastic, there’s also resin, metal and green stuff in the mini), so in my frustration I abandoned the project. Flash forward to last week (two years or so). I decided I’d try once more. Unfortunately the problem persisted, so I decided to cut my losses and get it on the table. End result is less than ideal (it looks horrible), but atleast it’s useable in games now (as long as you don't look at it too closely, that is). Maybe I'll make another version some time in the future and marvel at the evolution between them.

Right side

Left side