Adventures with...Shit, to be honest.

I have been dubious about the quality of the new finecast stuff from Games Workshop. I had heard and seen things second hand but hadn't actually had any myself. A friend had asked me to paint a Sammael model for his Dark Angels army so I was all Whooo! And bought one last weekend. Throughout the whole week the furthest I have gotten is basecoating before having to fix/resculpt something and have to reprime it. It is possibly the nastiest piece of shit I have ever come across in miniatures.

It didn't fit. There were bubbles all over it. There were bubbles underneath the surface that you could only feel when painting. Mould lines ran through finely detailed sections rather than the blank space next to them, mould lines meant bits of the model had slipped apart. Fixing some of it would have meant cutting bits of it off and realigning it by miles.

Most offensively? It was badly sculpted. All the edges were soft: sections that were supposed to be hard panels looking like pillows, none of the edges being straight - all curved in or out - rounded corners. The details had just melted into unidentifiable splodges. Even tubes on the bike weren't cylinders, they were squished sausages. Emblems and badges on the bike were well over a millimeter think, instead of being flat. There's a section at the back were the engine has regular grooves in - they are all different sizes and don't even have straight edges.

It looks like someone sculpted it with one eye closed and a toothbrush.

As you look at the photos notice the surface of the whole model. Resin can't be flattened the same way metal can - using wet grain paper and smoothing layers of thinned milliput. It would chew through the flimsy material and also this model was so rough that I couldn't make a dent in it.

This mold line had shifted the two halves apart

Same mould line, better view

This sword is over a mm thick, and the handle is a mush of detail

The other leg. This mold line actually split it in half - look at the exhausts

Split exhausts, and his lovely smooth cloak. This is after a time of filling in the horrible rough texture

His cloak with lots of large gaps in

Hard to see but this book has tiny micro bubbles and bits of the chains missing

More messy book pages. This is tiny - visible, but not really fixable

Look at the top of the pages - they aren't stylistically messy, that's just excess resin that steadily flaked off and took some page with it.
On the bottom right you can see when part of the book fell off, compare it to the left. 

This is supposed to be a circle at the top so that it could clip onto the bottom of the bike

Mold lines running across the handle details. You can see how spongy and bendy all the lines are.
If you look at the detail in the middle of the left end of the bike - those are supposed to be engine parts. The cylinders had split and spread out. 

This doesn't look so bad, but is impossible to paint. The details are all imprecise. Look to the left of the skull wheel, none of those lines are straight or uniform. The hoses are all smeared. Many of the details are so badly presented that they can't be painted to any decent standard. 

This is the bottom of the front. You can see this on the model, it's not covered when the model is finished. f

Huge mold line running along the bottom splitting details. 

Your control panel is made of marshmellows. There is also a massive mold line running through the top of the bike.  Also look at how out of line the handles are. It was not possible to centre it anything further. 

This is what the top looks like when fully assembled. Look at how asymmetrical is and how fudged the details are. Ragged lines and unidentifiable objects. 

These are just the problems I bothered to snap before I took it back. This is also what it looked like after I worked on it every day since Sunday. I had straight it so much compared to what you see now, and fixed so many details but I burnt out. It wasn't fun and the idea of giving it to my friend actually made me feel ashamed. I had offered to paint it for free to begin with, because I do love painting, but even being paid I would never had given this model to anyone in any state. I had a few bits of the model collapse when I went to paint it because there were bubbles underneath a very fine membrane of resin that only became apparent when I shoved my £10 brush though it. I need to replace my brush now, which is going to be damn expensive!

The thing that finally threw me was the fact I had had to pull out lots of pink squidgey material from the model and fill the resulting gaps in. When I asked our local manager he pointed out that that was actually part of the mold the model was made in.

Unfortunately my friend said this was the only model he was missing so when I went to trade it in I couldn't get him something better. This does mean I am now the proud owner of an ogre stonehorn!

I opened the plastic box and the difference between the new plastic models and the finecast ones is ridiculous.  The plastics are crisp, defined, sturdy. Edges are straight and hard. There's no bubbles and for the most part mold lines go through sensible places - not fingers and faces.