Salamander MkII Assault Squad – Work in Progress

As with every tournament, there is always that last minute rush to get your army finished. Astronomi-con Toronto is this weekend and I still haven’t finished painting the one squad I wanted to add. Now that I think about it, this post could probably be considered procrastination!

My Forge World MkII Assault Squad kits arrived a few weeks ago and I took my time washing, cleaning and assembling the models. I had some Thunderhammer arms and Corsair cloaks lying around just waiting to make this Sergent and I think he turned out really well.

wip-01a wip-01b

Just to go on a tangent for a moment, I was a little disappointed with this Forge World kit overall. Mainly because the casting quality was quite low. There was a lot of flash, air bubbles, and mold-lines all over the models that took forever to clean up. Even then, only assembling 7 marines, I have models with messed up areas I’m doing my best to hide. I was lucky I only needed a squad of 7 as a couple of the jump packs were just not usable with some major casting issues.

It was nice that the kit came with two sets of hands for each marine, letting you switch chainsword and bolt pistol hands easily. However the join between the hand and arm is quite poor, with some joining smooth to look like gloves and others with a rim to look like a standard marine gauntlet. Maybe it was just how I assembled them, but I’m confused as to how to paint the hands.

I was also a little disappointed with the poses of the models, none of the legs supplied had a running pose so the whole squad is kinda just standing there. This would be fine for a Tactical squad or something similar, but I expected a little more movement in the legs for an Assault squad. Not a huge deal though!

wip-02

Here is the current state of the squad, with all 7 models in a similar painting stage as the ones pictured here. The model on the left is just to compare the green, showing that I still need to do a coat or two of pure Snot Green to finish them off.

That’s all for now, I have work to do!