Saturday 12 February 2011

Jack in the Box part II


I've finally put together my plastic helljack and magnetized it. I will briefly describe the whole process in this post.
The first thing I knew I wanted to change was the pose. I've already worked on one cryxian jack in the past and wasn't happy with how static he looked like in the end.
Working with plastic posed some potential problems. I knew I wanted to somehow bend his legs. I was racking my brains until I came up with a simple yet effective solution - water. It turned out that putting plastic parts in boiling water makes them very flexible. Bending them into virtually any form becomes a piece of cake. One thing worth noting though - once you've bent it and are happy with the pose, immediately put it under cold water. Otherwise it may bend itself back. As you can see in the picture above, one leg has been stretched considerably.
It was also important to bend the feet so that they would fit the sloping rocks I used on the base. I also used pliers and slightly twisted the lower part of his body to add a little more dynamics to the pose. Once I've dealt with the legs, it was time to start working on the magnets. I won't go into details here as there have already been plenty of very good step by step tutorials on how to do it. My main problem was that due to lack of specialist tools (electric drill would have come in handy...). I needed to get the work done with the use of a regular hobby drill and hobby knife. It was a painstakingly slow work.
In the end I had to use modelling putty to fill in the crevices left after cutting out the holes for magnets.
I also added some scratches to the armor. If you're wondering about the sand glued randomly to the armor, it's going to become corrosion in the painting stage. It's actually not my idea - my brother (who is a layman in the field of hobby but is a smart guy who has lots of good ideas ;) suggested adding something or somehow roughening the surface covered by rust. He made this suggestion after looking at my painted bonejacks and I immediately saw potential for following his advice.

In the pics you can see the effects of my work. I'm particularly pleased with the Slayer. It's easy to see that the extreme sculpt version was my main source of inspiration here.



The Corruptor and Reaper were also fun to work with. Initially I was worried that the magnets may be too weak to hold their long arms in place but fortunately everything worked out well in the end (as you can see in the clip below).
Malice was the trickiest one here as I wanted to somehow incorporate the soul tokens and magnetize them as well. After toying with the idea for a longer while I came up with a solution. Unlike the original version, in which the tokens are glued the the area surrounding the cortex, I placed magnets in two different places, one on the armor above the head and the second one in the middle of the (I've no idea how to call this part, guess I'll just refer to it as 'exhaust pipe' until I've found the proper name). The third soul token can be placed in the rocks on the base. After painting I will glue some static grass around it so that the whole won't be visible.
I glued the additional element to the harpoon as I saw no way it could be magnetized. Still, I don't think it would make using the model as Reaper impossible.



And to wrap things up, here's a short video showing how it all works out in practice.

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