At the end of 2024 I came to a realisation: the thing I love most in my minaitures hobbying is building big miniatures. Bigatures, if you will. And I committed myself to building a number of them this year. This post is about the first of these projects, the Forgeworld Legion Mastodon.

I am not going to lie, you should not buy the resin Mastodon. I am an experienced hobbyist, with a workshop full of tools up to and including the ability to recreate the entire kit from scratch, and I struggled with it. It is poorly engineered and honestly it’s not an experience I want to repeat. It is bad enough it’s almost entirely put me off similar large kits from Games Workshop.

So lets begin, at the beginning. The kit is designed with a full interior, with two large side panels which are composed of two long thin pieces each. If you have any experience with large scale garage kits or similar, that sentence put the fear into you. If not, then it’s time for some brief education on why resin warps.

Resin parts are made by injecting liquid resin into a mold cavity (usually silicone, usually in our case two large blocks of silicone, but sometimes a “jacket” mould where a thin layer of silicone is encased with a plaster/fibreglass shell), and then when the resin has solidified, the resin part can be demolded. Sometimes this is done under pressure and/or vacuum to help reduce the bubbles, but not always. Depending on the temperature, the size and thickness of the part, and a million other factors, it takes between 20 minutes and an hour for the resin to harden but usually the resin “sets up” much quicker to the point where the outer surface has hardened but the whole thing is still squidgy and flexible.

If you’re trying to economise your casting routine, you may demould a part at this stage so you can fill it again, and most of the time this is fine. But on long, thin or flat parts, this can cause issues. You see, resin doesn’t cure evenly. Different areas may cure faster than others, because of heat or thickeness or improper mixing of the original resin, and when it cures it shrinks a tiny bit. This is one of the main causes of warping in large, thin resin castings. You can limit this by adding bracing to resist the warping, or leave the casting in the mold until it’s set longer, but these all come with tradeoffs.

How do you fix this when it’s happened? Easy, heat the resin up and bend it. The “official” guidance from Games Workshop is to immerse parts in “not quite boiling water” until they soften but I prefer either a heat gun for smaller parts (or more tactical bends) or heated sand for larger parts. If your part has one side that’s meant to be absolutely flat, this is quite simple: heat it up and then press it flat, holding it until it’s cool and rigid.

So back to the Mastodon, and you have two long, flat castings on each side which are already prone to warping, and have lots of detail on both sides. There is no flat surface (a reference surface) to press them flat against.

You can see the difficulty here (although here I’ve attached much of the internal gubbins inside AFTER my best efforts to flatten it). This is more of a problem than usual because the kit is designed with a removable top section, which has to sit in a recess between the side panels and be removed smoothly. With the warping of the side panels, even with aggressive filing and sanding (always wear PPE folks), it was still binding. Not to mention the doors on the front didn’t close properly.

I did contact Games Workshop customer support but I was given the following advice:

• Try to bend pieces flat individually by eye
• Assemble, then submerge the whole thing in hot water and try to bend it flat
• If it still didn’t go together, then call them back and they’d consider replacing any particularly warped parts

This presented four problems for me:

1. I’d only called them after I’d already tried everything except “stick the whole thing in the model oven to attempt to flatten it”
2. It was currently out of stock (I’d bought the last one from Warhammer World) so I couldn’t just go back to the store to swap it
3. Waiting for Games Workshop to recast the parts was going to take weeks
4. There was no guarantee that the recast parts wouldn’t have the same problem

And add to that that I had already spent about 10-15 hours on the kit, and I didn’t particularly want to spend another 10-15 hours to get back to the same point with a new kit, and I made the only decision that felt reasonable to me and I sacrificed the interior, glued the entire kit shut and then carefully heated the whole thing to try and eliminate the twisting.

This is AFTER I’d done my best. The kit was too big to eliminate all the stress, and there’s no way to reasonably clamp it down as it cools. I got to work gap filling and about a month after I’d started assembly I had this:

The goddamn front sponson DOESN’T FUCKING FIT.

This is, if I am being generous, not actually their fault. It was not designed with the plastic sponsons in mind and originally had a fixed loadout, resin sponson on the front mount. That being said, this is at time of writing a four hundred and eleven pound model kit. I am done making excuses for it. The kit was supposedly remastered for the plastic sponsons, and really they should have considered how it’s supposed to go together with the new plastic options.

As a final aside for the building portion, one of the other problems I had building this kit was that so few other people have built one that it’s not like you can just google “mastodon sponson don’t fit” and see how other people did it. Part of that is just always going to be down to the number of them out there, but also since dropping facebook I’ve lost access to some of the communities I could have asked in. (Although part of the reason I was more comfortable dropping it was a lot of those communities had just completely brainrot into oblivion.)

Back to the model. Some tactical cuts later to allow me to glue the sponson in place, it was done. The model was primed and I could begin painting and honestly, this is the point I actually started enjoying working on the model.

The core of the scheme is red and black, and this was quickly achieved using my (dwindling) supply of Citadel Air Word Bearer’s Red, washed with a mix of pre-contrast Agrax and Nuln Oil. (The current contrast based washes don’t behave right when airbrushed over large surfaces. I discovered this the hard way and had to respray this and four other tanks I was working on.) The black is Pro Acryl’s Coal Black. Except where noted, the remainder of the tank was painted with Pro Acryl and honestly I’m not going back.

I could have left it here and started on base-coating the other parts, highlights and call it done, except it’s meant to be a centrepiece model. So I did a quick test of burning geometric runes based on the illustrations in Liber Hereticus:

Jackpot! Except that a) it was pretty time consuming and b) I was feeling a bit fed up with the Mastodon. So I made the excutive decision to take a break and focus on the other four tanks I’d basecoated at the same time.

A few days later I’d perfected the burning runes AND a new technique for doing script work on the other four tanks:

It is worth noting that these two land raiders were christmas gifts from Christmas 2022, and I built their custom sponsons in Janurary 2023, so they’ve been unfinished for over two years! The sabers on the other hand are new, purchased this year and frankly are lovely kits.

I also pulled out the rhino that I needed for the army list, which was originally painted in 2022 with the launch of Heresy 2nd edition, shown here alongside my command rhino:

And updated it a little to fit my newer scheme:

New scriptwork, some extra black panelling and the now-obligatory runes. With five other tanks complete, I had no excuse and went back to the mastodon.

I am still torn which style of vehicles I prefer: edge highlighted or volume shaded. But damn edge highlighting looks nice, even with my chunky uneven highlights.

I limited the runes to the front portion of the tank partly to stop myself going mad, but also to give it some more visual texture. I think I might come back and add more later, especially since I’ve gotten the process down from the original seven steps to a more managable five, and I will be coming back to it with a few improvements after the Goonhammer Open.

The next step was to plan out where the script work was going to go, and I sent some friends this super complex mockup:

The big thing I was concerned about was the prospect of doing some large freehand lettering on the rear panel, and so did a quick practice:

A bit wobbly but not unfixable. Some quick guide lines later and…

The left and front of the tank are complete! I added a little diagram into the big block on the centre panel to break up the script-runes, which I think I oculd have done a little more cleanly, but it works. The lettering of Deliverance ended up going really well. Too well. I take a long sip of tea, turn the tank around, and start painting on the other side…

Fuck. Well, paint over and try again.

Good enough.

And that is Deliverance Unto Lorgar finished enough for the event next weekend!

At some point I will come back and:

• Extend the runes up onto the pill box
• Add a few more details like heat burn on the melta barrels
• Add a commander to the open hatch
• Apply dust and weathering to all six tanks

But that can wait until a) after the event and b) when I am not sick of looking at the thing.

Final conclusion (for now): honestly I still feel some degree of regret when thinking about it. It’s an awful lot of money to spend, to have to give up the interior and to ultimately not have the kit lay flat. I still wouldn’t recommend the kit, even to a fellow veteran modelmaker. It looks great, sat in the cabinet and I am thrilled to be able to use it next weekend (even if I am sad to play my first GHO without a warhound) but the experience has been, on balance, bad.

Next up in The Year of the Bigature is a surprise late addition: a miniature where no man has gone before…