On to the main body. It took me some time to get this part figured out. A few things I noticed while doing the endless dryfitting– no really, I spent like 2 days dryfitting these before deciding exactly where to put pins as well (granted they were work days, so more like 2 evenings)– first, the sides of the back did not fit well with the middle of the back (the reactor).  I couldn’t get the boxes on the sides to fit flush with the spaces in the reactor piece.  I spent a lot of time fiddling with these and trying to find out why they didn’t fit properly.  Turns out that the side pieces have a small nub of resin sticking out that is supposed to go into the corner of the reactor piece.

These nubs have to be lined up properly in order for the side piece to sit flush with the side of the reactor, but when you get it lined up in the corner of the reactor room, the boxes on top and bottom don’t line up at the same time.  According to the blog linked in my last post, this is pretty common to all Warhounds.  I also discovered that the floor of the reactor was going to be very difficult to line up properly with the front of the main body.  Eventually I just decided that I was going to have to do my best and then fill in the gaps with green stuff.  I wasn’t willing to make the cuts necessary to make some of this stuff fit; and in truth I wasn’t sure it would work.  I didn’t want to cut too much and find I’d screwed up the model.

Anyway, on to the pinning.  As you can see in the above picture, I did some more sharpie marking to find pin hole positions.  I didn’t want to drill the large 1/8″ pins all the way through the body so they’d be visible from the outside, so that meant I needed to mark out the pin holes because I’d have to drill them separately. I did this by marking with the sharpie where the back edge of the reactor met the side piece.  Then, I chose a spot that looked good on the reactor piece and drilled.  From there, I used a ruler to measure how far from the corners the edge of the hole was.

Then, with the edge markings I’d made on the side piece, I could mark the edges of the hole on it, then drill.  As you can see in the first picture, I didn’t get the location quite right on the first one.  It fit almost perfectly when it was the first hole, but once I fitted the second side piece to the reactor, the fit wasn’t as perfect.  I also found that the sides of the reactor are slanted slightly; they’re not straight up and down.  The side pieces are pretty close, so you need to decide which is going to be “flat” for your pin.  I ended up drilling more or less straight into the slanted face of the reactor piece (90 degrees perpendicular to the plane of the side where the measurements were taken).  That would put the pin poking at a downward angle into the side piece, which required a bit of a hole adjustment.  I figured no problem, the epoxy would need some space to hold the pin in.

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I did a fair amount of research before starting on this project.  I’d been thinking about it for several months before I finally worked up the nerve to spend the money on the model.  I’ve always dreamed of having a Titan, and now I’ve got one, I don’t want to screw it up.  I knew going into this that it would put all of my modeling skills to the test in addition to forcing me to develop new ones.  Well, so far I certainly haven’t been wrong.  I made a few mistakes, but so far I’ve been able to correct all of them (or at least mitigate them).  I’m going to include some pictures below of what I did along with my thoughts on the approach.

After doing a bunch of looking around, I decided I wanted a dynamic pose.  A straight up and down pose would be easier, but frankly, I think a lot of the flat-footed poses look kind of boring.  If this is going to be a centerpiece model for my collection, I want it to look good.  Eventually I decided that it would look really cool to have the Titan prowling through some ruins as if hunting some elusive enemy.  It took forever to find the ruins that I eventually decided to use.  I had initially planned to have it stepping onto the ruins, perhaps with the toes, but once I got some feasible ruins, I found that it was not likely to be a natural-looking pose with just the toes on the piece, so I decided I’d have the Titan stepping over the ruins as if it were just putting its heel down on the other side of a smashed wall.  The ruins come from GW’s Ruins of Osgiliath set.  I’m only using one of the pieces right now; the rest are either going to end up on the base or on my table as terrain.

So, first things first: get the feet done.  Starting with the left foot, I spent a ton of time dry fitting (not kidding here, I spent like 2 days dry fitting and trying different poses) for just the foot.  I used a bit of poster sticky-tac (not sure if that’s the real name or just what everyone around here calls it) to hold bits in position.

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