No Mini is Beyond Repair (Archangel)

I am still working on Borka2, and you should expect to see some updates on that very soon, but my travels home for the holidays ended up taking a little more out of me than I thought. I do have something for you all, however.

I've previously mentioned that I do a lot of wheeling and dealing for minis. Recently, I picked up a lot of Legion models that I didn't own super cheaply because the person selling them had moved across country and had to mail them to himself. Vigilant as they are about rain, snow, sleet, etc - the USPS just about destroyed his poor box of minis. Most of everything was broken and the cards were nowhere to be found. However, if the price is right, and you don't mind getting a little creative/spending a little time, this should never deter you from scoring something you need.

Case in point: this Archangel. (Please excuse the less than stellar photography. Our house was somewhat in shambles after the holiday and I didn't have time to set up my lightbox.)

This model regularly retails for $135. I picked it up for $30. In the picture, it's missing the tip of its tail, a leg, an arm, the two most forward top pinions on the wings, some of the ridged protrusions along its spine near the head, and the head assembly itself. It's also missing the 120mm base it sits on for competitive play. We looked carefully through the poor smashed box, and happened to find all the actual pieces except for the lower jaw, the top pinions, and the base.

I spent some time yesterday going through my bits box. (Never throw ANY leftover bits away.) In relatively short order, I found out that with a little bit of milliput, I can safely use the bottom jaw of the plastic legion heavy beast kit for the archangel, and it doesn't look out of scale. The position of the jaw will be very open, like the beast is screaming or perhaps breathing fire - so I will be scheming on sculpting some sort of flame coming out of its mouth like the ravagore kit.

As for the two top pinions, I am going to remove some of the shoulder spikes from the scythean arms from the same kit, and then sculpt them into the empty slots.

The first thing I wanted to do was to soak the model for a day or two in a 50/50 mix of simple green and water to strip the paint and help to loosen some of the super glue connecting all the pieces. I'll document the cleaning and reassembly (along with the sculpting) in a post in the future.

I'm actually really excited to "save" this guy. It's such an amazing model, and despite it not being phenomenal on the tabletop, it's just a fantastic piece to have in the collection. Look forward to more posts about this soon, and remember - No mini is beyond repair.

(Here's what the Archangel should look like on the left, along with a regular 50mm "heavy" beast in the middle, and a 30mm warlock on the right, to give a sense of scale.