Saving a Forgeworld Trygon

[Grythic]

Hi Everyone, so this is me reintroducting myself, as well as showing you all what I'm working on right now. It's been a long time since I was last here (2013), it looks like a couple of people might still be around, but not expecting anyone to remember me. I only really did one thing of note, which was my tyrannofex conversion (see signature), and I suppose another might be starting the project I'll be showing now.

So quick backstory, when the games workshop plastic trygon came out, the forgeworld version was discontinued. I was only just getting into the hobby at the time and was really disappointed by this as I loved the look of the forgeworld one but missed my chance. So in 2011 I picked up a cheap second hand one from ebay, accompanied with the description "painted to a high standard". I wanted to repaint it anyway, but how much paint was actually on the model was a shock... So in a plastic tub it went covered in a surface cleaner which seemed to be the hobby paint stripper of choice back then. Click here to see the orignial thread I made at the time (don't comment on it please, leave it in the past). But I didn't get very far with it, unfortunately life gets in the way (nothing bad, don't worry) and I didn't continue with 40k at that point.

So now it's 11 years later, poor trygon is still in the tub, I've been talking with a few friends and we're going to get back into 40k. I decide the first thing to do is sort this out. I've always wanted to, just never gotten around to it.

So this is the state the poor lad was in last week when I opened the tub:



It's had the time, and it's done the job. I didn't expect the cleaner to eat through the superglue too, but I'm glad it did as it's made this a lot easier. The paint comes off pretty easily, if it was any other race it would be a quick job, but the level of detail means there are so many little areas to clean out. The resin seems unaffected by its long ordeal, and is cleaning up really well. I'm leaving everything I've cleaned up immersed in water, I don't have much reasoning but I figure if the cleaner has done anything strange this might help, I'm mostly just concerned about something weird happening and paint not sticking to it again, but I think it'll be fine.

So far I've gotten two big sections done:




I'll show you guy when I get the rest done!
If anyone reading this happens to have a forgeworld trygon, may I trouble you for some high resolution close ups? I'm having trouble finding good enough reference photos online. The problem is that a lot of the smaller spikes are missing or broken, and the ones that are here look to have been cut to get them off the sprue... I need something to go off to recreate these, or to judge how good a match the ones from the current plastic kit are.

[Shadowwolf]

Welcome back! There are still some old farts hanging around, so hopefully you won't feel too old when the kids pull out their toxivores and malophants and whatever these modern day nids are called. 11 years in cleaning agent, you could launch a book series by that name. Always nice to see some good old forge world models in the pipeline, though :-)

Shadowwolf

[krieg]

Beautiful. Don't worry about being away for a while, I think I was last active in here nearly a decade ago.

The FW Trygon was always a stunning model, glad to see it hasn't suffered from being in the tub for that long. I'd deffo be thinking about a couple of warm baths with a toothbrush and washing up liquid to make sure there's nothing that will stop the paint sticking.

Have you looked at using the spikes that come with the current kit? They're probably slightly chunkier than the resin ones, but numerous enough on the kit that there's plenty spares kicking about.

[Grythic]

So took a while, but now have everything cleaned up as best I can, there's some black primer which is tough to shift, but I'm fine with that.



It's going to be left sat for a while to dry, as most of it has been set in water. So will be a while until I have an update to share again, but after it's dried out I will partially assemble it, and a little greenstuff work to fix some damage.
I also need see how much I can do with the small bits I have. I think I have broken spikes which I have both halves of, I just need to match them up. I'm still not sure what to do about the bits that are just missing. I have a plastic trygon sprue now, but it's noticeably less detailed. The other option is to pick up a recast kit for the bits, but I'm aware that's rather taboo...