Karist Trooper Assembly Guide
General Notes
Polystyrene cement - only use superglue if you want to go insane! All of our models are designed to be assembled with polystyrene cement as it gives some time to re-pose while gluing, fuses the models together and prevents brittle joins like other glues do. Make sure you have polystyrene cement in your toolkit before you begin!
We want you to experiment! We've broken our models up into lots of parts and given a fair few spare parts so that you can push yourself out of your comfort zone, learn new skills and create some really unique models. We've tried to price things so that it won't break the bank if you make a mistake, so please cut stuff up and have some fun. Start simple with a slice here and a re-pose there, and watch your confidence and skills increase until you are a master modeler!
Basing - Always make sure you glue your model to its base with an eye on the arc markers on the sides of the base. The arc marker indents should be at the halfway point between the front and back of the model to show the front and back halves of the model when gaming. See the Maelstrom's Edge rulebook for more detailed notes on this.
Dry fit before gluing! - There are lots of pose options possible, but that means there is also the freedom to screw up and make some bad poses! Sticking the parts together and seeing how things look will usually lead to a model that is fairly static and repetitive. You should consider knee, hip, torso, and arm positions when gluing and ensure that you have a pose in mind before you start gluing things together. If in doubt or insecure about your talents in the posing area, we recommend you try to copy the poses from some of our studio models found here in the gallery.
Karist Trooper Assembly Notes
Karist troopers are fairly straightforward to assemble. Three models can be assembled using the following sprue:
One design decision that might seem a little odd is the splitting of the legs from the lower torso/crotch piece. This had to be done because the upper leg armour is not possible to mould in injection moulded plastic without having to make some ugly tweaks to it that would have really reduced sharpness beyond what we were willing to tolerate. We decided to split the legs at the top instead, allowing ease of conversions and sustaining the crisp armour plates.
All three lower torsos (part F) are identical, as are all three torsos (G). Legs are paired with the same letter (eg; part M is both the left and right leg of the same pose). We recommend the first step in your Karist Trooper assembly should be sticking the legs on the lower torsos.
The most complex part of the Karist trooper build is the arm / weapon assembly. This is because three points need to be glued at the same time - the arms to the torso and the hands to the arms. If you are using polystyrene cement, you'll get a minute or two of re-posing time which can make this a lot easier. Arms are paired by code as well (eg; part C is both a left and right arm that go together). Mixing up your paired arms will mean some odd posing!
The shoulderpads (part A) are designed to be optional if you are so inclined - underarm detail is sculpted on the upper arms. We've not made any models without them though as we enjoy the distinctive profile the shoulderpads gives to the Karists.
Part K is the Karist Pulse Carbine. Part J is the Radwave Emitter and part L is the Grenade Launcher.
As with most models with poseable heads, we recommend building the whole model and then putting the head in place last of all. There are no hard rules as to which head to use on which model, but we usually stick with the bald head for our quintarch models and leave the masked heads for the standard troopers. The bald head is a great place to start if you want to try your hand at sculpting on extra detail like hair, scars, etc.
When painting, detail on the tri-eye lens on the heads can be a touch shallow due to manufacturing constraints. Heavily thinned paints washed around the tri-eye bring out the detail and help make the lenses pop nicely though. Overall we really enjoy painting the basic Karist troopers and they respond very well to airbrushing due to the smooth and ribbed plating. If you've ever wanted to dabble with airbrush painting, they are a great place to start, spraying them one colour, then adding successive highlight sprays angled from the top of the model.
The Karist Trooper kit is ripe for conversions, decorating and modifying your models in any way you think might look cool. Here are some examples of basic pose tweaks:
