What to glue, what to paint, check it out, check it out!
- General tip:
Apply the stickers as you complete each piece, instead of waiting until the kit’s finished. It is much less tedious this way! A-and: don’t work in a carpeted room, if possible. There are some really tiny pieces that can be lost easily. Every time I dropped a piece, I ended up crawling around for an hour until I found it again.
- Sprues:
A lot of sprues are duplicated (4 of sprue G, for example), which saves on production costs, but also means you need to pay attention when building. Once I accidentally made three left legs and had to pry some pieces apart (dangerous, since most pieces want to stay stuck after assembly).
- Head:
The teeth are part of the main head assembly, and thus unpainted. You must paint them, or your woof will look bland. For the Empire woof here, I went with silver.
- “Bust”, as they call it:
Glue that peg, or else it will stay stuck in the leg’s polycap, if you ever need to remove them. For the rest of the “bust”, some detailing will work wonders. I used a foil sticker and green Sharpie for the chest light.
- Waist hoses:
Glue them on this end, since this piece gets a lot of strain and they’ll pop out if you don’t.
- Waist connection:
An interesting thing with the wolf is that the head and waist are connected by a “spine”, and then the chest attaches to that spine piece.
- Waist and tail painting needed:
The shock absorbers are one piece in gold plastic, so some silver helps out. The tail piece is not even that lucky, so break out the gold as well as the silver.
- Gun mount:
Depending on which way you face it, it will mount the default guns, or the Irvine gun. Also, gold and silver detailing is recommended on the hydraulics.
- The big gun:
This is the big feature of the kit, and BE CAREFUL with piece O-1. The part where it goes into the main gun is the most fragile piece ever. “Luckily” mine broke in a way that’s not so visible. I’m afraid to even glue it, since the dab of glue would be even bigger than the break.
- Leg and foot details:
The ankle hydraulic is tiny, but detailing is worth it. The leg one is gold only, so get out the silver.
- Paint those feet:
Since the feet are on the same sprue as all the hydraulics, they’re stuck in an Empire-inappropriate gold. Thankfully some primer and Tamiya Gloss Aluminum spray saved the day.
