Ok, here is where things are going as of right now on the styrene kit.
As you can see in this pic, the small sub-assemblies are moving right along. They went together well. and clean-up hasn't been too bad. As I was finishing up these parts and getting them ready for their next coat of primer, I moved on to more parts. Which is when I got to the arms.
I opted for the styrene arms as I wasn't even going to mess with the vinyl ones that came with it. I ended up having to clip off the pins as they were keeping the parts from going together. You can see in that photo where I left one on to demonstrate how big the pins were.
Removing the pins left me with the issue of aligning the parts properly. Which was kind of a pain with a couple of the arms, as the way the parts lined up was kind of on a slant, and they kept wanting to slide and create an offset.
This brings me to the next issue. If you look at the hands in the picture above, you can see they have a bulbous peg to attach them to the arms. They are socketed and meant to be able to rotate once things are done. But this means you would have to assemble the hands, then put them in the arms before gluing those together.
Like so.
Then the arms and legs are meant to be placed into the body halves before putting those together.
This leads to multiple issues.
First, for assembly, trying to get the hands into the arms, get the arms together, then get all that rubber banded together to let the glue set properly all but impossible on a couple of them. And very difficult on the others.
It's even worse thinking about trying to do that with appendages going into the body. Trying to hold 2 arms, and 2 legs in place, while gluing the two body halves together? Then trying to get rubber bands around the body, without dislodging the appendages? Especially, since they don't really sit very well in the openings anyway.
This would also lead to a lot more complicated painting.
The sleeves on the arms have recessed ends for the hands to be inserted into.
That way it actually looks like a real shirt sleeve. But trying to paint down inside there, with everything already together? No thanks.
So, I made the decision to forego the rotating option.
I am going to glue everything into place.
This means I am going to have to decide exactly where I want things before committing to gluing them into place. But it will make things easier in every other aspect of the build.
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