2 - Assembling the Giant Gor

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OK! The Giant Gor arrived at my doorstep a couple days ago and I immediately opened it up to have a look.

The first thing I noticed is how big this guy is...the pictures on the Hundred Kingdoms website just don't do justice to the sheer size of this brute. He must weigh half a pound, there's about 4 or 5 times as much metal in this guy as the standard GW troll. I decided right off that I’d have to include something on the base to show the size of this guy...just what I'm not sure, but I'll think of something when the time comes!

The next thing I thought about was the number of parts the figure was cast in. He's cast in 6 parts and the only reason I can think of is the size...miniature molds are only a couple inches thick (usually) so you just can't cast really big things without cutting them up. The other thing you can't do is cast a figure that has big parts sticking off it in lots of directions...you could cast it, but it would be really hard to get it out of the mold; that's not the case here though, so it must be the size. So what's the big deal about the parts? Well, the more it's cut up the harder it is to get back together and the more work it's going to be filling in gaps and restoring details...

Speaking of gaps... This figure has a ton of them, and they are BIG!!! I plan to use a lot of glue to help fill them in, but there's still going to be a good deal of work dealing with them after the figure is assembled.

Alright. Down to business. The first thing I did was test fit the parts to see how well they fit. As Bill said in an earlier article, the pieces do fit together fairly well and you can get them all together for a few seconds without glue. The parts were cast with big, huge pins and holes to help make getting him together easy...it works!! That said, it fits together pretty loose and there's no way it would hold together on it's own once the glue was applied (you'd have to wrap it in rubber bands or wires or something!). To combat this, I decided to drill some new holes and pin them. My pins will fit much more tightly than the large existing pins and should keep this monster together while the glue dries. I want to point out that these pins are not going to make the structure much stronger once he's dry...the big cast-on pins will do the trick for that, my pins will just keep it from falling to pieces while the glue dries.

Now, what about the glue? Superglue (my normal glue of choice) is out of the question. Superglue is very strong but also very brittle, and I don't think that it would hold this guy together for long. I'll be using two-part epoxy glue, and I'll be using quite a bit!

To add my pins I drilled a hole in about the middle of the large pin already on the part. I then superglued a short metal pin into this hole (I use bits of paperclip cut to size). To get the location for the hole in the second part, I firmly push the two pieces together - this will leave a mark which I then drill a hole into. I repeated this process for the head, arms, and legs.

Next I mixed up a ton of epoxy glue (I used the blister the Gor came in...handy!), when you use this stuff make sure you mix it thoroughly to get maximum strength out of it.

I started with the head, filling the hole for it liberally with glue. The holes that the cast-on pins fit into are over-sized so you've really got to lay the glue on thick. I repeated this for each of the other parts.

In the final shot you can see the assembled Giant Gor. As I hoped, my pins have kept him together after gluing. You can also see that I used nearly all of the glue I mixed up...I only mention this to give you an idea of the quantity of glue used on this guy...it was a lot!

There you have it! Our Giant Gor is assembled and in about 24 hours the glue should be set and he’ll be ready to handle. (Actually, my glue says it sets in 4 hours and is completely dry in 24...but I'm not taking any chances.)

The next time I check in, I'll be talking about painting the massive beast!