Storm Strider Unboxing (Hi-Res)

The Storm Strider is a killer model. Hands down, I love a big, walking lightning generator any day of the week.

The kit is roughly 60% resin, 40% metal. Anything with super high detail was done with resin, and anything fragile was done with metal. Good stuff.

I’ll start at the bottom and work my way up. So, the first thing is the base (same size as a CD) and the lower leg parts.

The “outside” of each looks great. There’s a touch of flash in the lowermost corners of the “eggshell” part, but overall these are beautiful pieces. The tip of the feet will also need some work, but that could very well be hidden by the basing anyway.

Flipping them over shows us where the resin was poured. There’s a nasty chunk of the fill tube left on each foot:

Luckily, that can be clipped off, and the area filed smooth. Nothing tragic or irreparable, just time and oh-so-lovely resin dust.

Moving up, we get to the metal upper leg portions. These are pretty similar, however you’ll notice that two are open just a bit more than the other two.

The two that are closed most are the ones that correlate to the corner with the raised leg, and the corner opposite. Cool – I don’t have to remember to put the right leg onto the right corner. So long as they bend down and then back up and point away from the hips, I’m golden!

They have very little flash on them – nothing more than you would see on any other metal PP product:

The leg bone is connected to the… hip bone! The hips here is really just a box with several keyed holes for each leg, as well as a huge one on the top for the gantry. This part had three pour tubes, and they’re all on the bottom. Awesome! I can clip them, file them and forget about them.

So, that’s all the parts involved in the lower half. The resin pieces need the most work, but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed. So far so good!

The Gantry is the next piece, and it’s pretty solid. Cast as one piece, mine was a tad warped, but a little pressure in the right places and it lines up like a champ. The Gantry itself is very thick – it shouldn’t have any problem standing the test of time.

A little flash here and there, but a single piece this large molded as one piece is bound to have some flash somewhere.

Next, we have the generator ball. It’s a decent size, it’s just about the dame size as a large base. Mine has a pair of mold lines, one of which goes through one of the little nodes. However, the mold lines are on the bottom half of the sphere, so I can just bury that node in the back by the gantry and buttress, and no one will see it! Here’s some detailed pictures:

The next piece is the “buttress” or that things that wraps over the ball and has coils on it.

As you can see, mine has a big chunk attached where the mold pour was. Luckily, this area is where the buttress connects to the gantry, so all I have to do is clean it up enough to get a clean join. Cool!

The Coils themselves have a bit of flash and bits that need to be cleared up, but overall, this is about as clean as the legs, maybe just a tad worse.

The last parts are the crew and their hand railings. Unlike the Death Star, the Storm Strider has hand railings so the driver and gunner can’t fall. These look great and don’t appear to need any clean up except for the rare bit of flash. The control rods on the driver are a bit delicate though, so I may see about swapping them out for wire if they aren’t too thin.

So, overall, 20 pieces, and they all look pretty damn good. The resin pieces need some work, but resin always needs a bit more work than plastic or metal. Someone has to be the problem child. Honestly, I’d much rather have to spend a bit of time working on the model than sacrifice the details. The resin pieces are all super highly detailed and look fantastic.

The next Storm Strider post will cover cleanup, specifically working on the ball. Round surfaces scare people, as does working on resin, so I’ll go over a few of the techniques I use to clean up difficult areas.