Thursday, April 7, 2011

... in which I discuss my frustrations at Witchfate Tor.

I'll go into way more detail when I do a product review on GWs Witchfate Tor, but I found this piece so frustrating that I had to vent before hand. I finished the first floor of it last night, after a good 3 hour marathon of painting, which is more time than I've been able to devote in the past month... Thanks Michigan State University, you do wonders for my free time. :p Anyhow, Witchfate Tor should come with a huge warning on the box:

"Citadel Miniatures is an incompetent company, who has no quality control. Our directions for building this piece of terrain were written by a drunk monkey, and should not be followed. Build at your own risk to experience anger, frustration, hair loss, and sudden fits of rage. Caution: Use of this product in the specified way my cause you to punch small children."

Now that I've got the insults out, lets get to the meat of what I'm bitching about.

1) Do NOT build the tower before painting it. It is impossible to get your brush in there to get to the fine details.

2) Test fit all your pieces. I did this, but one of my walls was warped, so it went together extremely bad. I had to heat the piece up, and bend it to the correct shape. Something I should not have to do when I pay that much for a model. Now, because the wall was misshaped, the bottom floor of the tower is not circular, but you can't tell by the naked eye. You can tell, however, when you go to put on the second floor, and the piece will not fit. I had to do some HEAVY cutting with the Dremmel to pare down the floor so that it would fit on top. Now, it only fits on one way, but at least it fits.

3) The wall panels are a lie. The directions tell you to put a rubber band around them to hold them together while gluing. .............. Ok, except for even the loosest rubber band collapsed the tower every time, because you have to trim so much off the walls to be able to FORCE them together. Half of the time I was swearing at the thing because I was hurting my hands forcing the pieces together, then getting glue on my hands, then while trying to force the last part into the circle, having the forst two parts collapse.... all in all, a horrible design. There could have been a better way to support the walls.

4) Even with the walls "fitted" together properly, there are visible gaps between the pieces, be prepared to break out the green stuff.


Sorry folks, I just had to get that all out of my system. This is seriously the worst model I've put together. I think I still made the 1st floor look amazing, but the amount of effort I had to put into it was WAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY too much for what it was. It would have been easier sculpting and casting a tower myself.

I'll post pictures soon, when I finish the tower. The 1st floor is by far the hardest and largest. The other floors went together ok, since there there was such a learning curve on the first. Hopefully I'll get this done this weekend, so I can finish some of the other projects on the bench, and get to all those minis from Adepticon.

1 comment:

  1. That sounds really frustrating. I haven't had a problem with a GW product for a very long time (more than 15 years in fact) but I found the staff very helpful in fixing it. Since you (probably) got a defective miniature you might have been able to get them to replace it for you. Anyway, well done on getting the pieces together despite that.

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