Arguably, GW makes some of the coolest models in the business and has some very talented sculptors as well. We all have our favorite models when it comes to action poses or painting, but this thread, friends, is dedicated to those models that once you see them disassembled on your desk, you scratch your head and say, "What the hell were the designers thinking?!?! This thing is IMPOSSIBLE to assemble!"
My personal favorite: The Tau Shield Drone.
- Exhibit A: The Tau Shield Drone - Sucktacular model design
- sd.jpg (40.03 KiB) Viewed 800 times
Now, don't get me wrong - this model does look cool and fits the Tau visual feel. But, for anyone that has tried to assemble one, I feel your pain. It looks simple enough - put the 4ish pieces together and there ya go. It's a freakin' disc for cryin' out loud - how hard can it be?
I don't know how it is now, but when I put mine together 8+ years ago, those two antennae were metal and about 1.5mm wide. They have a little protrusion (and when I say 'little' I mean little) that is supposed to seat into a depression in the disc. So, you have an elongated metal piece with the heavier weight at the very top, standing at a 45 degree angle, that is way too thin to pin (at least for me) and will fall over if you don't hold that sucker perfectly still for 10 minutes or own a bottle of glue accelerator. Holy mother-of-badly-designed-miniatures!
Oh, and if you bumped it in a game, the antennae would fall off, leaving the hardened glue in the recess and it would never fit back in...
What I eventually did was give up on the longer shield antennae that were metal and simply used the shorter, plastic antennae that came with the Gun Drone sprues. Worked like a champ and nobody complained.
So there you have it - after playing this game for 22 years, the Tau Shield Drone is my miniature nemesis. What do you think is the most poorly designed GW miniature from an assembly stand-point and why?
Murphy
