Path to a Reaver

Written and photographed by: Chris “wolfy” West

There are those among us that have dreamed of owning a Reaver Titan from Forge World whether its Imperial or Chaos makes no difference, most of us have wanted one just never been able to afford such a beast. Well a buddy of mine just happened to have the funds to buy one so he gave me the money and asked me to order it and take care of the assembly and paint for it. I can honestly tell you that I was SUPER excited to have the chance to work on something of this size, as normally I only get to work on small models with the biggest being a Land Raider. That excitement faded away to nothing when the box arrived from England via UPS. So I invite you to come with me on a path to a completed Reaver Titan… a journey that will be educational, enlightening, and funny in spots.


Getting Started:

When you first get your Reaver be sure to grab your instructions straight away and go through each bag and make absolutely sure that all of your pieces are there and that you are not missing anything. I say do this now because you don’t want to get started on the model and not have to stop because a very critical piece is missing. Also there is a short list of tools that are critical to being able to assemble and build this beast. Such as a good hobby knife with plenty of extra blades (resin is really hard on the blades and cleaning up the pieces will chew them up), a hobby saw (do not use the GW one for this… as its teeth are fragile and the blade cant be replaced), a set of hobby files, Clippers, pin vice with a variety of drill bits, tweezers (I will explain this later), pinning rod (thick and thin I will let you know what size I used when the time comes), and… a hair dryer… yes a hair dryer. For those of you that have never worked with resin models before or have never had a FW model before it was assembled I will tell you know that the resin they use is not the highest quality and is very prone to warping and if you do have pieces that are warped just heat them up using the hair dryer and using gentle pressure bend them back into place. The resin becomes very soft and flexible when heated.





Prepping the Reaver:

So… after you have your tools sorted out and you have gone through all the parts bags and you have verified that all the parts are there you get to start the long drawn out arduous process that is cleaning up the pieces. Now I am not going to go into super great detail other than the fact that there will be flash and gates that need to be cleaned off the parts. There might be some small air bubbles that are in the castings and if there are I just fill them in with a little green putty (I prefer the fast drying green putty from Squadron). Once the mold lines and the flash are gone and the massive gates are all cleaned off of the model its time to wash.





Some people will tell you that you have to go through a million and one steps to get the mold release off the model. Honestly I never have gone through extra steps on cleaning up FW resin other than washing it. Some guys soak it in degreaser or Simple Green, which I think that is a bit excessive and I don’t think it is worth the waste of time because I have not found any more of a benefit to it. I just cleaned out the kitchen sink and then washed the parts in warm soapy water. I do recommend using Dawn dish soap because it does cut the mold release really well. Then lay the pieces out to dry or dry them with a lint free cloth (Viva paper towels are great for this). Make sure that everything is dry before you prime the pieces… if not… well… lets just say that you have been warned. And then Prime the pieces I use Armory black primer… so nothing fancy here either. It works really well isn’t as likely to rub off and it dries really fast. IF you do prime indoors like I do (Kansas is bad for priming right now because we are in Severe weather season so its EXTREMELY humid outside. From here we move on to assembly and paint.









Assembly and Paint: Lower Body

For this part of the build I partially built the lower body assembling the upper and lower legs attaching them at the knee with a piece of the 1.90mm brass rod (for strength and support to an otherwise weak joint). Then I attached the hips to the pelvis… the cool thing about the pelvis was the fact that it has a hole in the middle so I didn’t have to drill a hole in it so I could run not 1 but 2 pieces of the 1.90mm brass rod between the hips to help keep them together and attached to the pelvis. After that I went ahead and put the hoses on the lower body. Here is the first place that you have to use the hair dryer because you have to heat and bend the hoses so that they can be attached at the proper places. I then pulled out my handy airbrush and sprayed the beast boltgun metal so it would have a nice even coat and no brush marks (at this point I went back and sprayed all the parts silver that needed to be painted silver. This was a major time saver for later). Did some weathering and then highlights. Now before I continued on with the legs I pulled the airbrush back out and sprayed all armor parts Mechrite red and then did a few layers of highlighting all with the airbrush building up to P3 Skorne red. I assembled the lower leg pistons and stood the legs up on the feet so I could figure out the positions of the feet and the pistons and labeled them so that I knew which piston went where because they had to fit just right for the legs to be in the position I wanted them.







Went back and finished painting the piston guards and got them glued in place. Then do the same for the toes. Pay very close attention to these… the front and back toes are already labeled for where they go. Make sure you don’t mess this up or they won’t look and fit right on the feet. Toe pistons will piss you off… just warning you. In fact they are worse than the hip pistons because you really have to cut and fit to get them right.

Then its on to the inner and outer leg armor… you will probably want your hair dryer here too. Mine were almost flat and had to be recurved so on with the heat and some time and I finally got them to take and hold a curve. One of the best pieces of advice I can give you about this part is to be sure to follow the directions and attach the mounts to the armor plates and then fit them to the legs. Heating and bending as necessary to get them to fit.

Paint any touch ups that you might need to do and then give the whole leg assembly a quick spray of matte varnish to protect the paint and set them aside… you are done with them for now… at least until you are ready to start sitting the upper body down onto the lower. Now I did drill out and put another piece of the 1.90mm brass rod in the pelvis so when the top half is ready to be attached it has some added support so0 it doesn’t want to topple.







Assembly and Paint: Interiors

Again this is pretty straight forward and it moved along really fast because the armor plates were already finished all I had to do here was paint the interiors. If you want to be able to take the top off the Reaver and look at the interior you have to paint all the parts before you put them in otherwise you can’t get to them at all. This applies to both the head and the body. So paint your interior gubbins FIRST.
















Assembly and Paint: Weapons and finally Assembly

So with the interiors all painted and assembled and put into the body and head and the body all assembled and the head attached to the body (with a piece of 1.90mm brass rod), I moved onto the guns. I started with the missile wrack because it was going to be the fastest and easiest to get done up. Especially since it was already assembled before it was primed cause I didn’t want to lose the little missile warheads when I was washing them. And since for the most part it was already painted all I had to do was paint the missiles and minor touch ups here and there. Also I had put a magnet in the base of the missile launcher so that it could still be removed and not want to just topple off at the slightest little bump. It’s not strong enough to keep it on the carapace and tip the whole thing over, but it is strong enough to keep it stable.

Moving onto the Gatling Blaster arm… the barrels of this had to be straightened out a lot. They were really fairly bent so that the gun couldn’t be put together. Once they were straight and dry fit into place I went through and started on painting. The bulk of the silver and all of the red was already painted from earlier. So to start things off for this I had decided to paint the ammo box with yellow and black hazard chevrons. Mostly to contrast the red and silver paint scheme that my friend had chosen for this titan. Once the paint was all dry I pulled out the epoxy resin glue and glued the barrels in place and then glued the upper arm to the gun. And set the whole thing aside for the epoxy to cure.

Finally that brings us to the titan las blaster. This one was also already silver and red from earlier so all I had to do was paint some details and the assembly of the gun. I had decided days prior that I wanted to give the barrels a blue glow type paint job because I wanted to make it look like the power coils were glowing in the barrels like it was getting ready to fire. This glow was achieved using the airbrush and several coats of progressively lighter shades of blue up to white. They turned out really good looking.





So with the weapons all painted and the epoxy all cured I turned my attention to the body and getting everything attached. On a quick side note before we move on I magnetized the front carapace and the head carapace so that they could be easily removed but also be held in place for storage and transport so that they don’t just fall off and either get broken or knock paint off of themselves or other parts of the titan. In the shoulder sockets I mixed together some green stuff and stuffed it in the shoulders to push the arms out a little more so it looks better once they are mounted. The shoulders themselves were attached to the body a little earlier using the epoxy resin so that they could support the weight better than just regular super glue. First the gatling blaster arm was glued into place using more of the epoxy resin and held while it cured enough for the arm to not move. Then the Las blaster was attached as well using the same process. From there the hoses were heated and bent so that they would be able to fit into place and then glued, using regular super glue this time. Once the arms were all dried and the epoxy has set for a few hours I then put just a little more epoxy resin on the top of the pelvis and lowered the upper body down onto the 1.90mm pin that I had put in at an earlier stage. All I had left was to finish things up with some minor touch ups and a quick coat of matte varnish. Once everything was dry I snapped a few more pictures and called it a day.

The Reaver really is an impressive model to look at… it really does stand 16 inches tall and it is REALLY heavy. I do hope that I can get hired to assemble and paint a few more of these. And maybe even someday start building on my own titan legion.

Labels: Articles , Forge World , Titans