Ferratonic Incinerator

I am a real sucker for scenery and terrain on the table top. So much so that when the Forge World (as in the planet type) scenery became available, I knew that I wanted to mess around with some of the kits to see what kinds of things could be made and how modular they could be.

One of the first kits that I purchased was the Ferratonic Incinerator kit. This consists of a cylindrical element (the incinerator part), and a standard set of walkways to attach to the ends of the top of the incinerator (the octagonal lid element). 

In the first image below, I show the final product that I made from the kit. 

The kit was easy to put together and required less than an hour of gluing and clipping out from the sprues overall. I did not use all of the pieces though. And this is probably one of my major complaints. I followed the instructions for the kit almost to the letter with the main deviation being that I assembled it in a T-shape (rather than an X-shape) as I wanted the incinerator element at one end of the piece. 

In doing so, it became clear that some of the under hanging elements (e.g., cables, cords, skull like pulley systems) can get in the way of attaching some of the walk way elements (the barriers seen on the edges of the upper platform to prevent falls). I have several of these components left over that I don't quite want to glue in place in other locations, but would have used on the edges had I realised before assembling that the underslung elements would be getting in the way so much. Hence this is a sort of warning to others to dry fit the elements, regardless of what the instructions say you should be doing. The issue can be seen with a top down view, below:

Some of the underneath elements can be seen going over the edge of the platform. Its just poor planning on my part coupled with strong adherence with the instructions.

I also wanted to try to keep my assembly somewhat modular. Hence I have not glued the sub-elements together. Explicitly, the walkways are only held together by the tabs underneath -- I have not glued them together in to the T-shape. This is so I can potentially re-arrange in to an X-shape, L-shape or even just one long continual linear shape. I have another one of these kits (a different one in fact) that I would ultimately like to be able to mesh together with this one. Hence I would very much like to keep it all modular.

The ladders are also worth a little note here. It is essential that they are pushed in hard in to the underside of the walkways and upper platforms. Doing so means that they will be flush with the pillars that enable the platforms to stand on their own. On one of my ladders, it is fractionally below the height of the pillars and caused a little imbalance. I have corrected this by shaving off a little bit of the ladder to give greater stability and less wobbly model syndrome.

It is also worth noting that the kit can be assembled in a number of ways, including not only the overall configuration, but also the sub-elements. Here, the door or hatch to the incinerator has been left open (and glued in to place in this open configuration) at the behest of my daughter. This is actually a good idea in some ways as the door then provides additional cover for miniatures on the table top and effectively extends the surface area of the kit on the table top by almost an inch. The risk is, of course, that the open door stands more of a chance of being snapped off in transportation. But I think that's a price worth paying for it looking better in my opinion. Other bits and pieces enable the modeller to cover up some of the other exposed pipes, but in general I have avoided using them. Got to find some time to paint this one up now and build the other kit!