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Felix Wagner
Germany
Hamburg
Hamburg
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I assembled the Alien Queen yesterday for a friend and took the opportunity to make some pictures for anyone interested!
Tools used:
- Nail scissors
- A small file
- A sharp knife
- Wire (and something to cut it!)
- Citadell hobby drill
- Superglue
First of all the contents of the box:
The base on the top left is not included but from a series of scifi bases my friend wants to use for the game.
Beware that the models do need some work in order to fit. Flash / sprue attachment is often placed in / on joints which is both good (no details lost) and bad (a lot of precise cutting necessary).
This is one leg but all joints basically look like this. You need to cut away excess material and try make it resemble a half sphere.
Especially nasty: the neck. Here you need to hollow the half sphere out:
Took me about one hour of work and careful application of scissors, knife and the file. Be wary of filing. The material is very soft. Even one misplaced stroke and you might lose some of the extremely delicate details.
After everything was done, I examined which glueing surfaces I distrusted the most and wanted to augment by inserting bolts. I decided for the tail because that's a part people will most likely grab to lift the miniature and the feet for obvious reasons: Very small area to attach to the base!
In the back you can see that the arms fit even without glue. There's no room for variation in pose here.
I strongly advice to glue on the head first. There also no variation possible, you can't decide where the queen 'looks' at. For later positioning of the legs, I found it crucial to have the head on, otherwise you might end up with the mini looking at the ground.
Here's two pictures of the glued on head. You can see the gaps. For perfect, seemless fit, I suggest to grab some Green Stuff or similar modelling compount.
(Mind you that I was very careful to not cut away too much of the neck, so I'm positive these gaps are not may fault!)
Everything was ready now the be glued on. Fitting the legs was again a nasty task.
One night later, everything is dry and disaster struck! 
The bolted feet obviously weren't dried enough and the whole model slanted forward!
This wasn't the pose I was looking for and I swear yesterday the queen was standing upright.
Right now, I'm thinking about trying to unglue the feet from the base and reposition it, this time letting it dry with sufficient support.
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Felix Wagner
Germany
Hamburg
Hamburg
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Re: Alien Queen Assembly
Holy fuck, what is going on.
Another day and the queen is even more bent forwards. After over 48 hours of drying time, I doubt this is because of the glue. When I compare the legs to my initial photos, they're definitely more bent than before.
I am coming to believe that this wasn't my fault at all but some kind of faulty material. The legs not being thick enough to bear the weight of the body.
The queen is now touching the ground:
I will keep the queen in a different position overnight and have a look if something changes:
I keep you posted.
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Felix Wagner
Germany
Hamburg
Hamburg
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Re: Alien Queen Assembly
One night later and the miracle has happened:
Take this as a fair warning of whatever this blue stuff is. I guess we'll write Prodos and ask what to do now.
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Jake Rose
United States
Aiken
South Carolina
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Re: Alien Queen Assembly [blue stuff warning!]
Wow, at the price they are charging there is NO way you should have to deal with that. Please let us know what they say/do about it.
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Fabian Bohlmann
Germany
Hamburg
Deutschland
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Re: Alien Queen Assembly [blue stuff warning!]
Hi,
I'm the friend Felix mentioned in this post. I now have send an email to Prodos via their website and also posted a message and the link to this post in their AVP blog and on their Facebook page.
Hopefully they answer soon.
I have heard of their bad response rate from other backers of this game. But just lets wait and see how fast Prodos responds in this case.
I also hope that some other backer has assembled his / her Alien Queen already and can give some hints how he / she solved this problem.
If nothing else works we might have to use a little bit of wire to fixate the body to the base to take some of its weight from the legs.
It wouldn't look that great but better this way as a prone Alien Queen. She doesn't kneel for anybody, you know.
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Re: Alien Queen Assembly [blue stuff warning!]
Hi there,
I assembled my queen and didn't have any problems at all. It didn't bend. But I have two remarks for you:
1) the used polyurethane resin is sensitive to heat. So, if you had the queen near a heatsource to dry faster,that would be the cause. Sometimes even hours of direct sunlight are enough to soften and bend a miniature. Be aware that prodos has problems mixing their resin. Youcan see that by color variations between models. Sometimes they are more blue, sometimes more gray. In general they are softer and more heat sensitive, the more blue they are.
2) you canuse heat to "reset" deformations on resin/restic miniatures. Try putting the bend parts into nearly boiling water. It should bend back into its original shape after a few seconds. Then quickly dip it into cold/ice water to harden and fixate it. This procedure already saved me a lot of times. And you can also use this method to bend parts and fix them in a new pose, e.g. To vary the tails (and reverse them on the infants) without breaking anything.
Hope that helps.
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Fabian Bohlmann
Germany
Hamburg
Deutschland
-
Re: Alien Queen Assembly [blue stuff warning!]
Hi again,
wow, that was fast. Jarek from Prodos answered me already:
"Hi there, It's caused with 1st casts from a fresh mould, Resin gets into reaction with alcohol, to be honest is should be scrapped at manufacturing, however sometimes it may go through.
Please send us your address for replacement, Agata (in CC) will send you a new model, thanks."
So, this will solve the problem definitely.
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Felix Wagner
Germany
Hamburg
Hamburg
-
Re: Alien Queen Assembly [blue stuff warning!]
magisystem wrote: Hi there,
I assembled my queen and didn't have any problems at all. It didn't bend. But I have two remarks for you:
1) the used polyurethane resin is sensitive to heat. So, if you had the queen near a heatsource to dry faster,that would be the cause. Sometimes even hours of direct sunlight are enough to soften and bend a miniature. Be aware that prodos has problems mixing their resin. Youcan see that by color variations between models. Sometimes they are more blue, sometimes more gray. In general they are softer and more heat sensitive, the more blue they are.
2) you canuse heat to "reset" deformations on resin/restic miniatures. Try putting the bend parts into nearly boiling water. It should bend back into its original shape after a few seconds. Then quickly dip it into cold/ice water to harden and fixate it. This procedure already saved me a lot of times. And you can also use this method to bend parts and fix them in a new pose, e.g. To vary the tails (and reverse them on the infants) without breaking anything.
Hope that helps.
Hey,
the model was neither exposed to heat nor direct sunlight. I kept it for two days inside a secretary desk, so no sunlight. The radiator is a couple of meters away and wasn't even turned on. 
So that's average room temperate.
As you can see, the queen deformed just over one night, no sunlight, no heat. Right now it's standing perfectly, so I don't know what to achieve with steam. I definitely don't want to have the model more soft!
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Felix Wagner
Germany
Hamburg
Hamburg
-
Re: Alien Queen Assembly [blue stuff warning!]
Das Problem wrote: Hi again,
wow, that was fast. Jarek from Prodos answered me already:
"Hi there, It's caused with 1st casts from a fresh mould, Resin gets into reaction with alcohol, to be honest is should be scrapped at manufacturing, however sometimes it may go through.
Please send us your address for replacement, Agata (in CC) will send you a new model, thanks."
So, this will solve the problem definitely.
Ooh, that's nice. 
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Rod Mitchell
Canada
Calgary
Alberta
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I wonder how many of these "defective" minis made it to market? I had ordered 3 queens with my ks pledge (still not recieved) and am quite worried about it now (not of course that I haven't been for around 2 years now...). Everytime I hear something about this project, its negative, pretty hard to have any level of excitement about it. In fact, now, I'm almost dreading it, I honestly don't want to be pissed off, but I know if I look at any of my minis and they are that blue colour, I'm going to lose it.
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Felix Wagner
Germany
Hamburg
Hamburg
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Grumpae wrote: I wonder how many of these "defective" minis made it to market? I had ordered 3 queens with my ks pledge (still not recieved) and am quite worried about it now (not of course that I haven't been for around 2 years now...). Everytime I hear something about this project, its negative, pretty hard to have any level of excitement about it. In fact, now, I'm almost dreading it, I honestly don't want to be pissed off, but I know if I look at any of my minis and they are that blue colour, I'm going to lose it.
From what I've seen among Fabian's minis, some of the minis have blue colour. I have not seen it in the base minis (from the base game) but just additional stuff.
The other blue minis are iirc small ones that should work fine. So, I guess we can't tell you if this is really linked to the colour.
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Fabian Bohlmann
Germany
Hamburg
Deutschland
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Yes, we have to assemble all the rest. But Jarek told me that it is not the color that can identify minis with the bad resin. It could have blue color and be fine. You just have to assemble and cross fingers that this miniature wasn't made out of the bad stuff.
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Fabian Bohlmann
Germany
Hamburg
Deutschland
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Outcome: Hi, at last Saturday I received a package from Prodos. In it was an Alien Queen and it looks like this time it is made out of the good resin.
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Hi,
can I ask how long it took for your model to arrive after paying for it?
I ordered the predalien and a pack of warrior aliens nearly a month ago.both were in stock on their storepage.and got a "order being processed" email day after paying for them.contacted them twice about it. both times said they were being sent that Friday.still waiting
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Felix Wagner
Germany
Hamburg
Hamburg
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tootz wrote: Hi,
can I ask how long it took for your model to arrive after paying for it?
I ordered the predalien and a pack of warrior aliens nearly a month ago.both were in stock on their storepage.and got a "order being processed" email day after paying for them.contacted them twice about it. both times said they were being sent that Friday.still waiting
Fabian had been a Kickstarter Supporter and picked everything he got so far up at Essen. I think he still awaits some pieces. But no secret intel on the ordering speed here.
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Fabian Bohlmann
Germany
Hamburg
Deutschland
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Hi,
as your spy already has revealed I've got everything I have for AVP from Essen. Regarding the Ersatz-Alien Queen I received it about one week after I send Prodos an email with a link to this thread (Alien-Queen assembly problem) via their contact form on their website, facebook post and a comment on their AVP blog. They answered very fast.
I am still missing many miniatures and the Predator Ship board tiles. But I hope they will be here as soon as Wave 2 has been send out to the backers.
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