Test Of Honour Week: Temple Bell

As I continue through the Test of Honour week, I turn my attention to terrain by building up Sarissa Precision’s Temple Bell.  I’ve always liked this model and have had it sitting in shrink for a while now but was glad to have the chance to open it up.

It assembled quite easily and with minimal fuss. I’d seen complaints that the stairs are a little fiddly but it didn’t give me too much trouble.  I did find that it didn’t want to easily come apart after dry-fitting them into the base so I just worked glue in on the edges and it holds fine.

Just like the Dojo kit, it doesn’t have spacers between the roof slats so you have to add your own if you want it to better match the marketing image.  I’m using some thin dowels I picked up at a hobby store and they worked great.

The only disappointment is with the “bell.” First, it doesn’t even look like a bell (more barrel than bell) and then the piece doesn’t even wrap all the way. Kind of a glaring error on an otherwise great model.

I searched around Amazon and various other sites until I found a suitable replacement.  I have this on order and will update the model accordingly.

I went to prime everything and suffered a dumb mishap as I dropped the board I was priming on.

Luckily, damage wasn’t worse but it was pretty annoying to see it broken just after assembling and priming.

While my repair job was drying, I got to work on adding some color variations to the stone base.

Then painted up the fence and washed the stone in Nuln Oil.

After painting up the roof and doing a total hack job on the dry brushing, I fixed my more “experimental” roofing attempts and sealed it all down.  Of course a ninja had to ruin it by posing for my shot.  Damn ninjas.

I’m pretty happy with the model.  The stone painting takes a lot of patience just because it is so tedious but getting the model 90% there and done is pretty nice.  I’ll have to truly finish it up later when the bell arrives but I like it overall.