T2 Judgement Day Aerial HK Machine - Pegasus Hobbies 1:32

[Sgt.Squarehead]

T2 Judgement Day Aerial HK Machine

1:32 Pegasus Hobbies

I suspect most of you are by now more than familiar with the apocalyptic Terminator series of movies, beginning with James Cameron’s comparatively low-budget The Terminator (1984) which rapidly became a cult obsession and which is considered by many to be the film that launched his career. From these small beginnings Cameron transformed his series into the very biggest of big-budget movies with the hugely successful first sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and it is from this movie that Pegasus Models have chosen their subject, the Aerial HK Machine.

Despite not exactly rolling off the tongue, the rather cumbersome name actually does a pretty good job of conveying the primary purpose of the machine that it describes.....It flies, it hunts & it kills! Developed by the Skynet AI as an aerial surveillance & fire support platform the Aerial HKs are a perpetual and menacing presence in the future skies of the Terminator movies, constantly depicted either patrolling independently or supporting endless swarms of T-800 Endoskeletons battling Jon Connor’s resistance forces.

The Aerial HK design actually makes its first appearance in the very first movie and the same twin-tilt-fan flying-death-machine design has remained a constant theme throughout the whole series, so much so that we can envisage an approximate chronological evolution.....In Terminator 3: The Rise Of The Machines (2003) we see a very early iteration of the design in the form of the much smaller HK Drone, by the time of the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV Series the design has evolved closer to its final form with the still smaller and rather sleeker HK-VTOL. The full sized Aerial HK then puts in an appearance in each and every one of the movies until the conclusion of the series in Terminator: Salvation (2009).

The Kit

So what are Pegasus offering us for our pennies? Well you get a fairly substantial box adorned with some suitably futuristic looking graphics and an Image of an HK doing it’s thing amongst the ruins of the future, silhouetted against one of those huge petroleum fuelled explosions so beloved of Hollywood. The scale is stated as 1:32 on the bottom right corner of the box, but the text is small and I must confess that I completely missed it until it was pointed out by Nige in his build review. Within the box we find a 12 page black & white concertina folded instruction booklet, which again states the scale as 1:32, just once in a very small insert, this time at the top right corner of the first page. The actual scale of this kit has been the subject of some contention, as discussions in this forum and elsewhere have made clear, it’s definitely significantly smaller than the stated scale. I initially thought that this might just be a simple misprint and we were actually looking at a 1:72 kit, but the consensus opinion now seems to be that the kit scales out somewhere around 1:57: http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234963868-157th-we-think-pegasus-aerial-hunter-killer-machine-build-review/

Parts are comparatively few, just 69 in total distributed amongst four sprues of grey and one of transparent plastic, all neatly bagged, plus a few separate larger parts including the base for the stand, horizontally split fuselage halves and the tail assembly. Two of the grey sprues are identical, featuring parts for the fans and the arm assemblies. There were also a number of smaller separately bagged parts matching similar parts found on the sprues, whether these were included to replace miscast parts on the sprue, or are there simply because they fell off the sprue at some point and were gathered up before packing, I’m not sure, but I’d err toward the latter as the sprues have been shedding parts constantly since I opened the bags!

Detail on the parts is generally slightly soft but perfectly serviceable, but with some surprisingly refined areas, such as the panel lines and fan faces, I found the totality to be somewhat reminiscent of one of the better GW 40K vehicle kits. There are one or two very minor sink-marks to be dealt with on a few of the parts, notably the parts for the arm assemblies. and a few small injection & ejection marks are to be found here and there, none of them leap out at me as being hugely problematical although there are one or two, again on the arm assemblies, that will need some care to fix neatly. There is also just a hint of flash on the largest of the sprues, but it should disappear with just a few passes of your preferred sanding tool

The transparent sprue is actually rather cloudy and opaque, it nominally holds just six parts, the spotlights, what appear to be a pair of navigation/ID beacons and a par of running lights for the tail, however this sprue is just as prone to shedding parts as the others and mine was down to five before it came out of the bag, but in this case the part was still in there with the rest of the sprue, rather than separately bagged.

Assembling the model appears to be a fairly simple process, the instructions break it down into the usual numbered steps, eleven in all, but most of these steps comprise building modular assembles, so you can build them in pretty much any order that appeals to you. As the sprues were already literally throwing parts at me, I decided to stick a few of them together, making a couple of discoveries in the process. Firstly the fit of the parts while generally pretty good, is somewhat imprecise when it comes to the alignment of some of the detail elements. Alignment pins of various sizes are moulded onto all of the parts and these may well be the cause of the problem in most instances, however I didn’t want to test this theory by hacking them off, so I attempted to correct the issue by main-force and in the process made my second discovery.....Pegasus recommend using Tamiya or Modelmaster liquid cement and do clearly state that MEK based glue won’t work properly on the ABS plastic of the kit, but I didn’t have any so I used Humbrol Liquid Poly instead (how different could it be?). I applied a reasonably generous amount to all the relevant places and attempted to squeeze the parts together in order to both correct the misaligned detail and force a bead of semi liquid plastic from the join, which can help to avoid awkward filling jobs. To cut a long story short, it didn’t work! The plastic resisted my best attempts to form a bead and after being allowed to dry the bond proved to be quite poor too.....I guess that Pegasus really weren’t joking! The plastic also seems to have one other slightly odd property, it’s somewhat prone to furring up when sanded, it’s almost as if it occasionally de-laminates very slightly, which makes cleaning up the sprue attachment points something of a voyage of discovery.

No decals are provided with this kit, which isn’t a tremendous surprise as Skynet’s creations aren’t big on external identification marks, but does leave me feeling slightly short-changed somehow.

The painting guide for this model is both incredibly simple, a black & white photo of a finished model with some arrows pointing to various bits of it and utterly generic. They’re also very big on the use of chrome, which might prove challenging given the way the plastic can behave when you sand it. Personally I will be going for the ‘heavily weathered battle veteran’ look for my build!

Conclusion

I have to admit that while I do generally rather like what I’ve found in this box, I’m not sure I’d feel quite the same had I just bought the kit under the impression that it was 1/32 scale and thus slightly bigger than the Horizon offering. While the difference in price between them should provide a significant clue, this is not exactly a cheap kit and issues of this nature can lead to major disappointment. Leaving the scale confusion aside then and dealing strictly with what you actually get in the Pegasus box, I’d say that drawing a parallel with a GW product is quite apt once again.....In both instances you know you are paying something of a premium for a model that is some way from the cutting edge in terms of quality, in GW’s case because it’s an ‘official GW product’ and for this kit, presumably because it has an official T2 movie license. If you can live with that and want a perfectly serviceable small scale injection plastic T2 Aerial HK kit, this is probably the one for you, if you want a super-detailed large scale model, you may want to look elsewhere.

Review sample courtesy of

UK distributors for