Review of Privateer Press Plastic Jacks

Written by Red5angel Tuesday, 29 September 2009 06:23

So Friday I picked up my first plastic Jack kit.  I've been waiting for a while for these and I've always felt the company would do well to make Jack kits plastic as they'd be lighter, making them easy to transport and easy on finished paint jobs, and would suffer less breakage if dropped.  Besides which they'd be much easier to do conversions on.

The Jack comes in little bits, most of it already de-sprued.  In fact, for the Myrmidon kit, only the hands, heads and maybe a couple of shoulder bits were on a sprue. Everything else had already been clipped off and stuffed into little plastic pockets.

There was some flash to clean off where the parts were obviously attached to a sprue at one time. There were relatively few mold lines and being plastic they were easy to get rid of.

The plastic itself is interesting. It appears to be less brittle then say GW plastic so there's some give.  The sword for the phoenix had a slight curve in it but some heat and patience and it was back to being straight. Along with being less brittle, it's also slightly tougher to cut than I'm used too. That's no problem however compared to converting metal figs.

Details were for the most part crisp. The designs etched into the armor of the myrmidon would have been crisper in some locations, primarily the shoulders. Oddly, one of the shoulder bits appear to have a connection point to the sprue right next to those designs making it hard to clean up and not accidentally scrape some of the design away. Also, the heel of the jack is a series of vertical strips and there was a flash line running across them that was a pain to clean up. My suggestion is to make sure your hobby knife blade is new and as sharp as possible.

The kit itself is fantastic. You get all the parts to make all of the heavy myrmidons and with a little creative use of magnets could probably configure it for swaps. I like the kit enough to purchase all I need for each jack. Most of it is assembled through ball and socket joints the heads, arms at shoulders, elbows and wrists, and torso to hips are all ball and socket. The legs are one piece that snaps onto the hip in a static position. It would take some time to re pose the legs but being plastic goes a long way towards making that job easier.

Finally, the plastic takes to hot stuff glue really well. I was a little surprised by how quickly the stuff sets so you'll want to be careful about slotting pieces into place and getting them situated the way you like them right away.

Overall it was fun to build, and the Myrmidons look much better in person than they do in the pictures. I'd give this kit a high score as far as plastic kits go and I look forward to getting a hold of some plastic Khador kits sometime in the hopefully near future!