I've been meaning to get this figure for some time. A while back I jumped on a cheap one on Ebay, but was informed by the seller that the price had been listed wrongly so my buy-it-now was cancelled and refunded.
A week ago another seller listed him even cheaper, and it coincided with an Ebay 10-hour 10% off code. So I jumped on it again, fully expecting to be informed he was listed wrongly. However, the knight was in the post almost immediately, though the seller
did raise the price afterwards on the two others they had listed.
It's a fantastic looking figure, and pretty accurate visually with examples of later 15th Century Gothic armour:
https://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.21487.html
Though not without its frustrations.
While this was undoubtedly a brand new, never been opened figure, out of the box the eyelet on the leather strap of the left pauldron was split open. Therefore it was useless in its function of securing the pauldron to the stud on the top of the breastplate.
And those two studs were annoying as well. I don't know if they were originally glued in the factory, but they were both loose, making it impossible to fasten the leather to them as they would sink down into the chain mail every time you pressed down on them. Gluing them in place to the under side of the breastplate was my first job.
Since I never intend to have this figure displayed other than fully armoured, I glued the leather pauldron straps to the studs and the top of the breastplate/rear armour. I couldn't think of any other secure method of overcoming the split leather strap.
The only other modification I had to make was with the head. With the stock sculpt I was having trouble getting the combination of salet, visor and bevor to sit correctly. Either the head was too big at the crown or his nose stuck out too far. So I resorted to one of the most useful and cheapest bunch of figures I've ever bought: Disney's Krennic!
The long neck on the Krennic head plugs directly into the the ball joint on the body without need of the extra connection you usually use with necked heads. And because the Krennic head is soft and hollow it's easy to slice up with a craft knife. I cut off his nose and removed part of the top of his head. Stuffing the head with cloth, and leaving the end of the cloth on the top of his head meant I could adjust the height the helmet sat at, and without a nose it was much easier to position the visor over the bevor. (Doing this also freed up the decent CooModel sculpt for some other project).
Lastly, I didn't trust the crotch grabber to support this heavy figure. The metal wire suffers the issue shared with Hot Toys': it's too loose within the upright rod to stay at the height you put it. I would only feel safe if he were secured at the waist, but waist grabbers are often ugly and I didn't fancy using a metal one. So Hot Toys' Doctor Strange to the rescue...
I just got my Gothic Knight! It's so frustrating! His shoulder armor and breastplate/backplate seams to have come apart in the box. I found two little rivets loose in the box. I'm trying to figure out if I can reassemble/repair it myself and how.
Can anybody tell me where the shoulder-armor's leather straps connect to the breastplate/back armor? I assume that the rivet is meant to pass through the two torso pieces, and the leather, but I don't know if the strap is supposed to be on top of the armor or underneath.
I think those two little rivets must the annoying studs I was referring to. They need to be glued to the underside of the breastplate so they poke up high enough to drop the back armour onto. After that the leather straps are meant to be plugged onto them over both pieces of armour.
