Anvil Industry Unboxing - Part 1

Hi everyone,

I recently showed you lot the large order I received from Anvil Industry. Today I'm going to show you some close up views of the purchases as they came out of the packaging. Later this week I will take pictures of the other half and go over those as well. 

I very highly rate Anvil Industry both for their products and for their conduct as a company. I personally think this shows through in the pictures below as the quality is plain to see. After I have reviewed the products through unboxing I will be taking you step wise through the construction of this force showing how the pieces all come together into coherent models, squads and a force. 

I will note that I have some parts from additional companies coming through the post to round off the force, but the vast majority of parts come from Anvil's Exo-Lord range that has near everything you could need to customise a force of space marines. As and when I receive the other parts I will also review them :)

Heads

Here you can see two examples of Anvil's Spartan Helmets that I purchases along with a sprue of their character heads. The Spartan heads came pre-clipped from any sprues and are shown as is from the bag on arrival. I'm very impressed with the crisp detail of the visors and the hairs of the crest in particular. Previously I have bought heads from Scibor and was disappointed with the "fudged" detail which was a particular problem when it came to painting the eye visors. No such problem here. 

Equally the bare heads have particularly nice hair detailing. I feel the eye sockets are just a bit deeper than is "real" but that means when you actually have them painted then they have a more realistic looking depth set back in the face.

Torsos

I've Previously purchased this sprue of robed torsos from Anvil before and as last time they are wonderfully clean of flash and the folds in the robes lend themselves well to wet blending as much as using washes to shade them for less advanced painters. These match up well with the robed legs I also purchased that you can see in the legs section.

Anvil do a few different styles of torsos in their Exo-lord range, I chose this medieval range as I really like the high gorget that gives the head a more sunken look and, practically speaking, a more protected neck joint. All the rivets are well pronounced and rounded with none malformed in the 27 I bought.

Pauldrons

These pauldrons are the matching style to the medieval torsos and have a similar clean casting across all 60 I bought with a nice upper and lower lip of riveted detail. If you were so inclined I believe it would be quite easy to cut the lower inner section of the pauldron with a scalpel to create a smaller more lightweight looking shoulder guard.

Legs

These are the medieval styled legs (do you see a theme!) These were the only items in my order that required any flash clean up, and that itself was minimal. I bought several sets of running poses and a single crouched pose for an apothecary. As you'll see when I have these up and built they provide a really nice variety of poses for your models. There are 5 unique posings of the legs which means you are going to have less repeats than you would get from GW or FW sculpts I find. I have squads of 5-10 so at maximum I have the same pose twice in a squad.

Finally for this first unboxing review we have the robed legs that match the robed torsos. I would only really recommend using these legs with the robed torsos personally. I have tried mixing and matching with other torsos and they just look silly. These had extremely limited flash to clean up and again they have a decent number of folds with a depth that lends themselves well to simple painting techniques if you aren't super confident with cloth painting like me! Again also you can see that there are 5 distinct poses preventing repeated poses.

Overall

If you hadn't guessed I am very impressed by the quality of Anvil's products. It's worth bearing in mind that I ordered nearly 30 of everything (60 of the pauldrons) plus a few one of sprues of items and it took me a single hour of work to clean any mould release off the parts and completely clean up any flash and remove all the items from the sprue. I cleaned the parts out of habit and past bad experiences with resin in general, but with the exception of the medieval legs there was absolutely no tell tale sign of the slightly waxen/greasy feel that mould release leaves on the resin. 

My presumption with the legs was that due to their many rivets and detailed plating sections that more mould release is applied to ensure the pieces and the moulds aren't damaged during removal.

In part 2 of this unboxing I will be going over all of the smaller sundry items that I also purchased, which include arms, weapons (melee and ranged), as well as cloaks, loincloths and a few other bits and pieces. So stay tuned!

Peace out,

Rob