Warlord Titan Assembly – Legs and Knees

Step one of leg assembly is to epoxy the two pieces of the lower leg assemble together. I roughed up the joint surfaces and applied a liberal amount of JBWeld and let cure overnight(not pictured).

After the two lower leg pieces had cured, I put a 1/8″ brass rod pin through the join for good measure (probably unnecessary as JBWeld is strong and permanent, but I’m paranoid about leg strength on such a big, top heavy model. Below you can see where I pinned the lower leg pieces together. I drilled at an angle starting from the top of the armor support piece and down through the joint.

Below you can see the ejected JBWeld after I sunk the 1/8″ brass rod/pin. Not beautiful, but this part will be hidden by the lower leg armor plating.

Once everything dries overnight, drill a 1/8″ hole through the outer/upper knee joint.

If you try and drill all the way through both sides from just the side facing you there is a good chance that you aren’t drilling perfectly straight, or that the knee joint isn’t perfectly flat on the table, so your hole will be off center on the bottom joint. To avoid this I drilled in from both sides of each outer/upper knee joint to make sure that the hole is ‘centered’ on each side.

With the holes drilled on both of the outer/upper knee joint pieces, center the inner/lower knee joint as much as possible and mark the ‘center.’

If the center hole mark looks reasonable on the inner knee joint (it did) go ahead and drill through the entire inner knee joint through the outer piece facing you. Once you punch through the entire inner/lower joint, stop drilling as you already have a hole in the other side of the outer/upper knee joint.

There is enough play in the inner/outer knee joints… you should be able to test fit (no glue yet!) the 1/8″ brass rod through the entire knee joint.

Next, we need to decide what angle to glue the leg joints at. I decided to not get fancy… My goals for the Warlord Titan are not a dynamic running pose, but an imposing ‘standing my ground’ stance that is, most importantly, stable and strong.

As far as stability is concerned, I wanted to load to be ‘linear’ from the hip joint down through the legs to the feet. I used a straight edge from the center of the hip joint down through the center of the lower leg position, and noted the position of the knee joint (lug at 3rd line)

The next thing I was curious about was how much height I would gain/loose as I compressed the knee joint. As you can see below (inch measurements on the green mat) ‘lug at 3rd line’ was about 1/2″ taller than ‘lug at 4th line.’

I chose ‘lug at line 3’ knee positions for both knees for three reasons:

1. I like the extra 1/2″ height. Stand tall titan! We’re not some crouching/stalking WarHound, we are a mighty warLORD!
2. I like that the load from the hip joint will be ‘straight’ down through the lower leg
3. I want a more static/stable pose as opposed to a walking running pose… mostly for stability but also story wise. This Warlord is right where it needs to be and has the enemies of the imperium in its sights.
4. Static/Stable is less risk overall as there will be less risk of pistons being too long/short and less risk of the center of gravity being off and the warlord tipping over.

Now that I decided on my knee joint angle, I once again used JBWeld to glue those joints in. I applied a liberal amount to the inside of the upper leg, and then a thin-ish layer to the ‘cog’ coming up from the lower leg assembly. Once inserted, I sunk the 1/8″ brass rod pin through the knee joint, positioned the lug at ‘line 3’, cleaned up any of the JBWeld being pushed out of the knee joint with q-tips, and them clamped the joints down (light pressure from the clamps) to dry overnight.