Hawkgirl -- Benchnotes

First of all, a Happy New Year to the readership and yours!

The days since my last posting have been largely a painful haze with extremely long hours at work, extremely short "intermissions", and a residual soreness that only today has begun to dissipate. Which of course means very little "real" work has been done at the bench. But that doesn't mean some prepwork and familiarization was out of the question. . .

• As I mentioned, Hawkgirl is cast in a lead alloy. This was confirmed when I started taking file to her to smooth-out the flattened planes of the seams. It was a bit of a flashback, as memories of working on Series 77's Gladiator (the pre- assembled, pre-primed version) immediately came to mind with the "drag" on each stroke of the file. The results of this first clean-up session were equally as satisfying.
• The wings were removed earlier: the attachment cavity has now been filled, and the paired wings unit pegged and fitted in anticipation of the separation of the individual components. As a sidebar, Hawkgirl's wing harness has always been a matter of murky speculation for me (save for one incarnation of the character), so if anyone has any thoughts on the subject, I'd love to hear them.
• I stumbled upon the one major flaw in the casting: the definition of the [feathered] points on the trailing edges of the helmet. These were "soft fills" that would benefit greatly from a rework. And so I packed the edges with MS and these will be re-carved at a later date.

And that's about it. It's back to the trenches tomorrow, but not before hopefully getting back to the bench today. . . the countdown to Atlanta has begun in earnest!