A launch pad

On some very wobbly feet

Of all the pieces in the kit the launch pad's bits were in the worst shape of them all. I spent noticeably more time on cleaning them up than assembling them toghether. Take the adjustable legs, for example: getting them and their foot pads together was a tiny act of war already, especially as the installation studs were more malformed than a dozen quasimodos. Still, they obeyed the blade and glue - to some extent.

Then I got to the next moment of pain and suffering, as the legs were supposed to have some sort of a notch where the deflector plate was supposed to sit on. Pffft.

I allowed the gluing of the plate and the legs to cure for a good while so that they'd remain attached together while I rotated the entity but so that they'd still be somehow articulateable for me to adjust any bad angles. So I glued this setup to the ring that can be seen in the next photo, again with horrendous swearing and fighting. The studs were awful and they just didn't want to cooperate with me at all. After these gluings had been curing for a good while again I attached the missing diagonal beams. Horrendous stuff, I tell you, horrendous.

On top of this construction I was supposed to install another, separate setup. This second ring got some weird upwards-bent things, some adjustment/control bits for them and some decorative bits. I really didn't have a clue what they were, specifically, as they weren't described anywhere. For that reason I also wasn't sure if I had "cleaned" them up properly, as the pictures in the instructions were more like guidelines, really. And the bits were molded pretty questionably, as I had already complained.

Finally three extra bits were glued on the top ring, bits that I guessed to have something to do with the rocket engine's ignition. I just installed them on in random angles for variety, based on my gut feeling and artistic eye (hehehe). Also, as you can see in the last photos, another protruding weirdly shaped piece was added. Because I didn't have a clue of what it was supposed to be - and if it was actually meant to be that weirdly shaped - I didn't do any corrective actions. Just to avoid making it wrong by accident.