Spartan Scenics: Med Lab – Review

Welcome back! Sorry for the delay between posts.

Today we’ll be looking at the Med Lab set from Spartan Scenics.

This is a pretty basic kit and requires almost no assembly. Here are all the parts you get in the box:

All the parts are mostly single piece resin and really only require a bit of trimming to get rid of the flash around the edges. There are also some clear acrylic pieces here as well. Anybody who has experience with Spartan Games’ products will recognise the quality of the resin, the detail is superb and definitely worth the price tag. It’s great to see this level of care and detail applied to objects at 28mm scale. I also liked how the various shelves and consoles have a few different mounting positions. Most of them can be either floor mounted or even placed on a wall. This is great for creating a bit of variety to the room.

Overall I only had two issues with the kit, the first was just a bit of bad luck;

As you can probably see there were obviously a few bubbles in the resin when this piece was cast and it’s created a few little holes. Thankfully it’s mostly on flat areas so it won’t be difficult to fix. I find the Vallejo’s Plastic Putty works great for filling in these types of holes. I’ll also note that I’ll be fixing it myself because I feel it’s not going to hassle me too much, it’s the only part which needed any touch ups. I’ve had worse stuff in the past and Spartan are more than happy to simply replace the part if you’d rather not go to the extra effort to try and fix it.

The only other issue I found was the Acrylic pieces. Put simply I spent more time looking for images online and checking forums to figure out exactly what they are for. The green one wasn’t an issue but the clear pieces didn’t seem to fit anywhere and I couldn’t find them in any images online. Eventually after staring at the box I found out they are supposed to go here;

Which honestly…looks totally stupid so I won’t be doing it. Also even in Spartan’s own sample photos they haven’t used it so it seems a very odd thing to put in the box. I’m sure I’ll be able to use it elsewhere however. This is just another example of a big pet peeve of mine with not only Spartan Games but almost every other tabletop miniature manufacturer at the moment. No damn instructions! Even a PDF would have saved me time trying to figure this out.

Well enough of the bad, lets look at how it goes together.

The only real building you have to do is the little beds which come as two parts. It’s really just a matter of gluing the bottom to the top here so no real instruction necessary. However two things are worth mentioning. Obviously it’s resin and even after washing I found the flat parts which are meant to glue together were a bit slippery and didn’t seem like they would grip well. To solve this I simply did a bit of light filing on the bottom piece.

This just helped to roughen up the surface and give a stronger bond. I only did it on the base piece since I was confident it would be completely covered.

The only other thing I’ll point out is that there really isn’t a guide for which way the bed should face. Again I looked online and saw people who’d done it both ways so I just decided to try and match it up with the bottom as best I could. This is how I lined it up;

Seemed the best fit to me and the most logical. However the back of the box says to do it backwards. Again, instructions might have been handy here…

You can also see the console in the back of that picture which is the only other real part that you need to assemble. As I haven’t begun painting yet the acrylic piece is held on by sticky tac. I’ll glue it permanently once all my painting is done.

That’s it really, a very simple kit that (ambiguous instruction aside) was very quick and easy to put together. It only took around 30 minutes to get it all cleaned up, glued and ready to paint. We’ll save the painting for another time though.

Here are a few pictures of the other pieces next to a 28mm figure to give you an idea of scale.