Rimmy,thanks so much. Your advice prooved to be invaluable yet again. I fixed say 90% of the problem with welding alone.
But now I have another issue 
Blueprinting a character type based on this mesh and its physics asset (with generic anim state machine from third person example) is currently just bouncing off projectiles no matter what I try to do.
is there anything I should set in the anim blueprint for this ? I may very well be going mad already from unreal.
is that a good thing ??
anyway, much obliged !