While I wait for glue to dry on the ‘naut, I build and prime zombies. I green stuffed little hats on them, with face guards similar to my skink team. I still suck at sculpting. 🙁
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Craig
This is an intimidating project. I don’t truly know where to start with it. But I think probably it’s a lot of silver and blue.
I’m not 100% on being finished. I look at certain other members of my community who have built entirely new things with a ton of crazy gubbins. I just put tracks on the standard ‘naut, and sure it was a lot of work and a cool conversion, but the top part of this model is just stock.
Any thoughts?
Season 2 of CHOP! Blood Bowl is winding down, and my human team is doing quite miserably for me. I’m on a 8-game not-winning streak right now (2 losses, a draw, then 5 more losses), and I’m very unhappy with them. I feel like 2 months ago every team except mine jumped into overdrive!
And because I like new, shiny, I started thinking about a new team for Season 3. Undead were mentioned, model photos were displayed and I bought some Vortice Miniature Wights and Mummies. But I wanted to convert the rest, since I’m a little cheap and ~$180 for an entire new team was a little much.
This photo and post got lost in my backlog, (…) and then again in the middle of that sentence I left this post open. I think I need to publish it now. 🙂
Russ and I have recently turned emergency preparedness into a small hobby. I like the sound of “emergency preparedness” better than “survivalist”, because the latter brings to mind images of bunkers and guns and hunting camo.
Sunday we basically had a day of arts and crafts, making fire stuff!
Paraffin Wax Cooking Candle
We started with small aluminum cans, cat food in this case. We rolled corrugated cardboard in strips just as tall as the cans, and shoved the rolled strip into the cans. Then we melted paraffin wax and poured it until it filled the can. This stuff takes a little bit to start (ie, a match may go out before it lights), but will apparently get hot enough to cook food and boil water!
Vaseline and Cotton Ball Starters
This stuff lights on fire super easy. Take cotton balls, and knead vaseline into it until it’s a gooey mess. This is really dirty and gross. 🙂 After we were happy with how much vaseline was in it, we dipped it in more paraffin to try to keep it sealed against water.
These light on fire super easy, and provide sustained heat. We placed one on the candle from above, lit it and it lit the candle. We imagine you could do the same with wood tinder if you needed.
Fire-Making Kit
Lastly we put it all together. Russ bought some fire-steel, which you strike one piece against the other to provide sparks, and we stuffed it into a small kit along with the cotton balls and some cinder cloth he’d made earlier. (no idea how to make cinder cloth…something about a smaller space and a tiny hole). The sparks from the fire-steel are enough to light the cotton balls, so we have a complete kit!
Then we dropped all of this into Miranda and mine’s emergency kit!
Super happy with these! I wrote about the carriages and grots previously, so just the guns here.
I started with Vallejo Fluorescent Yellow inside the recesses where I wanted the energy coming from. My goal was to keep these areas yellow through the whole process. It mostly worked, except for the round balls on the right and the tips, which I had to go over a lot again at the end.
Mithril Silver pretty much all over, leaving the cables and that center red housing. Silver everywhere is boring, but after a sloppy application of SW Amethyst and GW Seraphim Sepia to make some colour and distressing, the silver is pretty awesome!
I had to go back with the Vallejo Yellow a fair amount. I did White in the recesses, then Yellow, then drybrushed the Yellow out of the recesses, then mixed the White with the Yellow to go in again. I don’t feel like I got that “pulsing glow” look, but it’s pretty bright looking. Not certain what else to do to get the glowing look, but I think it has to do with a smaller paintbrush and painting more gradients inside the coil area.
Everything else was pretty easy. SW Soft Body Black to get the really deep recesses. Mephiston Red in the center — I didn’t even do anything else here, just the slop-over from the Amethyst and Sepia made it look good. Blazing Orange+Sepia on the cables, Steel Legion Drab+Sepia+Ushapti Bone on the cable wraps.
Oh, and Blood for the Blood God on the sights. It’s an easy “glassy lens” look. 🙂
Didn’t have much time last night, so I just did some shims. The nice thing about this approach is a few things: I create a nice smooth surface to decorate (rather than cut-up Rhino innards), and I can check the fit on both sides of the shim to ensure it works. A problem I was having with the Rhino treads as-is was that I was never certain how much coverage (for gluing) I was getting — every time I went to check, the tread moved a bit!
I’m going to need to do a lot of gap filling. Both of these models were built by other people, and those people didn’t take as much care with good fittings as I would have preferred. Anyone have good materials for filling gaps? My go-to is green stuff, but the way I use it tends to create rounded pieces rather than straight-across pieces. Maybe I just need to overfill and file back.
I love this part of modelling – the fast and furious slicing and dicing of $50 models! I grabbed a Rhino from my bitz box (I have spares in case of Ork conversions!) and a hack saw and cut it in half.
I hadn’t built the start of the ‘naut (I received it from a friend), so I had to pull the legs off rather than just not gluing them. I cut back the Rhino halves until they were just track, and then cut up the “equipment case” in the back of them so they would sit flatter, and then cut up just in front of the middle so that the ‘naut doors would still open properly.
I wasn’t super happy with the “closed” look when I was done last night, but when I looked at it this morning I’m pretty stoked!
I think I’m going to get some plasticard glued to the back of the track portions so that I can try to create a flat gluing surface. There’s so much texture on the ‘naut, and so many recessed panels on the inside of the Rhino that I think any glue-job I did that didn’t include a lot of plasticard shims would fall off very quickly.
It’s perfect, ship it.
A friend Clayton said he put tracks on his, so I’m asking him to send me a photo so I can see what it looks like and make a decision. I think it involves removing the legs, so I actually haven’t done any work on the legs just in case I’m just going to cut them off. Probably going to need some plasticard, and I’m likely also going to saw a Rhino in half. 😀 😀 😀
Going to post a couple quick ones while I build this thing.
I’ve loved the look of this model since the 2014 Codex came out, but I didn’t play enough 40k to justify buying it, let alone storing it. (Storage space is at a premium at my apartment). I came into a good deal, and I’ve played more 40k in the last few months than the previous few years combined, so HECK YES GIANT STOMPY ROBOT.
Like any good GW customer (*cough*), I know that the best way to get the best bang-for-buck is to magnetize the options I want, and that primary happens with the gun arm.
I read a good accounting, and watched a video and got to work!
This photo is of the Deffstorm Mega-shoota front, with a magnet glued to it. Both of the links above used a 25mm 40k base, but I grabbed a Deadzone base of the same size. Deadzone uses perfectly round bases, rather than beveled. I had to bring out the Dremel to sand it down enough to fit in the gun arm, but it’s pretty great!
I glued the back piece such that the gunner will sit at the back, because the gunner is awesome. The back of the Kustom Mega-Kannon isn’t as cool, just having a little power-gubbin.
I glued the KMK wires to the top of the DMS ammo feed and jammed them both into the arm and cut a hole in the ‘naut to run the extra wide bit. I think I need more on the arm-end to make it look cool, but I like that both guns are accommodated.
I need to account for the other differences too – I think one has a skorcha and another has a KMB. I’m going to keep the Gorkanaut head because I like it better though.
Oh, and it has to have a Space Marine theme somehow. >.< (that’s an oooooold link!