Ramming speed!

With the captain of the looted wagon "ready for action" I turned my attention to the second crew member, the wagons "first mate". I decided to use the nobz sprue again and one of the heads from the maximini sets I had ordered.

And here he is. Once thing I have noticed is that the white resin Maxi Mini used is annoyingly hard to photograph! Still he should look pretty awesome finished.

So Crew finished it was time to turn my attention to the final major section of the wagon that needed working on. The engines! I did try and see if I could fit the engine from the Ork Trukk on anywhere but it didn't look right and would have seemed too "obivously" stuck on for want of a better term.

I suddenly realised there was a much more obivous solution as the raider already came with "rocket" style engines anyway. So all I needed was to add some more rockets to give it that Orky feel, of the crew simply pointing the wagon at the enemy, lighting the rockets and then hoping for the best.

For the extra rockets I used too packs from the stormboyz sprue which fitted into the gaps between the raider hull and the Ork Trukk chasis surprisingly easy. Now I know that the raider isn't quite "straight" but no looted wagon is ever going to come out of the Meks workshop perfect and I'm sure the Mekyboz simply told his customers that the wagon came with " sporty handling"


So here is the wagon in it's almost finished glory, complete with Kaptain and first mate. In case anyone is wondering the blobs of green stuff will be "lights". The one main thing I have left to do is drill out the heavy stubber barrels and added a couple more bits of wiring to represent the Mekyboyz "Kustomz improvementz".

Then all I'll have to do it paint it!

Try, try and try again

Okay so my first attempt at converting a Ork in Mega Armour wasn't exactly a rousing success. but I wasn't going to give up that easy. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to match the detail of the metal models so I decided to go for the overall look instead and hope it impressed enough that people wouldn't notice the lack of pistons, hydralics etc on the legs.

Now my first attempt had looked like he had simply stepped into a box and then pulled it up like a child. So this time I decided to use smaller bits of plasti card and created a "multi" piece armour look that while not near, fitted the " made from scrap" Ork image.
To convey the idea of hydralics I decided to fall back on the good ole tanks from the Ork Loota sprue turned side ways and mounted on the Orks back. I used simple wire in connections from the tank to the Combi and power weapons. To finish bulking the armour out I used Space marine shoulder pads for somewhat unsurprisingly the shoulders. ( just don't ask what happened to the should pads original owners).

The back armour, heads and jaw plates came from the Ork Nobz sprue and didn't need any additional converting. The combi weapons were relatively simple. I used a bit of plastic card for the arm "mount" and green stuff for the straps. I made sure to add ammo feeds and targeting sights and no ork Nobz in Mega armour would settle for a gun that was second best.

So here is the full strength squad ready to lead the boyz into battle and guard the Bosses back, or maybe stick a knife in it depending on their mood :-)

I'm really happy with how they came out and think their the best converted squad I've done thus far.

Plus I still have a ton of stuff from their sprue left over to go into the bitz box. Bonus!

It's a little dusty but it's still good

Deep in the dark mists of time, when I still working in a rather geeky job and didn't have to go to work dressed up as a grown up or worry about the real world good ole GW released Apocolypse.

Finally a way to use all of your collection on the tabletop in one go. You could play massed battles like you had only dreamed of and most people did.... and then got bored and went back to regular games.

In the midst of these heady days I decided to add a couple of apocolypse units to my Ork Army. Well a stompa was pretty much a given but what else?

After much umming and arring I settle on going for a battle fortress using the new Shadowsword kit.

So after a bit of work in the Meks workshop we get....
I was initially stuck on how to create the main gun for the fortress as there were lots of gun pieces in the shadowsword kit. I finally decided to go for the easy option. I used all of them in one go! Of course such a big gun would have need a lot of bracing as I'm sure you can see from the picture.

The exhausts at the back were a mix of plasti rod and the exhausts vents from the adeptus mechanicum city fight building.

The two "inside" track guards at the front of the fortress are the wheel coverings from the Ork warbuggy. The Turret well that's obivously from the Ork battlewagon sprue. To attach it to the top of the tank I used the mounting from the Ork battle wagon sprue as well although it did require a little bit of filing to get the perfect fit.

I used the two side pieces from the Ork Battlewagon sprue to mount the two gunnars and to finish the crew off I added a Mekboy to keep an eye to make sure the engine was running perfectly and some grots pulling ammo crates back and forth.

It didn't turn out too badly if I do say so myself. I just need to play an apocolype game at some point so I can actually use it in a fight!

Shiver me Timbers

Well the shipment from maxi-mini had arrived in the mail which meant I had my grubby little paws ( or grubby bit paws but I digress) on my pirate heads which meant it was time to fire up the welding gear and cutting equipment ( and by that I mean the plastic glue and my craft knife) and get back to work on the looted wagon.
So on went the sail and I raided my trusty bitz box yet again to find two heavy stubbers from the Ork Dreadnought sprue which were mounted on the proz right next to the ram! Of course you can't have a "Pirate Ship" with out a plank!

And what better then the boarding plank from the Ork trukk sprue!

With the Wagon coming along nicely it was time for some crew. I decided to fallback on my trusted choice of the Ork Nobz sprue because lets face it no self respecting Ork Nobz is going to ride around in a trukk when there's a looted wagon going. After umming and ahhing about what to arm him with I decided to go with twin pistols. For his head I went with the Ork head with beard pipe and of course Pirate Hat.

I'm not going to glue him in postion until he's painted but he you can see where he'll be ending up.

So now I just have to work on the driver and the engines.

WeirdBoy, weird boy watcha gonna do

Well I was debating adding one more HQ choice to my army and after some pondering I decided to try converting a Weirdboy.

Gw only do one model of a weirdboy and he's made of metal so he was unfortunatly out!

I wanted to go for a savage "look" for my weirdboy and so decided to look at the Warhammer range of Orcs for inspiration.

After some deliberation I decided to go with the Orc Warboss set as I liked the look of the chainmail torse and the long cloak with wolf head.

A little search in the old bitz box and I ended up with.
One plastic weirdboy. The head is from the Ork Boyz sprue as well as the two Ork skulls and the staff is from the Ork Grotz sprue. I did try and create a staff with wiring wrapped round to give the impression of the staff contained a psyhic conduit for powers but I couldn't get it quite right, so I decded to go for the less is more approach and keep it simple.

I feel he's okay but I'm not as happy with him as I could be, I just have a feeling that there's something missing. But he'll do until I get the inspiration to come up with a replacement.

In for a Penny in for a Pound

Once someone mentioned about the Pirate heads from Maxi Mini I knew that I just had to have them to go on my looted wagon. The image of Orks in Pirate hats was just too good to resist. Plus I don't have to worry about being targeted for heresy.

So one quick purchase and one week late I arrived home from work to find a rather tightly sealed packaged waiting for me and inside was ( drum roll please).................

My Pirate heads!!! Yaah! I can finally get on with the looted wagon.

I hate to sound childish but this is going to look so cool :-)

Becoming a heretic

I've been model making for a long time. Perhaps too long depending on who you ask, but that's a discussion for another time and place. And quite possibly behind my back but I digress.

My focus has been Games Workshop for nearly all of that time, with a slight foray into Historical minatures. For obivous reasons for those of you who have been paying attention I've kept my attention on Games Workshop despite being aware of the growing numbers of wargames manufacturers out there and hopefully the wraith of the inquistion won't fall on my head for saying so, the viable alternatives to Warhammer 40,000.

However since I now live in the real world I can start to explore these other games without worrying about the Battle sisters coming to my door, which is also a good thing as with the loss of my discount and the steadly increasing prices I'm starting to find it hard to indulge my hobby cravings as much as I used to even with more money coming in.

Visting my local wargames shop I decided to let my eyes make the decision and I went for the first thing which caught my eye.
Behold one of hte new plastic warjacks from Privateer press and their game Warmachine. Now I literally know nothing about this game but there was something about this model which just made me want to pick it up and try putting it together.

According to the guys in the shop Privateer press are starting to release a steadily increasing number of plastic minatures. Now I say " plastic" but it's a different plastic then I'm used to with Games Workshop. It's a lot harder but it allows quite frankly a stunning amount of detail. Just see all of the details on the bits above.

The other issue is you need superglue to put these models together which is little bit more time consuming then using plastic glue and does mean you have to pay a lot more attention to what your doing as gluing your hand to the table is a bad thing to do. Not to mention a silly thing to do. Not that I've done that before at all.........

Right where was I? Right good things about the model, firstly the amazing level of detail. Secondly the lack of significant models lines and thirdly the ease with which it went together.

Bad things, well having to use super glue, secondly the addition work needed to get rid of mould lines due to the hardness of the plastic and last the warped gun arm. To be fair with the last one that could have happened in the box but not having used the plastic before I didn't know how much "oommph" I could use to try and straight it again without breaking it. I was able to get it fairly into line but it's still a bit scewed.

So here he is fully aseembled and undercoated. My first ever warjack! I'm going to a bit of experimenting to try and match the colour scheme using GW paints as I don't want to have to go out and buy a whole new set.

I'll be posting some more pics soon so be sure to keep an eye out.