Brace yourself, as this is going to be a long post!
A few years back, I went to a model show in Milton Keynes. At a table I found someone selling one of the most recent ork battlewagons for £10. It's not a miniature I've ever liked especially, and this particular model was absolutely wrecked, even by space ork standards: some parts were broken, others were missing, and a lot of the detail had been gunked up with plastic cement. However, these things retail for new at the outrageous price of £70, and this sorry example could be chopped up and used for other things. So I bought it.
And it stayed on a shelf for several years. Eventually, as part of my retro ork unit, I thought it would be nice to give the orks some kind of vehicle in which to commit their acts of cartoony piracy.
The original ork battlewagon dates back to 1990 and sells on ebay for about £200 - not money I'm willing to pay. I stumbled upon a guy selling a resin version, which was a slightly basic, rather chunky copy. I bought it off him, and decided to use some of the resin bits and some of the ruined plastic kit to make something a bit like the original 1990s battlewagon.
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In order to get some ideas, and to get a better sense of the proportions of the old battlewagon, I bought several copies of White Dwarf that date back to 1990 or so: issues 128, 135 and 136.
I'm not going to go into much detail on this, and other people have done much better reviews of old White Dwarfs, but they really are extremely different to the current version. In fact, they're very different to White Dwarfs from twenty years ago. The early 90s WD is full of good stuff in a way that more recent versions aren't: there is virtually no filler at all.
For one thing, they don't just preview the upcoming ork army books: they give away big chunks of rules and points for different sorts of new unit. Issue 128 gives you templates, rules and instructions to convert your plastic battlewagon into a gun-wagon (you use a biro for the barrel). If that's not enough, issue 136 shows you how to make an ork tank from scratch, using absolutely no GW products whatsoever. And you get rules for it.
Interestingly, some of the painting and converting is excellent, and some of it is very basic. White Dwarf seems to have been happy to field models painted in flat colours, without shading or highlighting, and is refreshingly honest about the need to do so when a game is coming up.
They really are magazines by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, without any of the waffle and hard sell of the later editions. No wonder I got into this hobby, and no wonder that I don't buy White Dwarf anymore.
Anyhow, back to the tank.
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The old battlewagon is an odd model, clearly as much an influence on the modern ork trukk as the recent battlewagon kit. It is a cross between an armoured car, a dragster and a pickup truck, with three main parts: the boxy cockpit, the open area in the middle where the ork passengers go, and the engine at the rear. The wheels are massive and armoured, with little ground clearance. It doesn't have any mounted weapons: gunfire is provided by the mob of excitable passengers firing their weapons out of the back.
To make this vehicle, I used the big resin wheels from the ebay kit, along with the cab and the back part (the cargo area) of the plastic GW model. After a lot of thought, I decided to put the big wheels beside the cargo area and not behind it, as is the case in the original 1990s model. That would just make the battlewagon look weirdly long. Attaching the wheels was tricky and required pinning. I made spacers from those little plastic discs that plastic Mantic soldiers come on.
However, the battlewagon did need an engine, which had to be mounted at the rear. I found a set of Mantic terrain that I'd never assembled, which contained a cylindrical boiler thing. I added a load of additional parts to this, including an ork control panel, a gun from the Adeptus Mechanicus (now an exhaust) and a weird motor thing that came off a model tank.
Here's the boiler in place at the back of the battlewagon. You can see the huge resin wheels!
Of the two turrets, one was a complete mess, having been hacked off at a strange angle. I rebuilt it with clay and green stuff (only partially successfully) and put part of a Tau drone on top. It fitted very well. The other turret got a round piece of plastic, origin unknown, to act as a lid.
As the world of miniature painting seems to be getting more and more sepia and mud-coloured, I decided to paint this thing bright yellow. That meant undercoating it in pink and building up from there. I was worried that the combination of the yellow of the Bad Moons and the check patterns favoured by the orks would make it look like a taxi, but it seems that the old versions just didn't care about this, so I went ahead and used both.
If anyone's interested, I painted the metal in six stages: black undercoat; dark brown; drybrush of dark grey mixed 50:50 with boltgun metal; boltgun metal drybrush; and silver drybrush. Some areas were then washed with strong tone to make it look grubby. Someone once pointed out that ork vehicles would be greasy rather than rusty, as they're frequently used, so I followed that idea and didn't add any rust.
I painted a moon with sunglasses on top of one of the hatches, which I copied from a photo of a banner in one of the old White Dwarfs (Dwarves?). I also added some Jerrycans from an old tank kit, which were painted red for a bit of variety.
And here is the finished machine! I really like this thing. I feel that I ought to add more detailing, but to be honest I think less might be more here. It's not a perfect copy of the old miniature, but I think it captures much the same look, as if the old model evolved for the present.
Neeeeow!
