I Have A Plan - And Some Classic Ork Firepower!

So I had this random idea, and I thought I'd run it past both of my readers.

What if a bunch of painters bought a box of - say - ten minis each, painted the models, sold them on ebay and gave the profits to charity? I think that could be a nice idea. You could sell the painted models for anything from £40 to £150, depending on how well they were painted and who painted them. They would be fun to paint and you could try out a new paint scheme or models from a game you don't usually play (personally, I'd do a Blood Bowl team).

Unfortunately, I have virtually no clout in the painting/gaming community - not that I've ever looked for it. But it someone with a "name" picked up on the idea, or enough people went for it, I think it could be really effective. Of course, you'd have to rely on people to honestly donate the profits and not just pocket them, and there would be some showoff who tried to paint an entire army for it, but by and large wargamers seem to be decent people who would be willing to turn their talents to a worthy cause.

Does anything like this already exist? Would you consider doing it? If anyone fancies doing something like this one-box charity challenge, or has any idea on how you'd go about organising it, drop me a line.

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Right then. This week, it's space orks. I've been picking away at these for a long while, but I've got a batch done, and here they are.

I bought some metal guns off ebay, which originally came with 1990s Deathskull Lootas. They must have been some of the last old-style ork models. The guns are comically large and (of course) fit really badly with the ork models, metal or plastic. I used ancient shoulder pads to mount the guns and added handles made of a green stuff/milliput mixture.

I actually used an old metal madboy as the wielder of this weapon. For one thing, he's got a great expression and for another, you'd have to be mad to be carting this thing around. I think it's an autocannon.

He got a little plastic friend to act as a spotter. By turning the left hand the other way up (it's meant to be supporting his bolter) I've got him shielding his eyes. Shame his mate is looking in the wrong direction.

The next pair are both plastic models. Again, the gun took a lot of fitting. I've gone for the usual jolly freebooter/Bad Moon colours. 

And now onto the really fun stuff!

 The old plastic ork warbuggy gets a lot of stick for being a bad model but, once you factor in the odd design of the crew, I think it's perfectly decent. The detail is reasonable for a kit from 2000 or so, and you can add as much detail as you like to the big hubcaps and the front. It's also pretty easy to convert and customise.

The main problem is that the crew don't really look like GW orks. They resemble hefty humans (like House Goliath Necromunda models) with no necks. In sculpting terms they're not bad, although they don't resemble either the Oldhammer Paul Bonner-type orks, or the ape-like monsters from 3rd Ed onwards. If another company had made this model, it would be fine.

I particularly like the driver, with his deranged grin, and the guy operating the gun, who looks like an unusually green fat biker.

This model is pretty much as it came from the box, slightly repaired rather than deliberately converted. It was missing its banner pole, but I've got no great love for banners, and that won't be much missed. 

Broom!

I've got a Bretonnian leader to paint, but I'm trying to put him off, as it's a really daunting bit of conversion and painting work. Got to do it sometime, though!

Loads of Metal Space Ork Stuff

 Time for some orks! The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000 was a time of great disaster. It's definitely the point where the great grimdarking of Warhammer began, and the orks were hit especially badly by this. With the possible exception of some gretchin, I don't think any of the old models survived into the 2000s, which is a great shame. Still, the blood of martyrs is the heresy of eternal war, or something.

So, without further ado, here are some more old orks! 

First up, we've got two metal minis: a freebooter bad doc (that's a pirate mad medic) and a mek with a burner/flamer. These are such nice models. The detail of the sculpting is terrific on both models, with loads of cool touches. I particularly like the way that the mek is sculpted like a welder, rather than a soldier with a flamethrower. The doc is one of the meanest-looking old orks, and even by greenskin standards he's an ugly customer. The only bum note for me is the small hand hanging from his ear. I painted it like an earring or perhaps a decoration on his shoulder armour. 

Then here are two randos. The guy on the left is a Space Crusade plastic ork. He's not the greatest model in history, but he's got a certain goofy charm, and there's lots of space on the model to embellish him. On the right, there's a metal madboy with a custom weapon.

Madboys were an odd feature of the very complex 2nd Ed ork rulebook. They seemed to be suffering from various forms of delusion and mental illness, which probably wouldn't be treated so comically today, and gave the sculptors the opportunity to make orks with great facial expressions. This chap, I think, is feeling down. He is wearing an apron, and has some little tools in his belt, so perhaps he's a mek who is nervous about firing the ridiculous gun that he's just built.

And here are two plastic boys from the original ork boys set. They're a bit step down from the metal models, of course, and come in two weird poses: squatting as if about to have a poo, and creeping away to the right. Anyhow, they've come out alright, and bulk up the numbers reasonably well.

But that's not all! For the first time on this blog, I present... the ork wartrak.

Back in the ancient past of 1989, there were very few plastic vehicles (four, I think). Instead, ork buggies and the like were made of metal parts that you had to stick together. I found one of these, a wartrak, on ebay minus its mounted lascannon, and so I bought it.

Ye gods, this thing was a swine to put together. We can (sometimes rightly) complain about the complexity of modern plastic kits, but this thing was terrible. I pinned it, used green stuff and superglue, and every other trick I could think of, but it was a terrible struggle to get it to stay together.

It didn't help that I had to improvise a gun out of an old plastic bit (I've no idea where that came from), some plasticard and a sight off an modern Skitarri gun. I put it on a base for some small level of stability: back in 1989, you just plonked it on the tabletop.

Anyhow, at last I painted it, and quickly realised how much easier it would have been if I'd not stuck it together first. I gave the orks lighter skin than usual, just to make them stand out from their machine. I think these guys are probably Evil Suns, given that they use a lot of red, but they could still fit with the other chaps.

So there we are! Old orks is da best orks. Nuff said.

Squirty Bottle Moon Buggy Conversion

 So, new year, new picture, or something like that. The photo at the top of the blog is actually the Stanley knife (or box cutter, if you're in the US) that I use for most of my cutting and conversion work. I gather that you're meant to use a craft knife, and maybe I'd get better results if I did, but I've found the Stanley knife to be very reliable and robust over the years. And I've wiped my brush on it so many times that it's starting to look like a work of abstract art in itself. I'm sure the Tate Gallery would love it...

When converting (and writing, for that matter) I often find that I have an idea kicking around in my head for ages, and it just takes the right moment for it to come out and take form. To be more precise, you know those trigger-activated, squirty bottles that you get for shower cleaner, disinfectant spray and the like? Ages back I thought that the head of one of those would make a good cockpit and I've been trying to work out how to do it ever since. 

I saved one, cut it down a lot, and wondered how to make it work as some kind of vehicle. My first thought was as the front of a flyer, but I lacked parts to really make that work. I also had a bit of plastic tube that had probably been to top of a pot of glue, which fitted nicely behind the "cockpit" and could be some sort of engine...

After that, I rubbed the whole thing down with fine sandpaper, so that glue and paint would take to it more easily, and added wheels. Two were old Ramshackle tyres, and I've no idea where the smaller pair came from. It began to have a smooth, slightly retro moon-buggy look.

I added lots of details from thin plasticard bent to shape, and leftover model tank bits. GW provided an aerial for the roof, from a Tau part. 

Then it was time for painting. I went with a basic off-white, with red panels and a black front canopy that is presumably made of some kind of two-way glass. This helped break up the shape of the squirter a bit more. I don't often wish that I had an airbrush, but getting a half-even coverage and some kind of shading was really hard. I ended up using a mixture of glazing, conventional painting and sponging, and it's still far from perfect.

That said, I do rather like the end result. I kept the weathering fairly minor, but added a few chips to suggest use. Here is the end product.

And here's a picture with a couple of space adventurers for scale. Broom!

A (Konflikt 47) Walker for House Escher

Here's a model that I've had lying around for ages. I think I got it in a sale. It's a Warlord Games Coyote walker from their Konflikt 47 game. Oddly, when I bought it, Warlord sent me an entire resin kit and then a spare pair of arms and legs which were exactly the same, but metal. This miniature has the resin torso and metal limbs, for what it's worth.

I decided to use it as a support unit for my Escher gang. In new Necromunda, gangs can take robots called Ambots to support them. I'm not sure what they are or do, but I thought that this model might make a good equivalent.

The Coyote is a pretty nice model and a lot bigger than I'd anticipated. It also has a lot of blank space that you can use for interesting colours. I decided to paint mine to reflect the rest of my Escher crew, and used the tank from the 1990s film of Tank Girl as a basis. Much jollier than the standard olive green! The only modification was the addition of a little aerial to the top. I left off the guns, as I don't think that ambots carry them.

He's a happy little (big) guy!

Ork Dreadnought Time!

 So, Toby, how's that project to repaint all your old Brettonians going? Well, it's not really started yet. In fact, I'm still not entirely sure how to spell Bretonnia. On the other hand, I did rebuild and repaint an ork dreadnought that I scratch-built many years ago. The best laid plans of squig and man, as they say...

The main body of this thing is some kind of broken toy that I was given by a friend. The legs are landing gear from a marine flyer. The guns come from a very cheap walker from (I think) a Russian wargame (again, I bought these a decade ago, so my memory isn't great). The rest is stuff from the bits box.

I tried to give the dreadnought a wonky, awkward look like a clockwork toy. The clockwork key at the back was a late addition, made from plasticard and a bit of rod. I did wonder if it was a bit too silly, but you probably can't overdo it with old fashioned orks.

Just in case anyone's wondering (which I doubt), the yellow was painted over several thin coats of pink. The metal is done with a base coat of dark brown, onto which dark grey is roughly drybrushed. Then increasing amounts of plate metal and silver are added to the dark grey, all the way up to pure silver for chips and scratches. I find that the dark brown gives the metal a tarnished look that suits orks and heavy machinery.

I don't intend to make a big force of these old orks. For one thing, the metals are expensive and the early plastic orks aren't that great (and are expensive). But a small skirmishing group would be fun - and very Rogue Trader, where twenty men, one dreadnought and a converted shampoo bottle constituted an entire army.

Space Marine Whirlwind Conversion (and bonus rhino)

 Last time, I made a whopping great cannon to go on the roof of a space marine Rhino. I also promised further silliness. And I've been hard at work to do just that.

Back in the days, I purchased a plastic Empire hellsturm rocket launcher, a sort of multiple firework array on a cannon chassis. I put this onto a Rhino to make a very medieval Whirlwind tank.

The basis of the conversion is one of the plates that goes on the back of the Rhino. The Vindicator cannon lifts off, and I used the plate with a hole for a hatch in it. I put a Lego cog into the hole and stuck it in place with plasticard, to be the part that the launcher sits on. Here's a picture of a normal plate and my version.

The rocket launcher went on top. I added a piece that holds some extra rockets, in case the marines get excited and fire all their fireworks at once. 

It was painted in suitably jolly and heraldic colours, to match the overall scheme.

Whoosh!

Now, I thought it would be good to finish this project off by making a flat panel to go on the top, for when the marines just need nothing fancier than a Rhino. I found some doors and glued them together.

I wanted to decorate the doors, but I know my limits. There's no way that I could do the sort of freehand that wins modern competition. But I could draw as well as a medieval monk who's never left his cloiser, and so that's what I did. Hence this:

That looks suitably antiquated. Here it is on the tank.

That was fun!

Space Marine Vindicator Conversion

 It's a little tank with a great big gun!

Inspired by last week's comments, I decided to have another go at a conversion I did many years ago. It was gathering dust and slowly falling apart at the back of a cupboard, and I fished it out to see what I could do.

Before all that Primaris nonsense, space marine tanks were largely based on the Rhino APC chassis. The two main variants, the Vindicator and the Whirlwind, had a big cannon and a missile launcher, respectively. I must have realised that, if you could make the bits interchangeable, you could, er, interchange them.

So, I had bought a Rhino and got to work building a massive cannon to go on the roof. The "real" Vindicator has its cannon at the front, but this would be easier to swap out and would look more cool/ridiculous. I built the cannon out of a pipe from an old scenery kit, along with parts from various Empire buildings. When I fished it out last week, the tank looked like this:

Very dusty. I didn't really like the ram on the front, so I removed it. I also felt that the cannon looked a bit basic and front-heavy, so I made some hydraulics out of bits left over from a knight titan. Plasticard was used to attach them and space things out.

A bit better. Once painted it looked like this. I used a basic grey shaded up slightly and washed with thinned-down brown to represent dirt. It's nothing very fancy but it helps to bring out the details.

I also added some details from Empire kits and the spare parts from the original Rhino. Then it was time for paint!

Considering how a lot of my marines look, this is pretty low-key. Of course, it's very silly and I don't know how you'd load the gun, but it is sort-of-modular (ie the top falls off) and it fits the look I was going for (a bit like a castle). 

Incidentally, I discovered today that an official chapter called the Brazen Claws uses the same red-and-blue quartered design as my chaps, except all over their body armour. However, they don't sound as fun as my chapter. So there. And on the subject of fun, I think I'll repair the rocket launcher part of this tank, so it can also be a whirlwind - and that looks really silly...

Scratch-Built Moon Truck

 

Once again, I've been trying to use up some of the many bits that I've accumulated for excellent projects that never quite came to fruition. 

A little while ago I made an ork battlewagon, which looks like this:

In doing so, I bought a resin battlewagon from Ebay, which I'd intended to use as the basis for the battlewagon itself. I ended up only using the wheels for my version, which left me with a load of resin bits including a body that looked like a massive lump of white chocolate.

Also in the bits box were two, er, side pieces from a Ramshackle Games APC-type vehicle. I have no idea why I own these, especially since I had three of them. Maybe I over-ordered many years ago? I also had no wheels to go with them. Genius. However, I discovered that the side bits fitted the white-chocolate resin bit really well. 

I boxed in the rear of the vehicle with plasticard and then got to work covering it in greebles - that is, bits of interesting, superfluous detail. Many GW human vehicles have plates on them, which sometimes have little gaps between them. I tried to simulate this with different shapes and thicknesses of plasticard. 

The underside shows how the large random lumps of resin went together.

Further greebling occurred.

The bits came from all sorts of places: some Warlord Games turrets from an armoured car; two ventilation units made by TT Combat; a Mantic gun - anything that looked interesting and vaguely industrial, really. My favourite bit is a toolbox from a Gaslands sprue. I considered buying some resin wheels, but I'm cheap, so I got some Lego ones off ebay. And they worked surprisingly well!

The thing I ended up with looked like a cross between a military truck and a moon rover. It clearly needed an industrial paint job. I went with a light grey, because you can do a lot of weathering on that. For the first time, I used an oil wash to simulate dirt and grime: I used burnt umber from Windsor and Newton, watered down with white spirit. To be honest, while this was a bit better than just painting the dirt on, I didn't think that it was amazing.

Headlights, an abandoned toolbox and some kind of tube added a bit of colour to the model. Overall, I think it might be a bit over-weathered, and you can see that the tyres say "Lego" if you look closely, but I think it's come out pretty well given how it started. A weekend well spent!

Oldhammer Ork Battlewagon Conversion (Or Something Like That)

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!