Gaslands! Tamiya Half-track (1:35)

I've added another vehicle to my 40k motorcade (for Rogue Trader or from Gaslands!), this time an historical model pimped up with some sci-fi, kit-bashed additions.
The main model (1:35) is an excellent Tamiya, German half-track - a vehicle that has a whole host of detail and tiny bits of plastic on it's sprue to keep you challenged when constructing. The wheels and tracks are all moveable, but I decided to glue them in place to make painting a bit easier. I think the larger scale just about works. The additions to the build include an Ork gun (rear) and skull, a metal lasergun (?), bits from a computer motherboard, pieces of lego, rolled greenstuff, plasticard plating and other futuristic bits that I found that I believe are from Ramshackle Games.

Here you can see it with a Bob Olley Rogue Trader miniature that I had forgot to paint for a recent painting challenge:

I've put the half-track alongside my other 1:43 scale vehicles here, which looks like the start of a larger scale Gaslands! crew:

And here you can see the kitbashing in progress:

The painting itself was incredibly straightforward. Primed grey, pin wash with brown/black oil paints, quick highlight one with a light grey and then highlight two with the light grey and some white. Some rust and oil stains were added with appropriate colours diluted down and applied in vertical streaks for the rust and splattered on for the oil.

A mix of dry pigment and matt medium was then slathered on to the lower parts of the vehicle, starting with the tracks to show the terrain it has been driving through.

Next up, I'll go back to my Hotwheels scale cars!

Gaslands!

It was only a matter of time before I started a new project and that may as well be at the beginning of the year. Cheetor's excellent blog introduced me to the game Gaslands! and I particularly liked how he had used the contents of the Hot Wheels advent calendar as a starting point for a load of 1:65 car converting craziness.

So I'm in. Up to my neck. I love converting and kit-bashing and trash-bashing so this is right up my desolate, post-apocalyptic highway. First of all I've already got a couple of 1:43 cars that would work for the game on a larger-than-Hotwheels-scale, namely my Fighting Fantasy Freeway Fighter and Helsreach Arrabella projects:

And for Christmas I received a 1:35 Tamiya half-track:

Which I've built:

And which is now in the process of getting a sci-fi/apocalyptic makeover. This will join the two previous vehicles to make my 28mm Gaslands team.

Of course I'm not stopping there. I found a bunch of my son's Hotwheels cars and I've started building another team in 1:65 scale, using some 40k bits and the excellent Implements of Carnage from NorthStar Figures. My first two cars:

Primed:

And undercoated in rust colours:

Oh and it won't stop there, here's the other cars I've collected to transform into post-apocalyptic Gaslands machines (you may notice a familiar looking orange car there...):

I shall keep you posted....

Fusion Taxi Services

Gillette's packaging for it's Fusion razor blades is completely over the top. Each razor blade given it's own little plastic compartment trying to tell the consumer that THIS IS A LUXURY ITEM. Well, Gillette, I've trash-bashed your packaging into something a damn site better than for what you intended, a Rogue Trader hover taxi!

This was inspired by the current competition on The Emporium of Rogue Dreams: Old School Gaming Facebook page, where a skiff-bash challenge is underway. I had the competition in mind as I was about to throw away the aforementioned packaging and it struck me just how interesting the shapes actually were; the curved front, the hollowed out areas with slanting backs... what else could come into my mind except a hover car with lots of seats. And what vehicle needs lots of seats? Well a automated taxi service of course!

So from here I scrounged together a few other pieces, the family craft cardboard is a place I rarely venture in (it's a mess of felt, string, glitter glue and felt tips) but I vaguely recalled the interesting shapes of felt tip pen lids in that they may correspond to a kind of propeller shape. In the big box of shit that holds felt tip pens (many dried up without their lids), I scrambled to the bottom of the box to find those missing lids. I found a perfect one (with a kind of interior compartment shape that looked sexy and propeller like) but of course not a second one. So I just pilfered one from a perfectly healthy felt tip pen which is now dried up and useless. I should have used this as an opportunity to clear out the box, but did not want to disrupt my creative energy and stall my momentum. One of the kids can do it and anyway the referee in our house, doesn't know. The felt tip lids were filed flat on one side (deliberately roughly) and then superglued to the side rear of the hover craft.

I then dug out a few miscast sci-fi bits I was gifted at an event, dual exhausts, double lights and single lights and glued these in the appropriate places (after a bit of playing with their positions) on to the front and rear and was then ready to go and paint. Well not quite, to capture the hover aspect of the vehicle I built a hidden stand out of the end of a pen, inserted a rare earth magnet into the top of it and then drilled a corresponding hole to the underside of the hovercraft to accommodate the other magnet. The craft could now be removed from it's base (which helped for painting and can be removed and replaced by another vehicle if I ever get around to making another). Oh and it makes it look like it hovers too.

The painting stage was relatively straightforward. Black primer for the inside, masked this off and white primer on the outside. I added a few blended, vertical dark grey stripes to the seats to give them a textured fabric feel and then dabbed on a variety of rust colours onto the outside. Around these I added a range of silvers to show scratch marks and the revealed metal of the vehicle where the yellow paint and rust had de-laminated. The yellow layers were then blended in, black taxi details applied and finally I went back to the rust areas and textured them with some weathering pigments and then weathered the entire vehicle with some thinned washes.

Arrabella - Mad Max style car WIP

Here she is (sans paint and headlights)! 

I love model making and the aspect I enjoy the most of a project like this, is the problem solving. When I was a kid making models for the first time (largely Airfix), the problems were just in following the instructions and putting the correct bits in the correct places without swamping the model in glue. Lego was actually the big step for me, moving away from following instructions that came with boxed sets, to using my imagination and creativity to make my own space ships from a massive pile of different shaped and coloured plastic blocks, all he time ensuring functionality. In the case of spaceship Lego, it was often symmetry; ie: "Do I have enough pieces to construct two of and those fuselage's?" and/or "Will that opening gangway ramp actually fit over the size of the entrance I've made?". As an adult these type of questions and experiments to find the solution keep me happy and take up a lot of my thinking time. Thinking time easily out-weighs my making time.

So with this build, over the past month or so, a lot of time has been spent thinking about how this is going to work. 

1. Research. Find images that inspire. Obviously MadMax was a huge inspiration but I needed plausible builds that have already been built and accomplished by model-makers to give me some reality inspiration:

Thanks to all the modellers who made these, sorry I have not given you credit by name, but rest assured you have completely inspired and reassured me.  

All of these show the sort of thing I wanted to achieve, looking especially at wheels, suspension, exhausts and post-apocalyptic additions. Further research into reality showed me that most of these are modeled at a 1:35 scale, which in my experience is just too large for 28mm sci-fi. So I resumed my search for 1:43 plastic kits, rather than die-cast, the latter being much more difficult to model and convert as I discovered with my Freeway Fighter model

2. Scavenge and purchase parts. I plumped for this Heller plastic kit, it cost me about 7 quid from ebay, the sprues have lots of pieces (40) which means I have more control over what I include and exclude during the build. I liked the aesthetics of the car too, the curves and character of the car fit in with the Mad Max vibe as well as just being quite pleasant to look at. 

I decided that I wanted bigger wheels and raised suspension so as to fit into a desert environment as well as a raised engine and side exhausts to give the appearance of a suped-up version. For this to happen I had to go and scavenge some bits:

• Wire gauze from Halfords for the windows.
• Plastic off road wheels from the Ork bike kit
• Plasticard (plain and the double diamond tread plate kind)
• Jewellers chain so equipment can be secured to the vehicle
• Plastic piping of a variety of radii for exhausts and roll cages etc
• Springs from a pen for the suspension
• Guitar wire for tubed pipes
• Computer circuit board parts for engines and other machinery parts
• The only purchases were from Zinge Industries for fuel tanks, spotlights, and other equipment a post-apocalyptic car might be carrying

3. Making

Having made the brave decision to cut the back of the roof off (I spent a lot of time considering the pros and cons of this and the ideal position to cut), I could start constructing the car. I cut out a space for the raised engine in the bonnet, which is made from a part of a computer circuit board and glued all the seats, steering wheel and dashboard together. I used some embossed plasticard for the floor which attached to the underneath of the drivers seat - it would be visible in the back of the trunk. 

I remember reading an article from a very early White Dwarf, by John Blanche I believe, about keeping a tidy workspace. I don't adhere to that philosophy and have grown fond of such games as: "where the fuck is that drill bit" or "I had that bit perfect length of paperclip in my hand just now", or the dreaded: "bollocks" as the tiny spotlight slips out of my fingers, bounces onto the table and either silently settles on the carpet ("fuck") or nestles amongst the general mess ("for fuck's sake").

I added the roof's spotlights to a bent paperclip. Gluing the wire mesh into the window space was a proper pain in the arse. I ended up using some Uhu thick glue as superglue did not work (bizarrely), and it was, as you can imagine, quite messy and imprecise.

Here you can see the backboard made of the textured plasticard. Really hard to measure the right shape prior to cutting.

 When putting it all together I discovered  an unforeseen problem: two interior wheel arches needed to be made to cover the space where the wheels will show. I've also added some guitar wire as a flexible piping from the engine.

Biggest problems: cutting plastic the correct shape to fit into weird and impossible to get to shapes and using the right type and amount of glue for the right materials. 

Next problem: Making the exhaust. Just bending plastic tubing invariably makes it snap or flatten out. So I had to introduce some heat from a lighter. But just the right amount or else it melts obviously. I found the best way to do this was to rotate the tubing 360 as it is exposed to heat, use tweezers to manipulate the required bend and then run it under cold water immediately. This took quite a few attempts.

Using a range of different radius meant I could insert one inside the other to make a more interesting shape, breaking up the long tubes into smaller sections. I added an Ork bike exhaust for the end piece and used a lot of precision plastic glue..

You can also see the jewellers chain that's been added with the help of some superglue to the spare tyre and sleeping bag etc. The grey resin bits are all from Zinge Industries.

Raising the suspension of the car was the biggest problem of all. I had to make some plasticard supports, seen here in black (the back two being slightly smaller than the front two) with holes drilled in to support the thick paperclip axle. Springs from a couple of pens were used for the actual suspension and were superglued over a plastic rod.

Blu-tac is your closest friend when model-making, perfect for doing that dry run (at least three times) before you break out the finality of the glue..

Here's a closer picture of the front two suspension columns.

And another dry run with the blu-tac helping me out.

4. Complete the build. When the functional side of the build is complete, there's usually some aesthetic improvements to add. In reality I added most of the additions during the functional build, but a few adjustments were made when it was all put together.

The frontof the car needed something extra, to make it have more of a Mad Max appearance, so a bumper with spikes and a skull were added. It helped elongate the car shape too.

Space for a passenger (with gun) was created and a hole drilled into the back for later addition (a Copplestone miniature).

The chassis was raised slightly higher than I had anticipated, so I needed to add some bulk to the undercarriage to reduce the gap to the floor and to break up the very flat line of the bottom of the car. So Arrabella (so I've named her) was given some addiional barrels, which are actually fuses and other barell shaped objects from a computer circuit board (as you can gather there's some great shapes on these for miniature model making).

And here's Abdul Goldberg getting excited about his new ride. It's been pimped.

Right I'm off to spray the bastard, wish me luck because I'll be gutted if I fuck it up now!