Ork Fuel Depot

Okay, even in the grim cheapness of the future, this week’s project is ridiculously dirt cheap. I’m almost embarassed by it.

I save plastic jars to use for bitz. Six or seven years back--when White Dwarf actually printed mostly fun, useful articles and not just press releases for new products--one of the GW guys mentioned storing his super-small bitz in spice jars, which meant they not only took up a lot less room, but his Guardsmen had a wonderful cinnamon smell. With all the piles of sprues I had, it struck me I could do the same thing with whole armies. Wham--90% of my Space Marine bitz end up in a cleaned out peanut butter jar, vehicle bitz in another. Same thing with the Guard. And Chaos, Orks, Tyranids, Necrons... Suddenly my shelves were a whole lot cleaner. Plus it lets me eyeball stuff a lot faster, too.

What does this have to due with a dirt cheap fuel depot?

Well, I had a peanut butter jar in the sink a few weeks back that I'd forgotten about. The lovely lady and I were making dinner and I strained a bunch of noodles. Boiling water filled up the jar in the sink and washed all over it. I watched it melt and deform. The bottom shrunk, the sides bubbled...it was useless.

I went to toss this mutant jar in the trash bin and absently screwed the lid back on. Wait, what? Much to my surprise, the lid still fit fine, even though the bottom was way too deformed for it to stand up. I mused on this for a bit, flipped it over, and stood it on its lid.

Wham again! It was a beat-up fuel tank. And who would keep such an old thing? Why, the Orks of course. Suddenly I had a scenery piece/ objective.

Helpful Hint--I've mentioned this once or thrice before. One of the best ways to make cheap, oversized bases is just to superglue three old CDs together. Old AOL discs or game demos, drivers for hardware you dumped years ago, backup discs that didn't burn right for some reason, whatever. Three discs glued together is almost the precise thickness as your standard 40K model base. Make sure you hit your “project side” with sandpaper, too, so the glue will have a coarse surface to grab.

Once the base dried, I just superglued the jar lid onto it. It’s worth noting that the lid is bit off-center, so there’ll be room on the base for a few models to be placed on it.

Once the lid was solid I put some superglue on the threads and screwed the “tank” onto it. It was tempting to leave this part unglued so I could hide objective markers, models, etc., inside the tank. Thing is, I know all that would really do is lead to chipped paint and messed-up scenery. So it’s going to be a solid piece.

A fuel tank is no good with no way to get the fuel out, so I decided to make a little pumping station where trukks, battlewagons, and maybe killa kans could get topped off (poor little grots--the crew compartment and fuel tank are one and the same). The pump is just a little card box with some details on it. It’s 1 1/4” x 1” x 3/4”. The buttons are made with the 1/8” hole punch. The sign is a Warhammer Fantasy orc shield with a skeleton crest. A few rivets from the 1/16” punch accented the details.

Helpful Hint--Here’s the best method I’ve found to attach these little card rivets. Put a dot of white glue down where you want them. If you end up with a blob that’s too big (larger than the pip on a die, say) use a hobby knife to scrape a bit away. Now, use the tip of the knife to spear a rivet and press it down on the glue. The excess will swell up, yes, but ignore it for a minute. Make sure the rivet’s solid on the surface you’re gluing it to. Put on all your rivets (I usually do ten or twelve at a time), then go back over them and just give each one a quick, gentle press with your fingertip. The momentary pressure will help the glue cover the edges of the rivet (more durability) and the excess will come away on your fingertip. Wipe it on the back of your other hand and repeat until this batch is done.

I glued the pump off to the side next to the tank, still leaving a lot of open space for other models. Then I painted some superglue onto the base with a wide toothpick and covered the whole thing with coarse sand. Not modeling sand or anything clever like that. Just some gritty sand I found outside. There were a few small stones in it, too, which just add to the texture.

The pump’s hose is a short length of wire from a broken set of iPod headphones. The “patch” on the hose is made from dental floss. Just wrap it and tie it tight. The nozzle is a bit of plastic sprue with one of the circular bits drilled out.

Now, here’s a last clever bit. I took four disks from a 1/4” hole punch and used the 1/16” punch to knock a hole in the center of them. The four of them stacked on top of each other and the iPod wire fit right through the middle. This little anchor glued to the pump. Then I glued the nozzle in place with a big blob of superglue to create a puddle. If the Orks are going to have a fuel depot, you know it’s going to be a fire hazard.

And that was pretty much it. It was ready to prime.

The tank and pump both got a lot of Tin Bitz and Boltgun Metal. I freehanded a big Deathskulls logo one side with pencil and filled it in with Enchanted Blue. On the other side, where the jar was still a bit rough where the label had been, I painted it to look like a big patch of rust. The puddle got a few coats of Chestnut Ink.

Total cost (not counting paint, glue, or peanut butter)... zero.

Also, I’ve tossed up a link in the sidebar there for the featured anthology of the month. They’re not Black Library compilations, just other collections of fun stories from other sources. And, yes, I shamelessly admit I’ve got stories in some of them. This month’s is Cthulhu Unbound 2, which is a bunch of genre-twisting stories involving the Lovecraft mythos. If you’ve got a couple bucks to spare, check it out and maybe get some inspiration for the grim darkness of the future.

Killa Kans

The new Ork Codex (well not so new at this point--let's say the most recent) was a great thing for me. My Ork army, the TekBoyz, were lovers of all hi-tek warstuff, but were kind of hampered by the need to keep a warboss in the army. Anyway, right around the time I started this little ongoing art project of a blog, Games Workshop started dropping hints of some first-of-the-year releases to follow up on that codex. Among them, of course, were the new plastic Deff Dread and the Killa Kan squadron.

On most days I'd be singing praises of a plastic set, and the new Kans are gorgeous, no question about it. As it happens, though, I'd already been playing with a Kan template created two years ago by a gent named Adam Souza. It's a great one-sheet template (part of the big file over at the Golden Bolter Society) and it'll let you build a very nice Killa Kan in about an hour. Three cereal boxes will give you six Kans over the course of a weekend. And the price can't be beat.

So start by printing out said sheet. Use a glue stick to fix it to the back of a cereal box or some such piece of card. An old credit card will let you glue it down nice and smooth. In my experiments so far, I’ve found it’s easy to do two at the same time (using the front and back of the same box).

This is Important-- There aren’t any tabs on any of these components, so take a moment before you start cutting and sketch in some rough ones you’ll be able to use. Look carefully and try to picture how these components fold. Some of these components are pretty small and you don’t want overlapping or unnecessary tabs. Watch the little section on the back of the torso, too--you’ll need to make a reverse-score (on the opposite side of the sheet) for a tab to be useful there.

This template’s very easy. You can build all the components-- the main body, arm sections, legs, etc--and then assemble them bit by bit. I started at the bottom and worked up, but because of this design you can do it in any order you like.

Helpful Hint--I made the bottom layer of the feet double-thick. Trace them again on the card and it’s fine. This gives the toes a little more heft, considering they're supposed to be steel claws supporting this little monstrosity. You can also add on a few small rods or card strips to look like pistons or hinges.

The model gives you diagrams so you can build the legs with blocks the whole way (thighs, hips, ankles, shins). I went with a suggestion Souza makes in the notes and decided to use tubing instead. It’s an old Bic pen (10 for a dollar most places) that had dried out. One pen gave me legs for two Kans. If you happen to have a chisel-blade X-Acto it works great. A regular one works too, it just takes a bit longer. I glue the tubes to the feet first. Then once those are dry their glued to the thigh blocks (so I can make sure the thighs are square to one another). I wanted to use some wire from an old set of iPod headphones to make some power cables or hydraulic tubes or... heck, it’s Ork technology. Who knows what they’d be. It’d just look good. That’ll probably be on the next set.

The torso is a single piece with a bit or detail on it. I suggest gluing it shut on the bottom first and perhaps piling a bit in there for weight. I have a little tin where I save all the metal flash from models. It’s great for counterbalancing models. Drop a few pieces of that, a dozen BBs, or whatever similar thing into the torso. Then just drip some glue over it to keep it stable. White glue’s probably best as some superglues are thin enough to run out any gaps in the kan’s bottom.

Helpful Hint-- Again, Orkiness pays off. If you want different details on the kan, go for it. It’s hard for them to look wrong. A lot of these have the control panel from the template, but I freehanded a skull on one and made a very simple “jaw” on another. I also stacked 1/8” and 1/16” pieces over the eye-slit of one to make a “targeter” of sorts. Whether or not the grot inside will ever use it, well...

The three arm sections have a bit of leeway. You can make the center one a bit shorter and it’ll give you a slightly different look. Make sure that the “bicep” of the arm (the lowest section on the template) gets a good-sized tab on the end. That square is going to take the weight of the whole arm, so you want it solid.

When you assemble the arm, take a moment to pose it right. If it’s out too far you’re either going to need a base or the whole model will tip over. You also don’t want it in one of those positions that just looks weird for some reason. Once it’s together I use some pieces from the 1/8” hole punch to give the joints a bit more detail.

The close-combat claw is really nice. This is probably the most time-consuming part of the whole model. It’s a bit of work to cut out the little teeth and the multiple layers, but well worth it. You can also cut straight lines and make it look more like a set of giant shears, which I did with one of them. If you’ve got one of the Boyz chainsaw-choppas kicking around, it would probably glue in there real nice, too.

Helpful Hint--Even five layers thick, the claw doesn't fill the "wrist" space in the arm. So I took out my handy 1/4" hole punch and knocked out a dozen or so card circles. I glued together two sets of four circles each so I had a squat cylinder, than attached them to either side of the claw at the wrist. Voila--a hinge joint. It's detail and it makes the model more solid. I also skipped the shoulder pieces on the template and just did three or four-thick 1/4” circles there, too.

Take your time attaching the arm to the body and hold it until it’s dry. Not kind of dry or mostly dry--make sure there’s no doubt whatsoever this join is holding. Then brace it somehow and leave it overnight to dry more. This one point is probably going to take more stress and abuse than any other part of the model, so you want it as solid as possible.

The template has plans for a big shoota, and they’re probably the weakest part of the whole model. Not horrible, but kind of weak. It does make a passable grotzooka, though, especially with a new muzzle and a scrap bin on top. I also ended up scratch-building two kustom mega-blastas using a very old Ork plasma cannon and Marine plasma pistols. The last one’s probably going to get a rack of rokkits scraped together from a variety of sources.

Once you’re all done, add some final details. Souza says this right on his blueprints. Rivets make anything look Orky. I made a pile from the 1/16” hole punch and applied liberally to corners, edges, joints, and so on. In a few places I stacked them on top of 1/8” discs for more depth.

Helpful Hint-- If you ever end up with a gap or a loose join that just won’t stay, slap a patch on it. Just fold a small square or rectangle of card, glue it up, and place it where it needs to be. Then outline it in rivets. It makes the model more solid and it blends right in on an Ork model. If you look close, I did it on a few of the thigh-blocks and some of the arm joints. You could probably do this on a lot of Chaos models, too, without too much worry.

And there you have it. Very solid, very passable Killa Kans for pennies apiece and an hour of your undivided attention (maybe two hours if you’ve got an interesting movie on in the background). I’m probably going to keep a card-mounted template handy so I can keep build more whenever I’ve got spare time and no other projects going.

The Skullhamma, pt. III

So, when we last left the Skullhamma, I'd built a ton of components that needed to be added on. This is how they all connected together.

Running down the left side I placed the sponson, the armor plate, and then two more armor plates custom-made to this side. All four of them fit up into that slot on the hull I mentioned before (where the model's actual side skirts were supposed to connect) and also rest against the wheels. Their all good and solid. The brace on the back of the sponson is from a Basilisk model, if memory serves. Note one of the plates is "broken" to give a good view of that mismatched wheel.

The other side is the same, but different. The replaced wheel is in a different position, so my broken plate is, too. It's probably worth noting, too, that in the GW Skullhamma model the two big shoota sponsons are both on the same side of the tank. Seriously, go look. I like silly Orkiness as much as the rest guy, but I'm not going to openly handicap my super-heavy from the start. What I did instead was mismatch the two sponsons--the port one is half an inch farther forward that the starboard. This actually worked really well with the different armor plates, and it's a nice Orky touch that takes people a few minutes to notice.

It was also about this time that I glued a ram from the old Ork Trukk kit on the front. This was just a random thing I did for more detail, but it turned out to be a lifesaver. If you look at GW's model again, the big skull in the front has two huge tusks that give it a real savage look. I spent hours figuring out how to mount some on my model, because the underside of the hull has a really steep slant. In one of those "right in front of you" moments, I finally realized I could just mount them straight to the ram. They're made from the side-skirts of the actual tank model, cut and trimmed a bit rough with an X-Acto knife, and detailed with a few rivets, of course.

I glued the four smokestacks in the back. I played around with the placement a bit first to get the maximum randomness, if that makes sense. It's also hard to tell in this shot but I used some of that rounded sprue from the T 74 model to create more tubes and hoses in the back. I was actually tempted to build a small boiler and have grots shoveling coal into a furnace, but I think I might save that idea for later.

So, barring a few last minute details, the model was pretty much done at this point. You can see how it measures up with a Land Raider and a Rhino from the Alpha Legion. As I said at the start, it's not quite Baneblade-sized, but big enough that someone would have to be a bit of a jerk to challenge using it as a super-heavy. Fortunately my friends and I don't invite any jerks to our Apocalypse games.

There were still a few last details. A big skull and crossbones banner from the old metal Nobs box set went up on the back of the turret. The poles are more whittled-down sprue. A few random handles here and there for transport purposes, and some spikes from an old plastic Rhino. I also took a leftover piece from those side skirts, heated it over a burner--

(Helpful Hint - kids, always get Mom or Dad's permission before melting plastic on the stove)

--and that let me bend it over the muzzle as another armor plate. And a few more rivets. I decided to put them on the big skull, too.

An old metal Predator hatch fit really well in one of those turret-sockets, so I didn't even glue it in place. Plus somewhere down the line I'd love to replace it with a Stompa mek-captain, who I think would look very nice on top of the Skullhamma, especially with his cap.

In the other socket I used the spyglass grot from a Zzap Gun set. I dug around and found a large square fantasy base with a diagonal slot. It took a bit of wiggling, but I got the grot up through the socket from the inside. His base fit against the inside of the turret and glued right in place, and I braced it with a cut-down piece of sprue just to make sure it was rock solid. I also tossed on another grot (made from a very old Warhammer Fantasy snotling) with a hammer on the back near the engine, so he looks like he's doing random (and perhaps unnecessary) maintenance.

There you have it. A very passable Skullhamma tank, more than intimidating to Terminators or even a Dreadnaught. I'm probably going to paint it with a lot of red (for speed!!), blue to represent the Deathskull origins of my Orks, the Tekboyz, and a fair amount of bare metal and rust. Expect pictures sometime after I pass my next work deadline.

Now I just need time to play a game with it...