Gorkamorka Morker Mob

After a great deal of coercion, I have begun work on a Morker mob for my friend's Gorkamorka campaign.  It's a bit hard to find the old Gorkamorka Spanner Boyz these days, so I set out to convert my own.  I also always thought that it was a bit odd that the Games Workshop Spanners were generally less armored and less heavily-armed than the other Ork models.  They even used to paint them a lighter color of green, which always made them seem a bit more like newly hatched Yoofs than aspiring Meks.

In any case, my main goal was to recreate the two old Spanner Boyz, one with a welding torch and one with a bag of tools, using mostly bits from plastic Orks.

I decided to build the welding torch out of a bit of plastic tube and some copper wire.  The business end of the torch is the hilt of a Sicarian Ruststalker sword.  The wrench is from a charm bracelet.

While I like the Ork plastics, I found the choice of dozens of different snarling faces a little bit underwhelming for making a Gorkamorka mob.  I really like Paul Bonner's artwork and the amount of character that he is able to give to his Orks.   To that end, I decided (for better or for worse) that I was going to sculpt smiles onto all of my mobsters.  I also decided that I'd give this guy goggles to match his buddy.  As I recall, I made them by slicing up a couple different sizes of spears.

 I had to fiddle with the goggles quite a bit to get them to fit him right.  The end result is that the two lenses are slightly askew, which actually ended up looking kind of cool once I painted it.  He ended up looking particularly deranged.

As much as I liked the charm bracelet wrench, I wanted to keep all my Spanners looking unique, so I decided to scratch-build a pipe wrench for the next one.  I started with a choppa from the Savage Ork sprue (I think), cut down the blade and added some other bits and some plasticard.  The teeth on the wrench are the bottoms of two shoota magazines and the threads for adjusting it came from an Imperial Guard vox caster.  The rest of the vox caster got turned into a makeshift radio that the Spanner carries around in his pack.  His face took a lot less sculpting (though his arms took a fair amount of work to reposition) than the other Spanner.  I added some little balls of green stuff to make the lenses of his goggles convex so that I could paint them up like the other one as well as the obligatory smile.

This spanner ended up with a rather eclectic assortment of gizmos in his pack, including the aforementioned radio, a spare wrench, a hammer (another purchase from the charm bracelet store), and some assorted munitions.

All things considered, not a bad start for my Morker mob.  Next on the agenda is converting up a Nob to lead them in their quest for scrap and glory.