Gorkamorka Firecar

After months of planning, slow progress, and more than a few missteps, my second trakk is finally finished.  As you can probably see, this trakk is armed with a skorcha, which has been outfitted with some gubbinz to have Loadsa Ammo (my mob doesn't do anything halfway). 

Since I already had one trakk that was only slightly modified from the standard Ork Wartrakk, I wanted this one to be unique, while still being easily identifiable as a trakk.  The plan was to change the front to have two wheels instead of one, giving it a cab more like a buggy.  I wanted it to be wider and boxier, like the Warbuggy, but I didn't want to make it any longer than the standard Wartrakk or it would basically just be a second big trakk.  Also, since I had decided that I wanted to add a skorcha to the mob, I decided to base the design on one of my favorite cars from Mad Max: Fury Road, Firecar No. 3.

Obviously there wouldn't be any Volkswagens to modify on Gorkamorka, but I liked the idea of the car being a fairly sparse frame around a bunch of oil drums and a supercharged engine.

Although I've had most of the parts for this trakk sitting around since last fall, the hardest part was figuring out how to attach the barrels.  After tearing apart a wartrakk I bought on eBay, I didn't really have much of a frame to attach them to.  In the end, I ended up building a sort of scaffolding around the upright barrels and then pinning the angled barrels directly to the other two.

The downside of using all four barrels in a bunch, as opposed to cutting them in half and gluing them to flat surfaces, is that they took up much more space than I had originally planned for.  I didn't want to stretch the trakk any longer, so I ended up just pushing it up higher (and a little bit wider).  I also ended up scrapping the engine block, which was a shame, but it probably would have ended up stretching the length to almost as long as my big trakk.

Once I finally had everything mostly assembled, I had two main sub-assemblies, the front and the back, as well as a number of smaller bits to glue together after painting.

The two I-beams on the cab fit snugly around the two front barrels and extended most of the way through the interior of the rear section, making the finished vehicle fairly solid once it was glued together.  I'm sure I carefully measured the width of the cab at some point during its construction, but since the project was stretched out over the course of months, I was actually quite surprised at how perfectly it all fit together when the two halves were finally completed.

The other tricky bit for this vehicle was modeling the skorcha.  I had originally planned on building something sufficiently orky out of a pair of Imperial Guard flamers stuck together.  They ended up looking a bit small for a mounted weapon, so I ended up going with the flamer from the Sentinel kit and attaching it to the Wartrakk's shoota along with some other bits from the Guardsmen flamers.

Although the wartrakk parts came from the same assembled kit that I'd bought off eBay, I had already ripped and chopped the entire thing apart, including the weapon mount.  When I reassembled everything, I left both the mount and the shootas unglued, which means that the skorcha is essentially gimbal-mounted on the model, allowing it to tilt up and down and rotate, which is kind of fun.  It also means that I could easily swap it out for another weapon if I really wanted to.

I'm quite pleased with the finished model.  It was a bit taller and wider than I had originally intended, but I managed to keep its length within about five millimeters of the standard wartrakk, which isn't bad for the amount of scratch-building I ended up doing.

The skorcha turned out especially well.  When I zoomed in this much, I noticed that the muzzle burn on the end of the gun ends rather abruptly, but it still doesn't look half bad.  Finally Toast, our intrepid spanner and resident pyromaniac, has something appropriately burny to take into battle.

The only thing that was really disappointing about the paint job was the timing.  Unfortunately, it was only basecoated by the time of the last big battle of the campaign, which was the first time I couldn't boast of having a fully painted mob, but I'll get to that in another post.