Gubbinz: Reinforced Ram

The first gubbinz that I started working on after our mini-campaign were also the last ones that I managed to finish.  My reinforced ram, though fairly simple conceptually, ended up being much more difficult to pull off that I had expected.  The idea was simple enough.  I was going to start from a Chimera dozer blade and bulk it out with Orky bits until it looked less functional as a plow and more like something that was just used to smash into things.  I was envisioning something like the Battlewagon ram, but a bit more boxy.  Simple, right?

The first few steps went very smoothly.  I glued the dozer blade to the trunnion and then carefully cut across the push frame where it would meet the undercarriage of the trakk.  I then drilled out both sides and inserted some sturdy brass rod into the blade side.  Since this would be sticking out in front of the trakk and could be relatively large compared to some of my other gubbinz, I wanted to make sure that it didn't snap off if it got caught on a piece of terrain or something.  To make it secure, however, I couldn't just have a strong connection between the blade and the frame, I also had to have a strong bond between the push frame and the undercarriage of the trakk.  While there are lots of bits under there that I could have potentially glued the ram to, there were no flat surfaces where I could get a good bond.  Just lots of bolts and rods, all at different depths.  I decided that the best move would be to gently clip away a bit of the detail to make some flat, level places where I could attach the ram...

...I didn't do such a great job.  I ended up accidentally breaking the front axle of my trakk.  Then, while trying to clean up that mess, I ended up breaking some other bits off the undercarriage.

By the time I got all the broken bits removed and everything smoothed off, the entire front of the trakk was gone up to the chassis.  While this was pretty frustrating, it meant that I could make the new undercarriage solid.

The new axle assembly was built with two big plasticard I-beams on the bottom, which gave me a good surface to glue my ram to, even though they would run perpendicular to each other.

Unfortunately, I was never able to get all the bits of broken axle out of the resin wheels, so I just extended the axle wider and drilled new holes into the wheels to pin them with some brass rod.  Despite my best efforts, I didn't drill the holes in the wheels very straight, so the wheels are now really crooked.  On the other hand, I didn't assemble the rear treads very straight either (I'm really starting to dislike working with resin), so the vehicle has never really been able to sit flat, so I didn't worry too much about it.

Attaching the dozer blade to the new axle assembly went very smoothly.

The hard part would be attaching everything to the chassis.  Even after chopping off all the little greebly bits, it still wasn't a perfectly level surface, so I leveled it off with some plasticard.

I actually drilled out four little holes in each side to try and pin the axle on, but trying to line up four tiny bits of wire proved to be way too difficult, so I just glued all the flat surfaces together and filled all the gaps with green stuff.  I then glued more plasticard to the outside to reinforce the bond.  I also made sure to paint the axle assembly before sticking it to the rest of the trakk, since there was no way I was going to be able to paint all those little crossbeams once they were attached.

So after two months of breaking things and trying to repair them, I had finally managed to get the Chimaera dozer blade attached to my trakk, which meant that it was finally time for the converting of the actual ram to begin.

The first step was bulking the ram up to a size that looked good on the trakk, which took a bit of trial and error, adding on plasticard and then cutting it back down.  The next step was making it look proper orky.

I added a bunch of panels to look the finished ram look more cobbled together, then added some ork glyphs and some big toofy bits.  I used a combination of plasticard and glass beads for the rivets, which was rather time consuming, but managed to tie the scratchbuilt bits to the dozer blade.

For the paint job, I decided that I'd first paint it up all bright, shiny and new, then weather the shit out of it to make it look like it'd been smashing through everything in the desert for months.

This meant painting a million thin coats of white over the black undercoat...

It wasn't the cleanest checkerboard pattern I've ever painted, but it was about to get beat to hell, so I didn't mind.

The finished paint job turned out pretty well.  Lots of washes and thinned down brown paint.  I painted the scratches to look like the ram scraped up a lot of sand and rocks between the teeth of the dozer blade.  I think the finished effect turned out pretty decent.

So after two long years of work, my Morker Mob is finally finished.  There are still a few things I'd like to go back to and fix, such as making the big gunz on all my vehicles interchangeable (and someone got the idea of making a bunch of bikes stuck in my head).  For now though, I'm pretty happy with how Grizwoad and his mob have turned out, so it's time to move on to some other nerd projects.

Gubbinz: Armour Plates

One thing about basing my big trakk off the Forgeworld Halftrakk is that its stripped down design didn't really give me many places to paint in my mob's colors.  I went for sort of an old-school Goff scheme with Grizwoad and Da Chop Squad—black with white checks and a fair amount of red.  Unfortunately, since so much of the model was exposed machinery and engine, the only parts of the trakk where you could really see the paint job was on the door panels on the back of the bed, and those got covered up later with my spiky gubbinz.  When I decided to model some extra armour plates for my trakk, I decided that I wanted to built an entire hood to encase my engine.  That way, I could have a bigger surface to do some Orky paintwork and if it happened to get blown off, you would get to see my spiffy engine bits again.

Since I imagine the extra armour plates as the mob's spanners just bolting any big hunk of metal they can find to the side of the vehicle, I wanted an appropriately eclectic assortment of materials.  The main body of the hood is built from plasticard with bits from disposable razors and other random pieces of plastic that I had lying around.  Instead of plasticard, I decided to try making my bolts out of tiny glass beads.  It's a bit finicky and required drilling a lot of tiny holes, but the finished effect was pretty cool.  I chopped up some of the panels from the standard Ork Trukk to serve represent taking a second and third armour plate and picked up a pair of the exhaust pipes from the Fighta-Bommer to make someplace for my exhaust to go, since the engine on the Halftrakk doesn't connect with the standard trukk exhaust pipe.  I also built a supercharger for my engine out of the safety cap from a razor.  This was mostly just to make it look cool, but I could also use this to represent the Meks making my trakk fasta if I wanted.

As with my spikes, the biggest engineering challenge was how to make it attach to the trakk.  The hood had to go right over the engine, but I didn't want to just drill a big hole in the middle of it or glue a bunch of magnets to the side of it.  However, since the intake pipes on the halftrakk engine are just three fairly uniform tubes that stick straight up, I decided to take a set of slightly smaller tubes to fit inside them, essentially balancing the hood on the top of the engine.  It worked fairly well.  my little tubes connecting the engine to my supercharger fit nicely and kept the hood from sliding, but it was still just sort of balancing on top, so it would rock and sway every time you moved it.  Fortunately, this was right when I was experimenting with my plasticard-covered magnets, which worked amazingly.  The hood now snaps into place with a satisfying click and doesn't budge.  I also added two more magnets to hold on the other two armour plates when I'm using them.  As you can see from the picture, I also drilled a few bullet holes to make it look like the armour plates had already seen some action.

I like how the finished hood turned out.  Painting the checks was fun, as was trying to give the whole thing a bit of weathering.  I probably could have done a bit more paint chipping, since this is the front of the trakk where all the dust and rocks are going to hit, but I was trying really hard not to go overboard.  I decided to leave the supercharger looking shiny and polished, as if it were the one part of the vehicle that the spanner took extra care of.

It's interesting how the hood changes the overall silhouette of the trakk.  It definitely makes it look a bit boxier, and even a bit front-heavy without all the other gubbinz attached.  I also think that the panels in the front balance the colors out a bit, so all the detail isn't at the very back of the vehicle.

While I was at it, I also went back and touched up the paint job on the rest of the trakk, most noticeably painting the cables on the engine red instead of black, again, to break up the oily gunmetal that makes up most of the vehicle.  You might also have noticed that the front of the trakk has been lifted.  This is because of the last and most time consuming of my gubbinz for this campaign...

Gubbinz: Spikes

Like my shoutas, my spiky gubbinz were originally built toward the beginning of our first campaign.  Although they turned out quite well, there were always a few things I didn't like about them.  Most of it had to do with working with bamboo skewers.  Super glue wouldn't hold them to the plasticard, so I ended up using hot glue, which was a pain to do neatly.  The spikes themselves were also a bit rounded and smooth for Ork engineering.  I envisioned them more as hunks of wothless scrap pounded into jagged shards, rather than uniformly milled metal cones.

Fortunately, I was able to find some plastic cocktail skewers that I was able to cut into various lengths and widths, making for more of the feel I was going for.  I actually had to sand some of the edges down because they would occasionally break off sharp enough to actually cut you.  Most importantly, they could be glued on with plastic cement, which meant that I didn't have to mess with hot glue and I wouldn't have to worry about them falling off in the middle of games anymore.

The other major change I wanted to make to my spikes was to magnetize them.  At this point, most of my gubbinz had been magnetized and my spikes were one of the few bitz still rattling around loose.  Due to their placement, however, installing magnets was kind of tricky.  Whereas the magnets in my boarding planks and boosta rokkits were drilled straight into thick layers of plasticard, there were no places I could do the same on the trakk, especially around the cab.  Without contact all the way around the magnet, the prospect of gluing neodymium magnets to plastic becomes pretty dicey.  Cyanoacrylate glue has pretty low shearing strength and it also doesn't bond well to smooth surfaces.  Neodymium magnets also come together with a lot of force, so magnets snapping together can easily shatter brittle connections.

My solution to the problem was to slice up plasticard tube and encase the magnets in a plastic sheath.  This allowed me to then use plastic cement to glue the little magnetic tubes to other plastic components.  I also put caps on one or both ends which could be used to glue them onto a parallel surface, or to put a buffer between two magnets so as to reduce the impact of them sticking together.  Plasticard gave me the added bonus of a surface that I could write on to mark the polarity of the magnets so I didn't accidentally mount one backwards.  I initially only made enough for my spikes, but I ended up doing the same for the magnets in most of my other gubbinz.  By the time I finished building everything, I'd probably made at least two dozen of these things and I still have a few extras lying around for the next project.

The large spike panels in the back I was able to attach simply by making a backplate that connected through the windows in the trakk's armor.  The front panels were more complicated, as there wasn't enough room for a backplate, nor was there a big enough hole for the magnets to pass through.  I ended up gluing the magnets directly to the chassis and then covering them with green stuff, both to hold them more securely and to make them stand out less.

Overall, I think the new spikes are a significant improvement over the old ones.  I'll probably find a few other uses for those plastic skewers, as well.

Gubbinz: Mine Layer

The Mine Layer was a last-minute addition to my trakk.  Although a few players had taken one before, no one had really modeled one.  The one shown in the old Gubbinz book was basically just a clamp on the back of the vehicle holding some mines, and most other ones I could find were nothing more than a crate of mines bolted to the rear of the vehicle.  Actual military minelayers aren't much help either, as they just look like a tank with a bunch of tubes sticking in the air.  In the end, I think the closest thing I could find was the caltrop dropper on the back of the Razor Cola in Fury Road, which was sort of a hopper with a big hand crank.  I decided that even though it was operated by the driver, I'd add a big manual release wheel to the unit to make it look a bit more mechanical.

Since placing the hopper on the bed of the trakk wasn't an option with my massive shoutas, it had to fit underneath the bed.  I was using the big krak bomb from the Ork Boyz sprue as my mines, so the hopper could only be the height of a single mine.  A chute coming out the back would hold the next mine ready to be dropped.

The original plan was to have a long tab that went between the bed and the undercarriage to keep it straight and give it some support if it got bumped, then hold it in place with magnets. 

In the end, the tab fit so tightly that the thing didn't budge once it was in place, so I didn't bother with the magnets at all.

You can't really tell once it's on the table, but I also put in a little gear box attached to the manual release and a little hinged bit underneath connected to the actual release mechanism.  The little prongs holding the mines in place are bayonets from the Ork Boyz sprue.

A few additional details and the mine layer is ready for a coat of paint.

I also made a couple of mine counters to use in the game.

The finished gubbinz look pretty good.  Not as big and showy as the shoutas, but still detailed enough as befitting gubbinz that cost ten teef.

Gubbinz: Shoutas

Unlike most of the gubbinz I was working on for this campaign, my shoutas weren't new.  In fact, they were some of the first gubbinz I built.  However, as everyone else was constantly pointing out, they took up half of the space on my largest vehicle, which meant that while Urzig could pack nearly a dozen mobsters onto his trukk, during the first campaign, I only had room for my driver, gunner, and two crew before I had to invest in another vehicle.  Since I wasn't about to make them any smaller, I decided to make them bigger and simply move the crew space on top of the speakers, which meant that my trakk would have the exact same crew capacity with or without the shoutas.  With room for eight Orks, including the driver and gunner, my trakk still has one of the smaller crew capacities, but pretty comparable to a standard Ork trukk.

There were a number of complications I had to deal with when constructing the new shoutas.  First, the addition of side speakers meant that instead of a single contact point in the bed of the truck, I suddenly had three contact points, two of which were simply balancing on the edge of the armor panels.  This was also where my old spikes sat, which meant that not only was this somewhat precarious, it might have a slight variation in height depending on which gubbinz my trakk had equipped.  Thus, trying to model the shoutas to match the exact shape of the trakk while still sitting flat and not tipping (which would be extra important with models potentially perching on top) would have been difficult if not impossible.  It also would have made it pretty hard to use the shoutas for any other purposes in the future.  To deal with all these issues as much as possible, I decided to make the side speakers magnetized so that they could be detached and so that they would have a bit of leeway when it came to alignment.

The side speakers were built out of plasticard, just like the main tower.  Magnetizing them was actually fairly easy, because my original shoutas had a built-in maintenance hatch.  My original design for the shoutas actually had all the electrical components sticking out the back, with cables, coils, and batteries going in every direction.  This proved far too ambitious for the amount of time I had, so I slapped another piece of plasticard over the hole and called it finished.  Popping the hatch back open made fiddling with the inside a fairly simple procedure.

Since I was making my shoutas even bigger and more ridiculous, I decided I wanted to go for even more of a Fury Road feel than the originals had.  This meant trying to get a much bigger diversity in terms of speakers and other noise-making devices.  Since I had recently acquired a bunch of plastic golf tees for making my boosta rokkits, I decided that they would make some good air horns of the variety often seen on top of semi trucks.  The only problem is that the top of the tees didn't really have the right curve to be a horn, so I decided to drill the hole out with a my Dremel.  It took a while to get the curve right, but after a bit of work and a lot of plastic dust, I managed to get something resembling what I wanted.  I had intended to mount them on the top of the stack, but there wasn't enough room to fit them between the loudspeakers I already had, so I mounted them to the side with some small plasticard supports.

I also wanted to add a few horns to the side speakers, so I decided on a pair of tubas and some bullhorns.  The tubas were made from some thick wire and bits of plastic syringe, while the bullhorns were another experiment with using the golf tees.  Neither were particularly easy to work with, but with some patience and a lot of green stuff and glue, I was eventually able to make something that looked fairly decent.

I actually ended up being somewhat dissatisfied with the shape of the tuba bells, so after the campaign, I went back and carved them into a shape that looked more like a tuba that had been dented and repaired multiple times.  It was a bit ridiculous to go back and carve them after they'd been painted, but I like the end result much better, so I suppose it was worth the effort.

I decided that while I was adding new stuff to the shoutas, the main stack could use a bit of a remodel as well, so I sliced up a bunch of plasticard tube to add some speakers of a different size.  I also added some plasticard rod to break them up to look more like a stack of multiple speakers.  It was a fairly easy modification, though filing down each of the rings to have a nice rounded edge was a bit tedious.

I also decided that I didn't want the side speakers to look identical to the ones in the main tower, so I decided to make the upper half look like it was covered in a wire mesh.  Since it was such a tiny piece, I was kind of limited in what I could use, so I ended up going for a chunk of screen door.  The nice thing about the screen is that I could stretch it to have an elongated diamond pattern, rather than just a square.  The downside is that it was really difficult to work with on such a small scale (a recurring theme of this build).  I attached it to some small pieces of plasticard sheet with super glue and wrapped the edges of the mesh around to the back.  Unfortunately, because I was doing everything on a diagonal, after cutting the screen to the shape I wanted, some of the wires in the screen were very short, especially in the corners, so the whole thing started to unravel.  I was able to keep it mostly together with some glue, but I also had to weave some of the wires back together after falling out, which was more trouble than it was worth.  I think this sort of thing would work better if I just left a bit more of the screen to wrap around to the back.

The finished shoutas were a fairly eclectic assortment of different pieces, and while they didn't actually increase the overall size of the trakk when compared with the previous shoutas (at least not if I've already got the spikes on), they make the vehicle feel massive.

I also managed to acquire the big battery from the Mek Gun kit, which came pretty darn close to my original design for the back of the shoutas, and it just barely fit through all the bits at the rear of the trakk.

Also, since I had that big blank area on the back of the shoutas, I decided to give them one final touch to personalize them for Grizwoad and his mob.

I opted to carve out the glyph from plasticard, rather than just paint it on freehand.  I like the way it turned out, though even with my poor freehand skills, I'm not convinced that doing it this way was any easier.

So now my shoutas are crazier than ever and my big trakk looks even more like the Doof Wagon than it did before.  Maybe sometime I'll actually get to use it in a scenario that has the "Revvin' and Shoutin'" rules...

Gubbinz: Boosta Rokkit

Since I built way more gubbinz for my big trakk during this campaign than I was able to talk about in my last post, I thought I'd write a series of follow-ups on them, as I'm generally pretty pleased with how they turned out.  First up, my custom boosta rokkits.

Cygnus set the bar pretty high for gubbinz during our first campaign, making some nice gubbinz for Marvolork's Skwagmobile out for bits from various Ork kits.  He made some nice boosta rokkits out of a pair of the larger bombs from the Fighta-Bommer, which looked like some good solid rocket boosters, which seems like the sort of thing orks would strap to a trukk.  I decided to go in a slightly different direction, drawing more from liquid-fueled rocket engines and jet engines for the overall design.

I used the turbine bit from one of the Ork Stormboyz to make an air intake, but I needed something for the exhaust nozzle.  I ultimately ended up settling on some plastic golf tees, which weren't the easiest thing to work with, but had a nice shape.  Plasticard tubing provided the structure to connect all the bits together.

All the pipes, tubes, and cables were made from various sizes of wire that I bent into shape and super glued on.  I also chopped up some little pellets from an air gun to make some pressure chambers of some kind.  I designed the boosta rokkits to work with the magnetic mounts I'd already built for my boarding planks so that they could be attached by themselves or in combination with the planks.

As you can see, I decided not to keep their design perfectly symmetrical.  They both have the little brass pressure chambers on the inward facing side, however, I added different bits on the outward side.  One got the tanks from the Trukk kit, while the other got a small rocket that I think I got from the Flash Gitz sprue.  I like how the paint job turned out, with lots of grimy looking engine parts with a few bright reds and yellow hazard stripes to keep all the detail from blurring together.  I didn't actually end up using them in the campaign, since boostas have been responsible for far more catastrophic explosions than for actual victories, but I'm looking forward to getting them on the table at some point.  I might even have to build some mounts on my other vehicles so I can use them more often.