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...