Monday, October 8, 2018

Gubbinz: Reinforced Ram

A converterted reinforced ram for Gorkamorka

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...

The broken axle from my trakk

...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.

An Ork Halftrakk with a missing front axle

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.

A rebuilt axle assembly for my Gorkamorka trakk

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.

The wheels were crooked when attached to the new axle.

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.

The Dozer blade for the ram attached to the new axle assembly.

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

Adding plasticard to the chassis to make it even

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.

Attaching the new front axle to the trakk with plasticard and green stuff.

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.

Gorkamorka Big Trakk with Dozer Blade 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.

A WIP shot of a converted reinforced ram

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.

A WIP shot of a Reinforced Ram for Gorkamorka

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.

Painting white over black takes forever

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

The reinforced ram with its clean paint job, before applying weathering

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.

Reinforced Ram, painted and weathered

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.

Gorkamorka Morker Mob riding in a converted big trakk loaded with gubbinz

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.

Friday, October 5, 2018

Gubbinz: Armour Plates

A Gorkamorka Big Trakk with scratchbuilt armor 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.

WIP shot of scratchbuilt armor plates on a Gorkamorka big trakk

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.

The underside of the hood of the big trakk, showing the magnets and tubes used to hold it on

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.

Scratchbuilt Armor Plates for Gorkamorka

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.

A converted Ork Halftrakk for Gorkamorka

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.

A converted Ork Halftrakk for Gorkamorka

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...

Monday, October 1, 2018

Gubbinz: Spikes

Converted Spiky Gubbinz on a Gorkamorka Big Trakk

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.

Plastic skewers cut up to make spiky gubbinz

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.
Magnets encased in plasticard sheaths
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.

WIP shot of scratchbuilt spiky gubbinz on a Gorkamorka big trakk

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.