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.

Even More Gubbinz

The last month or two has been kind of crazy for me, and while I haven't managed to get much posted, I have managed to get a bit done here and there.  First and foremost, I finally managed to get all the gubbinz for my big trakk finished.

It's kind of hard to tell from the pictures, but my trakk is currently fitted with a reinforced ram, armor plates, a big grabba, shoutas, spikes (extra spiky), boarding planks, boosta rokkits, and a mine layer.  While there are still a few other gubbinz like a turning hook that I don't have modeled, these are all the ones that I have any current plans for using on this vehicle (though I also have a wrecka ball that I can swap out for my grabba if I feel particularly smashy).

As you can see, I constructed this batch of gubbinz from a fairly eclectic mix of parts and materials.  Each one could probably merit having its own post, so I won't try to get to all of them right now.  Plus, I still have to recap the end of the campaign (though sadly, most of the gubbinz were only half-painted at the time).

Hopefully the first campaign post will be up soon!

More Gubbinz

I probably should have stayed focused on getting the rest of my grots painted up in time for the campaign, but as is oft the case, I got distracted by another shiny idea and ended up spending a few days making gubbinz instead.  In addition to my lovely spikes and shoutas, Deezo now has a set of boarding planks and a big grabba.

The boarding planks were my first adventure into the realm of magnetization.  I had originally intended building magnetized gubbinz when I was first assembling my trakk, but unfortunately I wasn't even able to get a weapon, let alone a full set of gubbinz completed in time for the start of our first campaign.  I've still got a long way to go (plus two other vehicles that could use some love), but my trakk is growing into quite the monster.

Oh, I also gave myself the option to swap out the big grabba for a wrecka ball, just in case...

Anyway, since this was all being done after the whole trakk was assembled and painted, I had to go about it a bit differently than I had envisioned in the beginning.  Since the planks were detachable, I didn't trust the normal hinges, which weren't very deep.  I ended up putting a pin in each side, which didn't quite line up with the center of the hinge.  There was a lot of friction and sheering stress when you rotated it at first, but it seemed to eventually bend or warp itself into shape so that both planks rotate quite freely now.

There wasn't enough room between the truck bed and the tracks to slide the planks in between them (to say nothing of installing magnets), so I made some small platforms to extend the bed out over the tracks.  I wanted them to be as sturdy as possible, so I also gave each platform two long planks with some pins that would be glued to the bed.  Even with just a dry fitting, it held the platforms on pretty tight, so I'm pretty sure that they're not going anywhere.

Next up was the big grabba.  I was quite fond of Cygnus' use of the Battlewagon grabba on his big trakk, but I didn't want to just copy him outright.  I decided to base my grabba off a big mek power klaw, which had a nice robotic look to it, but was much too small to grab an ork.  The obvious solution to this problem was to bulk it up with a ton of plasticard and sprue.

While I'm pretty pleased with the end result, it was far from a smooth conversion.  Due to poor planning and a few holes that I drilled less than straight, this claw is pinned in somewhere between seven and nine different places.  There are five pins in the "wrist" portion alone.

Fortuately, the arm portion was much more straightforward.  Most of it is made from a Killa Kan arm, with a bit of shoota added on to give it some length.  The arm, shoota, and claw were all connected by a single long pin that ran down the middle of all three, so at least I know I don't screw these things up all the time.

Considering how long the big grabba is and how far forward its center of gravity is, I didn't trust the thin copper wire that I used to make the interchangeable weapon for my slaver, so I got some thin brass pipe to connect both my grabba and the wrecka ball to the vehicle.  The tube it slides into was build onto one of the boarding plank platforms.  The wrecka ball didn't have many changes made to it, other than adding a lot more spiky bits to the ball itself.

The finished gubbinz looked pretty good attached to the trakk.  The platforms for the boarding plank now make my trakk super wide (which can be a big deal in Gorkamorka), but not any wider than it is with all of its spikes attached, so I can live with it.

The big grabba looks surprisingly good painted up, considering what a hodgepodge of sprue and plasticard it actually is.  The mechanical bits that I used to cover up the huge chunks of sprue that made the wrist are a pair of vox casters that I happened to have lying around.  I thought I'd try my hand again at hazard stripes, and I'm fairly pleased by the results.  Ties it in nicely to Grizwoad's choppa.

 I also made a little control panel to control the hydraulics.

The wrecka ball also turned out quite nice, though it probably won't get a ton of play because of how much fun big grabbas are.  Maybe I need to add a mount to the back of my little flamecar...

So if my big trakk wasn't over-the-top enough before, it's certainly a lot more ridiculous now.  Proper Orky.  Although now that I'm to this point, I can't help thinking that it could really use a reinforced ram...maybe a mine layer too...

Sadly, finishing up the gubbinz took up the whole week before the start of the new campaign, so only half of my runts got painted in time to play.  I've also gotten terribly behind in my blogging, so I need to get caught up on all the events of our mini-campaign.  Until next time...

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.

Bodged Job

Work has commenced on a new vehicle for my Morkers.  It's another Trakk based off the standard Ork Wartrakk, but this one will be much more heavily converted than my last one.  I'm basically tearing it apart (I bought it fully assembled on eBay) and then putting it back together with plasticard and green stuff.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of starting with nothing more than a single sheet of plasticard as the main structural element, which ended up breaking on three different occasions.

After finally admitting the error of my ways, I decided to reinforce my flimsy joints with a few good, solid chunks of sprue.  I also cut off the three little boxes on the top of the tracks in preparation for another sheet of plasticard, which ended up being a much more difficult task than I had anticipated (I broke two hobby knives trying to remove them carefully).

Finally, I added a crossbeam to connect the two halves, as well as a bunch more structural supports that will hold the top and bottom together and help to spread out the weight a bit.

Hopefully this will result in a fairly sturdy vehicle once I add the platform for the gunner.  After that, I just need the driver's seat and some finishing touches and this one should be ready for a test drive.