Castellax

Just returned from a one week work trip and to wind down I finish of the Castellax that I have been working on. Now my mechanicum forces has three (four) robots. I am still struggling to get enough time to work on the knights so they are currently a on ice. I have some Desert Eagles and a Pre heresy Dark Angel built and ready for primer... so I think I will stick to the smaller models until things clear up a bit.

Pre heresy Dark Angel base swap

Recently me and the mrs played our first wh40k battle in many years, pitching my pre-heresy Dark Angels against her sisters (with some post heresy DA stand ins). One thing I suffered in this battle was the curse of wobbly bases. My assault squad with jump-packs kept falling over all the time as the resin jump-packs make them top heavy and un-centred. As the betrayal at calth, and I suppose all new marines are on 32mm bases I decided to change the bases and also take the opportunity to try out some more shoulder patterns. removing the old bases without damaging the models turned out to be a pain as I used polystyrene cement when i glued them in in the first place. Well some careful cutting with a scalpel solved that. I am not sure if I should make the same patterns on all shoulders within a squad or if I should give each marine his own heraldry. I think the individuality might be hard to keep up over some 50+ figures but it makes it more interesting to paint, and it also goes more with their back-story of the knightly orders.


Well we will see...    next up is some more mechanicum things. I am almost done with my second castelax so I hope to have some pics of it soon.

Dark Angels; Pre-heresy, Legion, Fallen etc...

Well, I have not done much with the knights lately as work and other things has taken much of my time. Instead I went back to some of my fallen/pre-heresy Dark angels and had a look at the colour scheme. I have already painted most of the Dark Vengeance box as pre-heresy or fallen dark angels, they are however snap fits and the wrong armour but I have also started to paint some knights with sword and shield and now that I have the betrayal at Calth box with mark IV armour I thought that I might actually do some real legion/30k variants. I test painted one tactical marine ha few week ago and added some black and white checkers, red stripes etc to give them something that set them apart from any other black armoured legion. However, as time passed I thought that it more and more started to look like a Goff space marine with the checkers and so. As I am quite pleased with the Dark Angels knights I thought I would change the tactical marine to fit the scheme, which included some bone white fields with red detail. I also went back to one of the assault marines and added the same touches of bone white and red to tie them into a common and distinct theme. I think it works and it also ties in to the medieval knights theme of the legion.

I also managed to paint the last of the cultists from the Dark vengeance box so now I only have the characters left from that box, so I can start on the Calth box.

That is all for now, I will probably have a short break on the trio of Knights to gather some momentum to finish the belt feeds, which I by the way managed to bend into a somewhat better shape, allowing the torso the motion I needed for the pose. I will get back on this as soon as I have finished of the last details on these.

Belt-feed and Warmonger update

Since last time I have not really made that much progress with the Warmonger and it belt-feed Gatling. Mostly it has been about trying to make the belts fit on to the model. It turned out that it was not so easy running the belts from the back mounted ammo boxes to the gun as I thought, so I had to heat them and try to get them into position. Once I got them to go from the boxes to the gun I mounted the top body to the legs. I am not really happy with how the belt run and how they interfere with the legs, so I might need to heat them again and see if it is possible to get some more clearance so that I can turn the upper body a bit. Once I get the pose that I want it is time to add the inside plates to the belts and finish up the connectors at the gun and ammo boxes.

WIP: Belt-feeds update

Since the last post I have tried to bulk out the belt-feeds abit. I did this by adding three layers of 0.5 mm thick by 4 mm wide strips of plasticard to the inner edges of the guide totalling a 1.5 mm thickness. This left a trench in the middle of the belt with the same depth as the diameter of the shells fired by the gun. I filled the trench with green stuff and sculpted some cartridges into it. After that I added another strip of plasticard to give the impression of the cartridges being inside the belt. I will at some 5 mm x 5 mm plates to the strips, matching he outer segmented stuff. But first I need to finish the second belt in the same style. I am not looking forward to the plates as there will twice as many of these as there where segments and they all need to have rounded edges.

To make sure the belts work together I attached the back ends to an old brush and the front ends to each other imitating the belts going from the ammo boxes to either side of the gun. Hopefully they will clear the legs of the knight and not put to much strain on the gun and the ammo boxes.

WIP: Linkless belt-feeds for imperial knight

If I ever suggest that a linkless belt-feed looks cool on a model and that I need to build one, stop me! However, for the "Gattling" carrying knight I already decided that it would be nice to have some linkless belt-feeds from the gun to ammo crates on the back. FW has this for the Castigator so I thought it would be ok. But how do you make these from scratch? One could just try to make something out of GS or use some thicker board that you could bend into shape. However, these things will be a large part of the model and has to look like they belong and have enough detail to not look out of place. So after some initial trial and error I came up with the idea of using a bi-layered plasti-card template to define the form and then cover these in segmented plates and fill the interior some how. So far I have only managed to do the template and the outer segments, since this step takes a ridiculous amount of time. The segments are first draw on a piece of plasticard, then each one is cut out and filed to smooth the edges. Each band is about 25 cm and the segments are 0.5 cm so there are about a 80 segments in total on the two belts.
When I did the templates I needed something to hold them while they set into shape. I used a piece of wood and measure approximately where to put them in relation to the legs, the gun and ammo crates as they would be on the knight. They are still a bit flexible so I should be able to makes some small adjustments one they are to be fitted to the real knight.
Now I just need to figure out what to do on the insides to make them thicker. I also would like to show two rows of cartridges to match the ammo boxes on the gun.
Well it is not much to show, but they take time to make.

Pre Heresy / Fallen Dark Angels

Me as so many others bought the Betrayal at Calth game for the Mk IV armours and a starter for a 30k force. I have always liked the Dark Angels since the first Angels of Death codex and since I already have a substantial Pre Heresy / fallen Dark Angels force I decided to do a quick paint test on one of the Mk IV armours to see what it would look like. I added some blue white checkers to the paint scheme but otherwise I kept it in-line with what I already have. I put it in a line up with the other armour types already in the force (it is in the middle). I think it can work, just need to sit down with the bases.