Oldhammer Ork Battlewagon Conversion (Or Something Like That)

Brace yourself, as this is going to be a long post!

A few years back, I went to a model show in Milton Keynes. At a table I found someone selling one of the most recent ork battlewagons for £10. It's not a miniature I've ever liked especially, and this particular model was absolutely wrecked, even by space ork standards: some parts were broken, others were missing, and a lot of the detail had been gunked up with plastic cement. However, these things retail for new at the outrageous price of £70, and this sorry example could be chopped up and used for other things. So I bought it.

And it stayed on a shelf for several years. Eventually, as part of my retro ork unit, I thought it would be nice to give the orks some kind of vehicle in which to commit their acts of cartoony piracy.

The original ork battlewagon dates back to 1990 and sells on ebay for about £200 - not money I'm willing to pay. I stumbled upon a guy selling a resin version, which was a slightly basic, rather chunky copy. I bought it off him, and decided to use some of the resin bits and some of the ruined plastic kit to make something a bit like the original 1990s battlewagon.

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In order to get some ideas, and to get a better sense of the proportions of the old battlewagon, I bought several copies of White Dwarf that date back to 1990 or so: issues 128, 135 and 136. 

 I'm not going to go into much detail on this, and other people have done much better reviews of old White Dwarfs, but they really are extremely different to the current version. In fact, they're very different to White Dwarfs from twenty years ago. The early 90s WD is full of good stuff in a way that more recent versions aren't: there is virtually no filler at all.

For one thing, they don't just preview the upcoming ork army books: they give away big chunks of rules and points for different sorts of new unit. Issue 128 gives you templates, rules and instructions to convert your plastic battlewagon into a gun-wagon (you use a biro for the barrel). If that's not enough, issue 136 shows you how to make an ork tank from scratch, using absolutely no GW products whatsoever. And you get rules for it. 

Interestingly, some of the painting and converting is excellent, and some of it is very basic. White Dwarf seems to have been happy to field models painted in flat colours, without shading or highlighting, and is refreshingly honest about the need to do so when a game is coming up.

They really are magazines by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, without any of the waffle and hard sell of the later editions. No wonder I got into this hobby, and no wonder that I don't buy White Dwarf anymore. 

Anyhow, back to the tank. 

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The old battlewagon is an odd model, clearly as much an influence on the modern ork trukk as the recent battlewagon kit. It is a cross between an armoured car, a dragster and a pickup truck, with three main parts: the boxy cockpit, the open area in the middle where the ork passengers go, and the engine at the rear. The wheels are massive and armoured, with little ground clearance. It doesn't have any mounted weapons: gunfire is provided by the mob of excitable passengers firing their weapons out of the back.

To make this vehicle, I used the big resin wheels from the ebay kit, along with the cab and the back part (the cargo area) of the plastic GW model. After a lot of thought, I decided to put the big wheels beside the cargo area and not behind it, as is the case in the original 1990s model. That would just make the battlewagon look weirdly long. Attaching the wheels was tricky and required pinning. I made spacers from those little plastic discs that plastic Mantic soldiers come on.

However, the battlewagon did need an engine, which had to be mounted at the rear. I found a set of Mantic terrain that I'd never assembled, which contained a cylindrical boiler thing. I added a load of additional parts to this, including an ork control panel, a gun from the Adeptus Mechanicus (now an exhaust) and a weird motor thing that came off a model tank.

Here's the boiler in place at the back of the battlewagon. You can see the huge resin wheels!

Of the two turrets, one was a complete mess, having been hacked off at a strange angle. I rebuilt it with clay and green stuff (only partially successfully) and put part of a Tau drone on top. It fitted very well. The other turret got a round piece of plastic, origin unknown, to act as a lid.

As the world of miniature painting seems to be getting more and more sepia and mud-coloured, I decided to paint this thing bright yellow. That meant undercoating it in pink and building up from there. I was worried that the combination of the yellow of the Bad Moons and the check patterns favoured by the orks would make it look like a taxi, but it seems that the old versions just didn't care about this, so I went ahead and used both.

If anyone's interested, I painted the metal in six stages: black undercoat; dark brown; drybrush of dark grey mixed 50:50 with boltgun metal; boltgun metal drybrush; and silver drybrush. Some areas were then washed with strong tone to make it look grubby. Someone once pointed out that ork vehicles would be greasy rather than rusty, as they're frequently used, so I followed that idea and didn't add any rust.

I painted a moon with sunglasses on top of one of the hatches, which I copied from a photo of a banner in one of the old White Dwarfs (Dwarves?). I also added some Jerrycans from an old tank kit, which were painted red for a bit of variety.

And here is the finished machine! I really like this thing. I feel that I ought to add more detailing, but to be honest I think less might be more here. It's not a perfect copy of the old miniature, but I think it captures much the same look, as if the old model evolved for the present.

Neeeeow!

Fun With Space Orks!

 After last week's somewhat introspective post - thanks for your comments, guys - I decided to make some models that are both jolly and entirely lacking in self-awareness: old space orks.

I found an ancient tinboy model. Tinboys were robots that the orks built in mockery of their enemies: there were space marine, eldar and squat versions. This is the eldar one, which is why it's got a head shaped like a banana. Given that my warband has a vaguely Bad Moon feel, it had to have a yellow head. The blue on the body is like that of my craftworld. One of the arms fell off and had to be repositioned, but is still not very sturdy. I really enjoyed painting this!

Then we've got two plastic orks from the old set. They're not the best miniatures, to be honest. The weird crouching posture of the orks is very strong in these guys, and the ridged armour they wear (some kind of flak jackets?) isn't much good for detail or freehanding. 

However, to my surprise, the detail on the shouting ork head from the plastic set is excellent, especially for its time, and was a pleasure to paint. The ork carrying the rusty chest (a piece of loot) on his shoulders is a sort of conversion. His left hand, which is steadying the chest, had very little detail at all and looked like an over mitt, so I painted the fingers and claws on in freehand. A nice pair of low-lives to flesh out the squad.

And finally we've got a metal bloke with a shoulder-mounted flamer. This model was alright, but his weapon was surprisingly detailed. He was really difficult to photograph.

This isn't the whole unit, but it contains most of these scurvy dogs and freebooters. The more of these models I paint, the more I like them. I can see why GW chose to make its orks bigger and more bestial, but I think something was lost along the way. 

All the Howling Banshees!

 Here are the rest of the Howling Banshees. I painted the exarch in the style of the old GW unit from the 1990s, by reversing a lot of the colours. I also added a couple more troopers. 

I'm a big fan of these models. I've got a couple more, but for now this will do, since it's a legal unit (actually, in 2rd edition 40k, it would be a legal unit with three models!). Right then, what's next?

Howling Banshees

 I've had a bunch of stripped Howling Banshees in the vast heap of shame for a while now. To be honest, I've been avoiding painting them: not because they're bad models, but because they require a level of accuracy that I find difficult, even when it is rewarding. And I can't really convert them at all. 

They're Jess Goodwin models and, as ever, I could say a lot about how excellent the sculpts are, especially given that they were made in the 1990s. For detail, elegance and a sense of movement they're up with the old harlequins. I painted them in a very similar style to the ones in the old Codex Eldar, adding a bit of blue detailing to their belt equipment to tie them in to the rest of Craftworld Zandros.

I really like these guys. I'm particularly keen on the subtle fade on their power swords. Some colours blend better than others, and this shade of blue - Vallejo Medium Blue - blends very nicely. I've still got the Exarch to do, along with a few other squad members. I'm not sure how big I really want the unit to be. 

A Car for Dark Future/Gaslands

I've been painting and converting some toy cars, as used in the old GW game Dark Future and the recent Osprey game Gaslands. I used to play Dark Future - many years ago, given that it came out in 1989.

Dark Future is, to modern eyes, quite an odd game for GW to make. For one thing, it wasn't set in either the Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000 settings (or whatever Blood Bowl is set in). For another, while you could buy a small range of models from GW, you were encouraged to convert Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars to make your own vehicles. As you can imagine, this didn't bring in a huge amount of money for GW, and it disappeared.

(Mainly, anyhow. A load of new Dark Future novels were published by Boxtree in 2005 or so, and the timeline and alternative history of the setting were revised and greatly extended. I started reading one of them, thought it was terrible, and gave up on that.)

Dark Future is rather more grown-up and down-to-earth than the big GW games. It's set in a near-future America, in a land racked by global warming, crippled by corporate greed and threatened by insane cultists. On the other hand, the US hasn't elected a dictator, so perhaps a modernised version would be called Somewhat Optimistic Future. On the highways, Sanctioned Operatives (the law) fight huge gangs (not the law) in armed and armoured cars, like a more gun-heavy version of Mad Max. It's got a fairly real-world look, with the Mafia, biker gangs, Bloods and redneck paramilitary types all being represented. 

Gaslands is one of those games from Osprey that fits into a gap that GW failed to fill. While Frostgrave is Substitute Mordheim, and Stargrave is to some extent a replacement Necromunda, Gaslands fills the "Mad Max with Matchbox cars" niche. 

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I was in Tesco recently with a friend, who suggested that I should buy some cheap toy cars and do them up. I thought I'd give it a go, so I purchased a pack of really naff, cheap toy cars. Each car seems to be based on a real-world vehicle, but they're not classy enough to actually say what they are.

One of them was a Chevolet-type truck that looked like this:

I split into its three main bits: the upper chassis, the silver plastic part that contained the interior detailing, and the metal base plate.

I put the upper chassis onto a base made of a bit of carboard, slightly roughed up to represent a crude road surface. I painted it all to look like a ruined, burned-out shell, somewhat overgrown.

That left the silver bit and the metal baseplate. While I couldn't think of anything to do with the baseplate (yet!) the silver bit looked like a crude, stripped-down buggy. 

I ordered the plastic "implements of carnage" sprue from North Star games, which comes with lots of bits of guns, armour and the like to Mad Max-ise your toy cars. I stuck exhausts, a ram and two guns that look like they came off a Flying Fortress onto the silvery shell. I added a driver from the sprue, which took quite a bit of cutting.

Then I painted it.

Oddly, these cheap plastic cars sometimes have some strangely detailed bits, often hidden away. This car had a bottle of extra fuel or nitrous oxide bolted behind the driver's seat, together with a tube that leads into... his bottom? Anyhow, it looked cool.

Well, I certainly got my money's worth out of this thing! It was fun to make and I'm pleased with the results. The other cars will be simpler conversions. 

A Bunch of Chaos Weirdos

 Here are some chaos guys that I've been working on. Although they're ancient and short, I still really like the old chaos marine miniatures (well, most of them).

I had a load of damaged bits, and some legs made from a ruined old plastic Khorne berserker (no idea where this part came from!). I added loads of extra parts to make a full model, including a resin Necromunda arm, a fantasy helmet and the face of a Sigmarine. I'm not sure where the bag and chain parts came from, but they look suitably chaotic.

Here he is with some paint. Next to him is a marine from a boxed set featuring the chaos warlord Fabius Bile. Bile is a mad scientist type who can "enhance" his minions. This being the wonderful world of Warhammer, this turns them into hideous maniacs.

This particular hideous maniac is not a great model (none of this set are). His head is very big, and the sculpting is a bit crude. Well, I did my best, and tried to make him look suitable mad. He has a lot of wires and pipes, which I imagine pump some unwholesome solution into his body.

The next two were repaints of models I did a while ago. The chap on the left is one of my favourite conversions, which I did when I was about 18. I replaced most of his head with the mouth of a plastic space ork, which I believe is upside down. The other guy is the spotter for a heavy weapon squad. It seemed appropriate to give him a hazard-stripe shoulder pad.

Next up is a trio of disgusting monsters. I made these from all sorts of tyranid and chaos oddments. The big worm was made from a tyranid ravener's lower body and a part from some sort of ugly Khorne monster, probably called a blood-something. I really like them. They remind me of a Francis Bacon painting. Yuck.

All glory to Chaos!

Another Hive Tyrant and a Load More Tyranids

 I found an old tyranid hive tyrant in a cardboard box, which I probably bought about 25 years ago. I stripped it down and rebuilt it.

This is the second incarnation of the hive tyrant, and appeared in the second tyranid codex. Rumour has it that Games Workshop got into trouble with the owners of the Alien (20th Century Fox, I assume) because it looked too much like the queen from Aliens. I'm not sure if this is true, but I do recall an article on GW's website saying that it looked a bit too much like a certain film franchise. The third version of this miniature largely ditched the second's style, and has remained so ever since. And if you think that's confusing, just wait.

Anyhow, it was a right pig to assemble. I ended up pinning pretty much every limb. I gave it two deathspitters and a barbed strangler: I doubt that this shooty loadout would be much good in battle, but it does look cool. The original model came on a tiny base, the sort that is now used for Space Marine terminators. I gave it a much larger base, to suit the model and hopefully provide some small amount of stability.

It got the usual Hive Fleet Behemoth colour scheme - lots of oldhammer red. It was quite tricky to paint, with a lot of hidden parts that were hard to access. Here it is.

Hideous, really. I particularly like the ammo-scrotum for the barbed stranger. Lovely.

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Here are some other tyranid models that I've been working on. These are von Ryan's leapers, a sort of smaller version of the tyranid lictor. Their job is to creep up and attack enemies in close combat. 

They're recent plastic models. To be honest, they are both good sculpts and massively overcomplicated. I didn't especially enjoy painting them. I used a base coat of while, with dark blue contrast paint over it - looking back, I don't think this did anything that a simple wash wouldn't have done. They'll do.

And here are some more new miniatures. These are "neurogaunts", a new form of tyranid. I've no idea what these things do, but I felt that they'd make quite good hormagaunts. Okay, let me explain this.

Back in the days of the first tyranid codex, the only hormagaunts you could get were big spindly metal things that toppled over if you looked at them too hard. They didn't look much like other tyranids, especially not the little red termagants, to which they were meant to be closely related, and were much larger than genestealers, which are the tyranids' close combat experts. Now, these new neurogaunts are the same size as the little oldhammer termagants, and I think they work well as hormagaunts. And if you've read this far without getting a headache, I salute you.

Anyhow, here are some. They're really nice models, with a good range of poses. They were extremely quick to paint, since they've got no eyes and only a couple of colours.

And here is a big swarm of these guys. They don't come out well en masse, but you can see that a horde of these things does look quite impressive. A case of quantity being a quality of its own.

Anyhow, that's enough space bugs for now. Next time we'll have some more Stargrave conversions.

Veskit Executioner Mark 2 - a skaven hero for Mordheim

Time for  another mangy skaven! A while ago I made a conversion of a Mordheim character called Veskit the Executioner, who is a hero that the skaven can hire. Veskit is a bionic skaven, with a lot of mechanical adaptations, who is as close to the Terminator as a giant medieval rat can get.

I thought it would be cool to make a(nother) miniature of this horrid creature. I decided to base him on one of the Vyrkos Blood-Born models from the Warhammer Quest game, who is crouching ominously on a ruined pillar (which sounds like the sort of thing people do in Mordheim). The basic model looks like this:

I removed the whole right arm and the head. I replaced the head with a skaven one (unsurprisingly!) and his left arm with one from a Necron warrior. I had an arm from a plastic arco-flagellant, and replaced a chunk of Veskit's left leg with an ornate mechanical bit from the arm. I expect it's a piece that Veskit's bosses just wanted to improve.

His tail was a resin bit that I've had for ages, with a Chaos Warrior's spike on the tip. It balances the model out and reminds me of the Alien. Then I added a lot of extra bits and bobs, to represent his many bionic "improvements". He got a bionic eye, a tube on his back that contains fuel, a wire running from his head to his back, and a plasticard brace on his lower left leg. Any messes were covered with fur sculpted from green stuff.

Suitably manky, I think. I painted him in a similar way to last week's rat ogre, using a red basecoat for the flesh and thinned crimson and purple washes. The metal was painted to look rusty and old. I painted the container on his back to look as if it's a glass tube containing some kind of nasty liquid, which presumably fuels him.

That's enough raw flesh for now. I think something different is called for!

Mordheim Rat Ogre

 Here's an old skaven rat ogre model that was released for Mordheim, sometime in the early 2000s. It's technically a Clan Eshin rat ogre, Eshin being the wing of the ratmen who produce scouts and assassins and dress like ninjas. Clan Eshin, in the background, sent its minions into Mordheim - hence this chap.

While I like the idea of rat ogres, I find many of the models to be too weird and too beefy. My mental image of a vicious rat is something thin and scrawny, and most of the rat ogres look too hefty for that. Also, they have that tendency of recent skaven models to look like fleshy mutant things, rather than actual rats, with extra arms, bionic weapons and all sorts of odd additions.

This guy, on the other hand, looks like a gigantic rat-person who rips people apart with his hands. He's lean and nasty, with a superb face and some nice subtle details, like the scars on his back and the skulls around his neck (actually, those aren't very subtle). Anyhow, after some hassle with pinning and gluing, I painted him to look old and mean, with greying fur. I like models of this size - not too big, but full of interesting bits.

The skin was basecoated red for an unwholesome feel. I painted it normally after that, although I used strong tone and thin brown washes, as well as a glaze of Sigvald Burgundy, whatever that is. I'm really pleased with the end result (and the unusually good photos!).

Eldar War Walker

 Right then, back to "schedule"! I've been slowly building and painting an old metal Eldar war walker. These rather odd machines are basically walking artillery for the Eldar, like a souped-up version of the Imperial Guard's sentinel. They are strange, gangly and really quite hard to assemble.

This one came with a slightly broken right leg: the hoof had been cut off and the rear "claw" (it's quite hard to know how to describe these things) was missing entirely. I made a new one out of green stuff and plasticard.

A small nerdy point: this model is a mixture of parts from the first two incarnations of the war walker. The pilot is from the first release, as seen in the blue Citadel catalogue, but the guns are scatter lasers from the second version, as seen in the earliest Eldar codex. They are also some of the coolest weapons in the whole of Warhammer. Space elf rotary cannons. Yeah.

Anyhow, it got the standard Craftworld Zandros paint scheme (as made up by me), to match the other mechs and Guardians. 

Definitely a strange model, but one that I quite like at the end of the day - even if it was a pain to assemble!

Wonky Metal Tyranid Warriors

 

I've been busy with the nostalgia Tyranids. It's been one of those projects that you chip away at, and a lot of the models aren't anything especially great. One of the coolest things about the Tyranids is the sheer number of the horrid little buggers than you can field: however, this doesn't show up especially well on camera. 

I've also been painting a couple of old metal warriors. Now, nostalgia aside, I think these are pretty ropey models. In fact, compared to the super plastic warriors from a few years earlier, they're terrible. The detail isn't as good as the plastics, and the features are cartoony. While I'm generally in favour of Oldhammer, I do think that there are some poor-quality models from back then, and these - along with such joys as the half-naked Khorne berserkers and the cheesy old undead - are some of them.

(In this case, I wonder if it's the result of trying too literally to turn a John Blanche picture into a miniature. Blanche certainly has his place as an artist, but I think he's better at drawing humans and demons than aliens. But that's just guesswork.)

So, I had two nearly-complete warrior models. I gave both of them necks made from Dark Eldar pistols, which makes them look a little less daft. One had one of those goofy tongue-out Tyranid heads, but I couldn't do a lot about that. They were both missing left arms, so I made some new ones out of old plastic termagant arms, elongated with wire and green stuff. This turned out to be easier than I'd feared. 

(It's worth pointing out here that early Tyranids carried their guns, which makes much more sense than the later versions, who have their weapons apparently growing out of their bodies. This would seriously limit their tactical flexibility, and bothers me way more than it should.)

The old school barbed strangler, which this guy holds, is a really cool design. It's got a sort of facehugger/ribcage structure at the back, a barrel apparently made out of bone, and a couple of anuses. A shame, then, that the model is saddled with those whopping great claws.

This chap has a devourer. It used to have a description worthy of Cannibal Corpse lyrics: a muscular tube ending in a cone of rotting flesh, infested with writhing worms. I tried to reflect this in my painting, but I don't think much could do justice to such a description. Because I'd run out of silly old metal claws, he got some modern rending claws left over from a genestealer.

They join their two derpy comrades armed with venom cannons. I've got to admit that, as a group, they do look sort of cool.