Yet Another Really Pathetic Excuse

Hey.

Soooo... legs didn’t get done before Comic-Con.  Or since then.  They’re still in pieces on a TV tray here in my office. 

Comic-Con was amazing, as always, and I’ve just been slammed with work since then.  Started the new Ex book, revisions on The Fold, plus I’m working on a semi-secret project that I’m very excited about and hoping I can talk about in a few days.  Plus there was some extremely painful jaw surgery.

So instead of playing 40K—or even just working on the hobby side of it—I’ve been forced to sit here at my desk and remember when I used to have time to play almost every week.  Which, granted, was way back when.

If memory serves, it was around the time that Games Workshop just gave Codex: Assassins away for free with White Dwarf one month.  Seriously.  No extra cost, they just printed it up with a solid cover and included it in the mailing.  It was a thank you to all their loyal customers—“here’s a freebie from us.  It’s only four models anyway, it’d be silly to charge for it. We'd look like mercenary bastards.”

Anyway, enough nostalgia.  I’m going to try to get the legs done soon so I can move on to guns and maybe even start another project before the end of the year.

Yeah, we’re far enough in that it’s almost the end of the year.

Many, many thanks for your patience.

Imperial Knights, Part VII

So, it only took a little bit of work, but I managed to salvage and rebuild the toes  without losing too much time.  They're much more solid this way.  Now on to the legs.

They look complex on the template, but the leg sections are really the same sort of thing I’ve done in the past for gun barrels and towers and such.  They’re just octagonal cylinders.  The only difference is these ones have tabs and folds at each end for the hips, knees, and ankles to rest in and attach to.  Cutting them out is a bit of work, but once that’d done they go together very easily.

Helpful Hint –Cut the vertical tab (the one that runs the length of the thigh), a little thicker than it’s marked on the template.  There’s a lot of stress on that tab.  I’d give it all the room I can to grab hold with.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that you might not want to peel the template off the calf-section of the leg.  Some of those squares and rectangles are going to be helpful in the near future.  It’s not a huge problem if you already peeled it—you can just look at it on your computer. 

The hip and the knee are two simple cylinders.  I cut them out and then wrapped them around the shaft of my hobby knife to give the cardstock a good curve.  Then it came down to another bit of pinching and holding each one for about ten minutes.

Another little note.  The outside of the hip is a very nice piece that would give me a beveled edge on that cylinder-joint.  However, I made a pre-emptive decision not to use it.  As I’ve mentioned a few times before, this template is really designed around paper as a building material, not cardstock.  While that piece may look beautiful in paper, I think cardstock’s going to be too rigid, which means there’s a good chance it’ll be creased or wrinkled, plus it’ll be pulling itself apart as the cardstock tries to revert to its natural flatness.  And this will all be happening on the outside of one of the major, load-bearing joints in the Knight.  Instead I used a simple disc and made some more detail bits with my hole punches.

This gave me the whole assembly for one leg.  It also made it clear that there was some room for posing the Knight.  Not a huge amount of leeway, but the hips and ankle have some definite room for adjustment.  And small shifts in angle or direction can make a huge change in a model.  So I started thinking about how I could pose the legs.

Some of you may have noticed last time that the ankle isn’t a straight up and down arrangement.  This threw me for a bit until I realized that the model is built with kind of a splayed-leg stance, with its feet further out than its hips.  This is very true to the old Epic-scale Knight, but also feels a bit static compared to the more dynamic pose of the current GW model.

I decided to turn these ninety degrees to make a forward and backwards foot, as if we’ve caught the Knight in mid-stride.  I think this is going to work, but it’s going to take a bit of effort to make it all fit just right. 

And I’ll go into how I did that next time.

Yeah, I know.  It looks like it's going to have little chicken legs.  Don't worry...

Imperial Knights, Part VI

As I’ve mentioned once or twice, the legs on this Imperial Knight are fairly complex.  Enough so that I was already considering splitting the legs into two posts.  When I find out I had to do re-do a large number of components, well... that clinched it.

More on that in a few minutes...

So, let’s talk about feet right now.  Next week will be about the legs themselves. 

This template has a huge footprint.  By which I mean it has really big feet.  It is much more reminiscent of the classic titans, but it does look a little cartoonish compared to the new GW model.  I think one thing that will help that is a darker paint job—bright white toes do catch the eye.

The first thing I put together was the center part of the foot.  Even though it’s not quite accurate, I’m going to call it the heel, just for simplicity.  It’s a little challenging because of the extra angles, but it goes together quite smoothly.

The toes are probably the most challenging part of this model to date.  Because of their size and angled folds, the best I could manage was clamping one set of tabs.  After that I had to hold each toe together for the fifteen to twenty minutes it took for them to dry.  So that was almost two hours for all eight toes.  I highly recommend putting in Pacific Rim, having a drink nearby,  and telling yourself this is how all the Jaegers went together...

The ankle is very straightforward.  Cut, score, and glue the tab.  While it was drying I tried to figure out exactly how it attached, and that was when I realized I had the heel upside down.  That little Mechanicus symbol is (in theory) the footprint of the Knight.  So the ankle fits right into the octagon on the top (the real top) of the heel.

At this point I decided to check out how the toes fit into this.  Because of the way this foot is designed, I could put the foot together any number of ways.  It’s show on the template as cardinal points (front, back, sides), but it would be just as solid with the toes at NW, SW, SE, and NE positions.  Or two in the front and one in the back to give it more of a raptor-ish look.

But all this experimenting made me take a good look at the toes.  They just didn’t seem to mesh right with the heel.  Either they had very little surface contact, which meant a very weak glue bond, or the Knight was supposed to stand on its toes and the heel didn’t touch the ground (or its base, however you want to look at it), which meant solid toe joins with a lot of stress on them. 

I studied the pictures that came with the templates.  Alas, they’re low resolution and not  at the best of angles.  But the more I looked... the more I convinced there was something wrong with the toes I’d built.  I’d printed an extra set of templates, so I cut out another toe and played with it a bit.  And discovered one problem when you’re working with minimal instructions and bad final pictures...

You may remember I mentioned that this was a true Paperhammer template—it wasn’t built with cardstock in mind, only paper (or so it seems).  In a few places it doubles up on itself for extra durability, and that’s what it does here with the toes.  The darker, “bottom” sections of the template aren’t pads for the toes.  They’re actually meant to be reversed and folded into the toe to make it stronger.  This changes the way the toe sits on the ground and how it sits against the heel.

The upside of this is that it means the toes are much easier to build than I originally thought.  It takes an extra moment to line up the reverse-scores, but after that almost the whole thing can be clamped with clothespins.

The downside is it means I had to rebuild all eight toes.  So... learn from my mistakes.

Next week, legs.

Quick Apology Post

Wanted to stop in and apologize for the lack of posts.  I’m actually up against the wall with this deadline.  The new book’s due next week and I’m trying to get a last polish draft in after a series of brutal rewrites.

(To be honest, my publisher graciously let things slide for an extra month and I’m still against that wall.  See that as a sign of my determination for a great book or my incompetence—your call)

And I tried to work on the Knight’s legs in my rare breaks, but they’re very complex. Just not the sort of thing I can do for fifteen or twenty minutes away from the computer.  It’s probably going to take me two whole posts just to cover putting them together.  One for the feet and one for the legs. 

Which I will get to as soon as this draft is turned in.  This Knight will have legs before the San Diego Comic-Con.  Really.

A Brief Interlude... for War

I’ve gotten very little done the past two weekends, and probably won’t for the next three or four, either.  As I mentioned last time, I’ve had folks in town, book signings, and a birthday.  Plus I went down to San Diego for our annual Carnage Asada/ Memorial Day cookout game.  If you’ve ever wondered what a 20,000 point Apocalypse game looks like (lots of Tyranids versus Imperial Guard with Space Wolf allies and a Warhound Titan), well...it looks something like this.

This was also the first time I got to take my modified Hive Tyrant out on the field.  I’d originally called him Gigan, but as I was writing up my Carnage Asada list I realized, wait a minute, he’s the Tyrant—the king—so from here on he’ll be referred to as Ghidra.

Alas, the game was so huge and sprawling, Ghidra barely had a chance to do anything.  It was epic and fun, but with the socializing and drinking, we just made it into turn three before we decided to call it done.  There’s a lot more details and pictures over at the Atomic Warlords page, if you want to check them out.

As I mentioned above, it might be a week or three before I get to do anything more on the Imperial Knight.  I’m now in the last four weeks before the new book is due, so that needs to be the focus of my attention for now.  The good news is, once it’s done I should be ready for a burst of geekery and model work.

So please bear with me—legs and weapons coming soon.

Imperial Knights, Part V—The Quickie

I’m kind of bombarded with things right now.  Friends in from out of town, lurking at my friend Craig’s book signing this weekend (check out Suffer The Children—it’s amazing), trying to get caught up on my own book.  Long and short of it is, I didn’t get as much done this week as I wanted.      

Well, I did get a lot done, but I didn’t get a lot finished.  So I could show you some random, unconnected sections.  Or I could focus on one piece I scratch built that’s kind of important.

As I mentioned last time, some template issues ended up giving me a slightly messy join on the Knight’s shoulder trim.  I deliberately attached the shoulders so one of the bad joins would end up on the front-right.  I mentioned I had a plan—it’s a pretty simple plan.  The bad join will be hidden by the Knight’s heraldry shield.  The catch is that this template doesn’t have that piece—it’s a new detail they’ve added on the Games Workshop model.

 

So, how to build a heraldry shield...

I measured out two rectangles of card measuring 1” wide by 1 1/4” long.  I’m doing two because I want to have them overlap for a nice thickness.  If you don’t mind the shield being a little thin, you can just do one.

Helpful Hint—Make sure the measurements and cuts for this are as exact as possible.  I want this to look clean when it overlaps.

Once I had both rectangles.  I marked the 1/2” point on the bottom (the center) and made two 45 degree cuts—again, being as exact as possible.  This gave me a basic shield shape.  If I just wanted to keep things simple, I could stop here and it would still bring the model that much closer to the GW one.  But if you’re up for a little more detail on this...

If I’ve done everything right so far, the the top section above the 45 degree angle should be 3/4” high.  I marked it off in 1/4” sections on both shields.  Then I lined up my 1/4” hole punch to give me a semicircle.  This took a bit of work to get it lined up just right.

Helpful Hint—If the semi-circles end up a little off and don’t line up when the shields stack, nominate one as the bottom and just trim that one to hide the overlaps.

I used a thin coat of glue and pressed them together.  I clamped it with five clothespins to make every edge as tight and clean as possible.  I let the whole thing sit for about ten minutes and then I used my hobby knife to just nip off the bottom tip of the shield--I wanted to look a little more rounded and not quite so pointy.  And then I mounted it on the edge of the shoulder so it hid that bad piece of trim.   It’ll probably get a few rivets, too, when I hit that stage. 

Imperial Knights, Part IV

Many thanks for your patience.  I lost two weeks, really.  One week I was at Texas Frightmare.  Then last Friday I didn’t have anything to post because I’d been at Frightmare the week before (when I’d normally be building stuff).

That said... let’s move on.

I had most of the big torso section together, with some extra details on it as well.  I wanted to get the shoulders done and also finish up the lower torso and hip sections.  I decided to start at the top and work down.

The shoulders go together almost exactly like the head, except that the edges come together at the corners of the backing piece rather than the front.  I ended up clamping the edges one by one (again, just like with the head) until the whole piece was dry and ready to mount on backing.  It’s a bit of a pain, because the shoulder pieces are so large (almost the size of a tennis ball) it’s hard to hold all the edges in place at once.  I highly recommend having a few small, heavy objects that you can use to brace the sides (I had two boxes of baking soda handy).

While the two shoulders were drying, I cut out the two detail strips.  They’re the trim on the shoulder pads.  It was very easy to bend these around my hobby knife and drag them across it once or thrice, giving them a nice curve in each direction.

Helpful Hint—If you wanted a Chaos Knight, this would be a good place to start tweaking details.  It’d be easy to do something like I did with the Defiler to create either standard Chaos shoulder pad points along the trim or a more Nurgle-ish decay pattern.  Just add any points before cutting the trim out of the template.

Now that the trim-strips were curved, it was very easy to wrap them around the shoulders.  I made sure the corner piece was as square as possible to the shoulder corner.  It took a few moments to make sure the details were as tight as possible and lined up.  This would be one of those attention areas, so I wanted to make sure it looked as good as possible.

Alas, this is where I also confirmed something I’d suspected. This really is a paperhammer template.  It’s all done off the assumption I’d be working with material about  1mm thick.  Cardstock isn’t much thicker, but this is one of the places where it makes a real difference.  The trim pieces don’t line up.  Everything is just a tiny bit too thick, and it all adds up here.

Fortunately, I have a plan to deal with it. 

Once these were dry I glued them onto the main hull section.  The shoulders are more or less symmetrical (there’s a little oddness, but that’s from the assembly difficulty I mentioned above).  I spun the knight’s right shoulder (left if we’re facing it) so the side where the details don’t line up is in front.  The left shoulder had the good side to the front and the bad side to the back.  I had to hold the whole thing together for about three minutes, but there’s lots of surface area and the glue held fine.

This was also the last time I’d need to worry about opposing force inside the torso, so I finally sealed up that bottom flap.

The lower torso’s a simple box.  It goes together with no problem.  The only thing is to make sure it stays square and doesn’t lean off to the side while I’m assembling it.  Once it was together, I glued it onto the bottom of the big section.

Okay, now I’m going to veer away from the template again.  This piece on page three is the Knight’s waist/abdomen.  I’m not going to be using it, for three different reasons.  One is design—getting rid of the “wasp waist” will actually pull this model a little closer to the GW one.  Two is height—this model’s just shy of nine inches tall as is, and losing the waist section cuts an inch from that, which also brings us closer to the GW model. Third is stability—this is already a top heavy and front-heavy model.  Anything I can do to create more a more solid connection between sections is a good thing. 

So this goes away.  I’ll need to adjust a few things down the road because of this, but I don’t think it’ll be that hard.

Famous last words...

Last bit for now was the hip section.  It’s the big odd-shaped piece on page four.  It’s important to note that this isn’t just an octagonal piece—it also tapers in at the top.  It isn’t difficult, just a bit more time-intensive.  Make sure to score that secondary line where the upper half folds in.

I put one side of the hips together and clamped it at the top for a few minutes.  Then I folded the other half around so it was open at the bottom.  Once that was dry, I sealed it up.  I had to hold it for a few minutes and tweak a tiny bit here and there to make it nice.

And that’s where I am now.  The Knight’s entire body is done at this point.  Questions?  Comments?

Next week will probably be legs, armor, and then weapons.

Imperial Knights, Part III

Okay, after some musing I figured out how I was going to assemble the whole head/ cockpit area in a way that would bridge the gap between this Knight template and the new Games Workshop model.

First, I put the head together.  I gave it a bit of a bend in both directions, wrapping it gently around my hobby knife.  The opposing bends did cancel each other out a bit, but it left a lot of curve where I needed it.  Then I dabbed some glue on the tabs and worked my way through it.

Helpful Hint—Because of the amount of small folds and overlaps, it might be worth putting this piece on thinner card.  Maybe even something like a file folder that’s closer to very heavy paper.  It’ll still be rigid, and once it’s on the head base it’ll be solid.

Another Helpful Hint—Start from the right side (looking at the above picture).  That way you’re folding the sections down onto the tabs rather than trying to push the tabs up onto the sections.  Trust me, it’s easier.

Once I had the whole thing together, I held it for about a minute and then mounted it onto the head base (the small oval on the template).  This helped the whole thing hold together, and after maybe two minutes I was comfortable setting it down to dry.

I also added two 1/4” circles from my hole punch at the back for a little bit of detail.   They’ll be deep inside the cowl, but the head’s going to be the focus so I think the more the better.   I was careful to make sure they didn’t hang over the back edge, since that’ll be flush with the torso. 

Next I mounted the head on the neck.  The neck’s a very simple piece to assemble (just make sure to give the long center piece a slight curve at the front), and the head goes on it with no problem.  I also added some hole-punch discs here for more detail.  A 1/4” and a 1/8” on each side.  Make sure the head is centered  and lines up in the front (check the outlines on the template).  This combined piece has to be just right so it’ll match up with the hull.

This model has a bit of empty space between the head and the hood.  I decided to fill this with a secondary piece, which I’m going to call the cowl just to make things easier and clearer.  It was scratch-built, but it’s very simple.

I marked off a piece that was 1/2” wide and 2 1/2” long.  While I was cutting it, I left a tab on either end and one in the middle.  At the last minute (after I took this photo) I also made a 45 degree cut on the corners (the red lines).  I used a straight edge on the front, but I wasn’t as worried about the back.  I put a curve into this piece by wrapping it around the handle of my knife.

Finally, the hood.  This was kind of a nightmare.  That front/ outside edge is so thin it’s almost impossible not to tweak it.  I over-curved the top section, I scored all the tabs to the point that one of them almost fell off, and it was still a pain.  I ended up with half a dozen clothespins on it, all braced to hold it steady and in the right shape.

Now... time to put all this together. 

The scratch-built cowl went on first.  I knew it would sit close to the head, and I didn’t want to be fumbling with the tabs around that piece.  I took some measurements, marked off the centerline of the torso, and glued the cowl so it sat even with the edge-corner across the “chest” area.

Helpful Hint—Because of the curve of the torso, the cowl won’t sit flat.  If you look close, it’s connected on either side at the base and then by the tip of the center tab.  The important part is that it’s flush at the base.

Now I put the head-neck assembly in place.  Just as I’d suspected—it just covers the ends of my tabs for the cowl.  It would’ve been a pain to add the cowl if this piece had been glued down first.  The whole assembly fits great against the torso.  It's a very well-designed template.  I held the head-neck piece in place for about a minute and it was solid.

Next is the hood.  Some of you may have noticed that the hood doesn’t have any tabs on it.  I did, too.  However, as I just mentioned, this is a very well-designed template.  The hood fits perfectly against the hull at all points.  I put some glue on the edges of the hood, pressed it into place, and it was so snug it dried solid.

Now, one last bit of detail...

The original template for the Knight has a sort of “Mechanicus zipper” pattern across its back.  If you like that, I’d recommend cutting the pattern out on the spare set of templates, giving it a light curve, and laying it down along the hull’s center line for a nice, raised detail.  On mine, though, I think I’m going to make another tweak to bring this model closer to the GW one.

There are three prominent hatches on the top/ back of the GW model.  The larger, center one even gets picked out in the paint scheme sometimes.  Going off the look of the plastic model and the scale of this one, I cut out a 3/4” x 1” rectangle for the center hatch and two small 1/2” squares for the side ones.  I gave each of them a slight curve on the knife and then glued them in place.

On another note... I’m not going to be able to post next week because I’m a guest at Texas Frightmare.  So if you happen to be in the Dallas area, swing by an say hullo in person.  But the week after that... much more progress to show off.

Imperial Knights, Part II

I didn’t make a lot of forward motion this week.  Part of it was just shortness of time (I’m right on that line of being just on time and falling behind with an important deadline).  Part of it was hitting one of the first bumps in this project as I had to figure a few things out.

But let’s look at what there is and next week I’ll have some more.

First thing I did was the smokestacks for the top of the engine stacks.  They’re worth spending a bit of time on because they work off an interesting design that crops up a few times in this template.  It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but once I did I was kind of awed by the creator’s solution to the detail issue.

In the past, when I wanted to add detail to an engine or gun barrel, I’d start with an octagonal tube and add strips of curved card around it to “smooth out” the design a bit.  In this template, it’s all done as one piece.  I just cut it out and roll it.  The detail pieces are longer, so they build up higher.  It’s very clever.

Since a lot of this detail is 2D though—just images on the paper—I decided to take it a bit further.  The circular vents on the smokestack are almost exactly 1/8”, so I took a few minutes to line up my hole punch and actually make them.  When the detail wraps around, they’ll have flat card beneath them just like the vents on the back of the engine stack.

I wound each of the long pieces around my knife to give them a good bend.  Then I glued the tab first to form the base and held it for a minute or two.  Once it felt secure, I wrapped the second half of it around.  I made sure to pull it tight so there weren’t any odd gaps between the two layers.  It’s tricky because pulling too hard will tug the tab loose (as I discovered), so don’t be too frustrated if this takes two or three attempts. 

Once it was all in place, I tapped the top and bottom on the table a few times to make sure everything was sitting flush.  I also squished the sides a bit to get it as close to round as possible.  I held each one for about five minutes to make sure they were solid.

I decided to move on to the head next.  It’s a very small piece, and it doesn’t help that its outlines are pale gray on white paper.  It’s also very intricate.  I spent about twenty minutes cutting the whole piece out.

Helpful Hint—If you’re going to peel the paper off like I do, take a moment and trace over these lines with a sharp pencil or fine pen.  Your eyes will thank you for it later.  My eyes are cursing me because I didn’t think of it until I was done...

At this point it became how small the head was in relation to the torso.  It also has no real detail on it aside from 2D eyes.  I wanted to mull this over for a bit, so I moved on the extremely slow process of cutting out the Knight’s hood.  It’s a piece with a lot of very thin sections.  I’d hoped I’d be able to alter it’s shape a bit, give it that little “bill” in the front that the new GW version has, but that would involve additions, not alterations.

As I studied the template and some of the images go the finished model, it struck me that I could add a second hood inside the larger one.  It would fill up some space and bring this closer to the GW model.  It was also clear I’d have to start with the head and build out.

And this was where I decided to stop and mull on things a bit more.  I cut out the “neck” and some of the shoulder pieces, just to have some more pieces ready to go, but I stopped assembling things until I had a better sense of where I was going with this.

Imperial Knights

I have to be honest.  This was on my list for sometime in June or July, probably after this new book was done and turned in to my editor.  But Games Workshop seems to have forced my hand, and it’d be silly not to work on this right now when everyone’s interested in such things.

Not to mention if I can show how to build a half-decent model for ten bucks or less instead of $140, well, I think that’d go over pretty well.

I’d also planned to do two—a loyalist and a Chaos one, but now I think I'll just stick with loyalist.  I doubt GW will do Chaos rules without building any actual Chaos models.  Partly because of the whole Chapterhouse thing, partly because... well, Chaos gets screwed a lot.  Sad but true.

Anyway...Imperial Knights.

This is a great little template I found through the BWC group on Yahoo a few months back.  You can join up there, and I’ve added it to my own archive as well.  Feel free to grab it and follow along.  I’m also probably going to be doing a few small changes and tweaks along the way to bring it more in line with the new GW model.  You can ignore, improve, or mock those changes as you see fit.

Also, this template’s in full color—intended for the paper to be left on—but I’ll be building it from card and peeling the template off (as I usually do).  This may result in a need for more detail in some places, but I think it’ll all work out fine. 

Let’s get started with the basics...

I printed out two sets of templates (in black and white, just so there's no confusion) and I glued one set onto bulk cardstock (a.k.a. frozen pizza and cereal boxes).  The other set is a spare for possible accidents of detail pieces as they become necessary.  Or if this goes insanely fast and I decide to build another one.  Not likely, but I'm trying to think positive.

I decided  to start right on page one with the main hull/ torso.  I gently rolled the piece around a thin bottle to give it a nice curve for that “beetle back” look.  I’ve used this technique before for small detail pieces on engines or weapons.  This is the same thing, just on a slightly larger scale.  It's a bit trickier and takes a little more work, but it makes everything so much easier I think it's worth it in the long run.

Helpful Hint—I want to make sure I only roll the back/top of the hull.  If I put a curve in the side pieces, it’s going to make assembling this section a pain.

This section is going to take a lot of work to make it all fit well.  I spent almost an hour on it, working each tab to make sure they were solid.  I didn’t want to rush it and have it popping apart later.  It really is the core of the whole model, so it needs to be solid.

Helpful Hint—I didn’t close the hull quite yet.  I left the last panel, the bottom, free so I could reach in and apply counter-pressure when adding a lot of these detail pieces.

There’s also a small detail piece—a box—on this first page.  It sits right between the bases of the engine stacks, more or less in the small of the Knight’s back (there's a clearly marked spot for it on the template--I love it when people add stuff like that to their designs).  Assembling the box is very straightforward and I glued it in place with no problem.

Helpful Hint--This little box is one of the first places you might have tab issues.  They're snug here, so if I've leaned a little too far one way or the other while cutting this piece out, the tabs won't fit together well.  Always remember--tabs aren't seen.  They can be trimmed, cut down, or even removed if you think there won't be a structural problem.

Next up are the engines themselves.  All the tabs make these look complex, but they really aren’t.  There’s only two tabs that actually connect to assemble each piece.  The rest are to attach it to the back of the hull. 

Also, just like on the hull, I want to curve these pieces, but I don’t want to curve all of them—just the section that’s going to wrap around and be the engine housing.  These are a little bit tricky because they only hold together at the very top and bottom.  If there's not a really good curve, they're a chance they could splay out in the middle and cause problems later.

There are three big vents on each engine.  After a bit of debate, I decided to cut them out for extra detail.  I did all the cutting before I assembled the engine.  Once it was together, I curved another piece of card for some backing and it glued it inside.  Wipe off the excess glue and it looks great.

I used my 1/4” hole punch  and added a disk to the bottom of each engine stack.  It replaces some of the 2D paper detail.  Plus it looks good in that semi-circular section.

There’s also a 2D Mechanicus logo that goes between the two engine stacks.  I held off because I didn’t want to create any problems on the off chance the stacks didn’t fit well—I didn’t want to end up with a weird overlap.  And as it turns out I was right to hold off.  As I worried about above, the engine pieces are splayed out just enough that the logo won’t fit.

I like the general level of detail, though, so I played around and found something round to trace that fit the space (an old Warhammer fantasy shield--you may need your own object depending on how yours turns out).  I also added another 1/4” disc at the center of this piece.  It doesn’t look like the logo, but it looks a little more like the “engine core” on the GW model.  It’ll probably look even better when I hit the rivet phase.

More next week.

Yet Another Pathetic Minor Update

If anyone’s still bothering to read this, you have the patience of a saint.

I could give you the usual list of excuses.  Book release.  Appearances.  New book in progress.  Far too much dental work.  Printer issues.  It hasn’t left me with much free time for other stuff.  Heck, I think I’ve managed to play two games this year, and they were both Kill Team games.

But you don’t care about any of that.

Good news is, a large number of these issues have been resolved.  So this time next week, I should have the first part of a new project up.

Give you a hint... it rhymes with Ethereal Blight.