Gargant -8-

So... more dakka.  And some other stuff.  This one’s going to be kind of huge.  I had a week off and I did a lot...

I mentioned before, I built a simple arm for the rokkit pod based off the same design as the gargant’s actual arms. I fastened it to a square plate on the bottom and a round plate (a “swivel joint”) on the top. 

Then, back to the flakkgunz.  I tried something new and actually wrapped the cardstock barrel sections around my hobby knife when I glued them.  There were plusses and minuses to this, as I discovered.  On the plus side, it let me put clothespins right on the seam without deforming the barrel, so the seal here was very solid.  Minuses, they were clamped so tight that every non-clamped area became loose almost by default.  Also, I realized this meant the knife and clothespins kept getting tied up on single items while they dried.  Needless to say, this slowed production down a lot.

So... maybe only use this method on single, specific things.

While the barrels were drying, I  sketched out two simple boxes to be the bodies of each flakkgun.  It’s not far off from the way I made the deffkannons, just smaller.  I put these together and then made a slightly more complex shape—think of it as a cube with a triangle on top of it.  This is going to be the central “mount” for the flakkgunz.  I’m sure someone reading this knows the real term—feel free to put it in the comments.

I glued the barrels to each other, turning them so the seams were between each pair of barrels.  Once they were dry, I mounted them on the bodies.  And while those were drying, I added a few details to the center of the mount.  Once the guns were in place, it was going to be tough to reach between them, and I’d rather do it now when it was easy.  So I put on some rivets and plates, made a simple Orky targeter, and glued the whole thing to a foamcore base made out of a square piece of scrap.

Once both of the flakkqunz were dry, I attached them to the central mount.  I didn’t want to dig out my larger clamps, so I just walked around holding the whole assembly for about ten minutes, checking it now and then to make sure nothing slipped.  I wanted them to be as close to aligned as possible, but I wasn’t sweating it much.  Like much of Ork technology, their anti-aircraft guns don’t work on accuracy as much as volume...

Then I cut some long strips of cardstock for the scaffolding/gantry that’s going to hold up the flakkgunz.  The wider ones are going to be uprights, the narrower ones will be diagonals.  I doubled these up, clamped each of them, and once they were fairly dry I stuck them either under books or the cutting board itself.  These need to be solid and straight.

Once they were all dry, I set them out and built one side of a 2” wide scaffolding gantry.  I used my steel ruler/straight edge to keep all the connections pressed flat.  At this point, there’s a lot of glue and cardstock here, and it’d be very easy for it to warp or bubble.  So, pressing flat and straight the whole time.  I let this all dry, then flipped it over and built the other side.  I added a foamcore square as a top platform and let that dry.

Alas, my three-legged scaffolding was not as stable as I’d hoped.  The triangle it makes is strong, but not enough to counter the leverage of the square platform.  So, in true Orky fashion, I rolled some cardstock into a tube, glued it, held it tight with rubber bands, and then stuck it on the side when it dried.  Done.

Except... well, now I had a new problem. I’d been thinking I’d leave the gargant’s head unattached to make it easier to transport.  But if I’ve got two towers growing off each shoulder, the head’s kind of a moot point, isn’t it?  Plus, that means the towers are going to be subject to a lot of stress riding in the back of my car—odds are they’ll tear off the first time I make a turn.  So I needed to figure out a way to make them solid, but also make them removable.  Like the arms.  Except I’d planned to build the arms that way...

After a bit of fret and worry and a few discarded ideas with magnets (which are too expensive for a cheap project like this) I came up with... gravity.  The gargant’s shoulders are flat enough, and it’s not going to move that often on the tabletop.  Really, once it’s placed it’ll probably just blaze away.  So if I can make these shoulder-mounted weapons stand on their own, they should be fine.

I ended up taking two pieces of foamcore and cutting them to fit across the back of the gargant’s shoulders.  There was some deliberate overlap where the pauldron connected with the torso.  I added a small foamcore block at the overlap point.  It’s going to fit right in the corner behind the pauldron and make sure these “baseplates” always sit in the same spot, so I can build around them.  The weapons mount to the baseplates and these are done.

Fun Bonus –It also struck me that all four weapon systems are removable, which means they could be swapped out if I decided to build something else.  The gargant is unexpectedly modular.

With that taken care of, next up was the Gaze of Mork (or possibly Gork).  I knew I wanted it to have a vaguely Zzap gun look to it.  It also needed to fit inside one of the eye sockets, but I also didn’t want it sticking drastically out.  I made a small cylinder about an inch and a half long and maybe 3/8” wide.  It was wrapped in a few strips of cardstock, and then I wrapped narrower strips on top of those. It gave me a nice, simple, Tesla-coily look.  I glued a 1/4” disk from my hole punch in the front as a lens, then added a simple hood over that, and the Gaze was done.

Actually, one other thing.  Because of how I’d built the head, the surface behind the eye socket is at an angle.  So I needed to build a little base for the Gaze of Gork that would be able fit through the socket and counter that angle.

Once again... math and science pay off.

The head is a hexagon.  That means each of the outside angles is 60 degrees (360 divided by six sides).  My tiny little craft toolkit comes with the standard 30-60-90 triangle.  Even if it didn’t, 60 is such a commonly-used angle it’s even marked on my cutting board.  So I sketched out a quick triangular box that was also 30-60-90.  It was small enough that I just held the whole thing together in one hand while it dried.

Now, with all the weapons done, it was time to think of some details for the back.   Most Ork walkers, from killa kans up to stompas, have some degree of exposed engine workings in the back.  I didn’t see why the gargant would be any different.  So I wanted to do something that gave the appearance of half-covered machinery.  But I also wanted to keep it simple—In The Grim Cheapness of The Future... has never been about super-insane-realistic detail that takes days of work.

I plotted out a few simple shapes on cardstock.  Two triangular boxes and another one that could be described as a cube with another triangle beneath it.  It’s lot like the one above I made for the flakkgunz, but I assembled them a bit differently because of how they were going to attach to the main model—that one sits on its square base, this one will essentially hang by its rectangular back. 

Question—At some point I may do a post just on how to build some basic shapes.  I skim over that a lot because it seems basic to me, but that might just be me.  Would anyone be interested in a quick geometric shapes post?

I cut out the sections, glued them together, and let them dry.  Again, simple forms, not much measurement past making sure the sides lined up.  Then I actually glued the three of them together to make a larger, engine component-ish-looking thing, then slapped on a few simple detail "plates" that also helped hold it together.  A good block of tech for the back of the gargant. And it gave me a broad horizontal surface for smokestacks to come out of...

Helpful Hint—Here’s another little quick geometry tip.  If I want to make a cylinder and it doesn’t need to be exact, figure that it’s going to be about 1/3 the size of my piece of paper or cardstock.  A three inch piece of cardstock will roll into about a one inch cylinder.  A six inch piece of cardstock will make a two inch cylinder.  If I need it to be exact, do the math, but this is a good rule of thumb for this scale.

Another Helpful Hint—Don’t forget to leave a little extra space for tabs, too.

All that being said, I cut some 4” wide strips of cardstock, trimmed one side into a tab, and rolled them into large smokestacks.  Because of their length, I couldn’t put clothespins on the middle, so I ended up wrapping them with rubber bands.  And—much to my surprise—it turns out I don’t have a lot of rubber bands in my house.  So things kind of ground to a halt as I essentially did one smokestack at a time.

At which point, as I mentioned at the start, I realized how much stuff I’d done.  This is going to be a huge post as is, so I’m calling it done.

Next time... everything gets assembled and the rivet fairy shows up!

(the rivet fairy probably will not show up—it’s just going to be me)