The Hell Blade Pt. III

Very sorry for the delay. The real world keeps getting in the way of my little toy soldiers. I blame editors and publishers. Well, I would except they pay me to keep quiet and write...

Anyway, at this point, the Hell Blade only needs one more thing before you can yell “Death from above!!” The engine. This flyer needs something to convince your opponents it’s not hanging in the air with magic. Well, maybe it is, but you don’t want them to know that...

Cut a piece of card 2 1/4” wide by 2” long. You want to do a series of scores on it 1/4” apart, parallel to the short side, so when it’s done your piece of card has nine sections measuring 1/4” wide by 2” long. That last section’s going to be a tab, so it’s probably better if you cut the corners down. Roll this piece, glue it on the tab, and clamp it so you’ve got an octagonal cylinder 2”long. With me so far?

Next, cut a few 1/4” and 1/8” strips that are three or four inches long. Wrap them tight around your X-acto knife, a round pencil, or something like that so they get a good curve to them. Now wrap them around your cylinder and cut where appropriate. Try to make all your seams on these strips line up, because you can hide them all under the Hellblade’s tail. One of these strips should be just over 1/4” from the end of the cylinder.

Now cut out six triangles as shown. Score them down the middle and fold. Glue each of these little “spikes” on the end of the engine (creased edge up), butted up against that one strip near the 1/4” mark so they end up with just a little bit hanging out over the end. Make sure you set them on the octagonal edges, not on the flat surface. This will help hide the angular nature of the jet exhaust. You only use six so you can leave a space at the top (where the seams line up) and make the whole thing fit under the tail better.

Helpful Hint-- If you need to cut out a bunch of triangles for spikes (for Chaos or Orks or whatever) try this. For the ones above, mark out a strip 1/2” wide, then break it down into 1/2” x 1/4” rectangles. Sketch alternate diagonals into the rectangles (left-to-right, right-to-left, left-to-right, and so on). Now you’ve got a row of triangles going both ways, top and bottom. Nothing gets wasted and each cut is effectively cutting a side on two different triangles. Make sense?

There’s your engine. It should butt up against the horizontal card inside the fuselage. I stacked up four discs from a 1/4” hole punch to make a set of spacers. These went from the top of the engine to the inside of the tail. Alas, unless you’ve got something really cool there’s no way to clamp this. So I just sat with it and watched an episode of The Simpsons while it dried.

The 1/16” hole punch gives me a few dozen rivets to scatter at key points. I’m a bit more conservative with them here than I would be on an Ork project. I found putting one every inch or so on the trim looks pretty nice. A few on the strips wrapping the engine look nice, too.

Helpful Hint-- If you’re ever in doubt about rivets, try marking where you want them with a pencil first. They’ll give you a good idea what things will look like, and one way or another the marks will be covered by paint.

I haven’t built it yet but the base is going to be the standard three CDs I’ve pushed a few times. Turns out this is pretty close to the same size as the Trygon/ Valkyrie base. Mount a 10” dowel on it, put some small stones on the base for scenery/ weight/ to stabilize the dowel, a bit of sand or grass and voila.

One bit of pure geekery. Glue a rare earth magnet inside the lower fuselage. You should be able to slip it in behind the guns, under the pilot. Get it as close to the Hell Blade’s center of gravity as possible (mine fit right between the port autocannons and that wooden toothpick). Glue a matching magnet on top of the base’s dowel, but triple check polarities before putting down one drop of glue! Now your flier can come off the base for transport or to be a wreck on the tabletop.

Two last little bits. First, I took a strip of cardboard that was about 1” x 6” long, rolled it up into a tight little cylinder, and slid it down into the engine. When the cardboard unrolled, it held itself in place. This gave the back end of the fuselage a bit more weight to balance it on the stand, and also made the engine and the cockpit look a bit more solid.

Second, I had a few small gaps in the canopy that were nagging at me. It hadn’t gone together quite right. Normally I wouldn’t mind the gap, so to speak, but the cockpit is the focus of attention so I decided to patch them and hide the work with a few more rivets.

Helpful Hint-- If you need to do a quick patch on a paperhammer project, just use plain old white paper. Trim it to the right size, make any folds you might need, and glue it in place with a generous helping of white glue. It’s not structural, but it’s more than sturdy enough for painting and general use.

Looks like explaining the details took longer than explaining how to build the flier itself, but that’s about it. If you want an air fleet for your Chaos army (and God knows dedicated Chaos players need all the help they can get these days), this is a nice inexpensive way to go. Two cereal boxes, some white glue, a few old CDs, a marble of green stuff and some bitz you can find cheap if you or one of your friends doesn’t have them already. Count in the magnets and the total cost is three and a half, maybe four bucks. When you figure in drying time for the wings, you could probably build one every weekend if you put your mind to it (much faster than I made it look here).

It’s still a work in progress, but there’s enough paint on it to give you a passable idea what it can look like. And remember, all cardboard except for the pilot and the autocannons.

The Hellblade pt. II

So, if you followed along last week, the model’s about 90% done at this point. Or it would be if you were using the template as is. Everything from this point on counts as an optional helpful hint. So here’s how to slap on some extra detail. A lot of this come right off that second set of templates I said to print out.

On the inside of the cockpit, I used the little chest-and-shoulders piece that comes with the Chaos vehicle sprue. It’s the one that would normally give you a head just peering out of a tank hatch. Here it makes a great pilot, especially with the Chaos Marine respirator-wearing head. You could also use a horned head and reposition the horns to look like cables running back from the helmet deeper into the cockpit. I glued the pilot in place on top of that horizontal card I added a few steps back.

The canopy gives you a few options, as I see it. You can cut it out, score it, and call it done. You can also cut the windows out of one of your two copies, then glue parts of the other one inside that frame you’ve made to create a two-level “glass” effect. You could also use clear plastic from a blister pack or flat-sided bottle for the windows, but then you need to put something inside the cockpit (which I’ve already done). I decided to cut out the windows but leave them open (it is just a model after all).

Helpful Hint-- This is one of those cases where size really does matter. The stanchions of the canopy are so thin it’s very hard to get the folds right. Alas, this is a precise piece and if the folds aren’t just right you’ll never get the canopy to fit on the cockpit. What I finally ended up doing was (very carefully) cutting the whole canopy apart and gluing each panel in place seperately. It’s more work, but quicker and cleaner in the long run.

Take the extra upper fuselage template and sketch in a line about 1/4” from the edge. My little diagram is not to scale. Your own personal chaotic taste may say to make it a little less or more. Cut off the “barbs” at the front of the wings, too. Now cut along that line you added, remove the center (try to make clean cuts), and you’ve got a section of trim that should line up perfectly with the wing. You could add a few chaotic points to the trim as well, if you’re into that sort of thing. Glue this in place and use some clothespins to hold it. There may be a little tweaking involved as you go, so start at one end and work your way down, clamping as you go. If you managed to get the whole center section out in one clean piece, you can cut off the narrow end, shift that piece down onto the trim, and now it’s a bit more detail.

You can repeat this trim on the bottom fuselage if you want more detail down there, but I don’t think you really need it. Even with a flier, how often do you see the bottom of a 40K vehicle? I did it on this one to demonstrate, but it may not happen on the next one.

Helpful Hint-- I wrapped each wing in wax paper and set them Under The Dome for a while after all this, just to make sure they were straight and solid. One of the biggest problems with Paperhammer models (in my experience) is things can tweak and warp as the glue dries. The more layers (and glue) you add to something, the more chance it’s going to start bowing and twisting--expecially when it’s something flat like this. Don’t rush this stage and let things dry as long as they need to dry. I did the wings just before going to bed so they had all night to sit.

I did this trick in reverse with the spare cockpit. I sketched the lines and made the cuts, but I used the inside section for the triangular panels on the front of the cockpit. Extra detail and it bulks that up a bit more.

I doubled up the VTOL thrusters on the Hellblade’s bottom by using the forms from both sets of templates. It just gives this engine detail a bit more solidity. A couple circles from a standard 1/4” hole punch gives a touch more detail, as well.

The autocannons are just some doubled-up thin tubing (you could probably use straws) with gargoyles from one of the Chaos vehicle sprues. After much thought about how to attach them to this very angular section of the cockpit, I broke down and used two blobs of green stuff and a drop of superglue. I used two spare autocannon ammo drums from the Imperial Guard heavy weapons set to add a bit more detail. Again, remember that plastic needs to be superglued onto the cardboard.

The lower stabilizers went on now, too. I glued down a thin strip of cardboard on each side first. This gave the stabilizers a bit more to lean on and made it easier to line them up. Plus, it’s just a bit more texture when the model’s done.

This is a bit short, I know, and it’s silly that what’s really a simple model is going to take three posts to explain. Alas, I’m swamped with a few other things right now and I’d rather take a little longer and do it right. After all, I’m theoretically doing this as an example, so rushing stuff doesn’t help anyone.

Next time I’ll show you how to build a ridiculously easy engine for this thing, plus a last few gubbins for detail.

By the way, if you haven’t seen it already, check out Paperhammer 40K. It’s got templates, a forum, and a bunch of other resources for folks trying to learn about origami Necrons and similar fun card constucts.

The Hellblade

One thing you don’t see a lot of in 40K is fliers. Skimmers, yeah, but real flyers get left on the sidelines a lot. Even in Apocalypse, which has pretty solid rules for them. So when I started getting into Paperhammer and sifting through different templates, they were always something that always caught my eye.

As I tend to lead towards the more ruinous powers, it wasn’t long before I found myself looking at a simple template for the Chaos Hellblade. The Alpha Legion can always use a new direction to attack from, after all. Alas, there’s no name or email address listed on it anywhere, but if you know who built it please speak up so I can give credit where credit is due.

It’s a deceptively easy-looking template because there’s just a few big parts to it. I tried once, set it down, and only recently came back to it. And now I think I’ve got it figured, along with a few very simple improvements.

Helpful Hint-- To build this the way I did, you need to print out two copies of the template for each Hell Talon you want to build. You’re not going to use all of the second set, but you’re going to use enough of it that it’s simpler just to have two copies.

There are five main parts to this template. They’re marked upper and lower fuselage, the two inner wings, and the cockpit. There’s a few more detail bits, but these are the big five.

Put the templates on cardstock. Cut the top and bottom fuselage from one, plus all four spacers (from both sets). The first thing you want to do is glue the inner wings together so you end up with a single set that’s double-thick. This is where the wings as a whole get most of their heft, so by doubling this up they’ll be almost 3mm thick when the model’s done. I double-checked that they were lined up right, wrapped them in wax paper, and set them under a hardcover copy of Under The Dome to make sure they stayed flat.

Helpful Hint-- If I make another Hellblade (and there’s a good chance I will) I think I may make one set of inner wings from foamcore just to see how that looks. The wings are just a hair too thin on this for my liking, but that’s a matter of individual taste. It may just be a matter of finding some slightly heavier card to work with.

While the inner wings were drying I went to work on scoring the two sections of the fuselage. I admit, this model threw me for the longest time and these sections were why. In theory, this model has an open “maw” under the cockpit, which is the weapons bay and the intake for the engine. What I couldn’t figure out was how the maw stayed open without just collapsing flat. The model doesn’t have any interior supports, struts, or similar structures. Needless to say, it works. Really. So if you start feeling a little confused during construction, just remember you’re not alone and be assured it all works out in the end...

This Is Important-- The usual “terminology” in Paperhammer is that solid lines are scored, dotted lines are scored on the opposite side of the template. On the top and bottom fuselage sections, the outermost set of lines should be dotted. If you score these pieces all on the same side the model won’t go together right. It isn’t too hard to line them up if you just take your time. The two long lines on the cockpit should be dotted as well, so make sure they’re scored on the opposite side, too.

So, now with everything dried and scored, I glued one set of inner wings to the lower fuselage. Take a few moments and make sure everything lines up right. If you’ve got clothespins, this is a great time to clip one on at one end and manipulate the rest into place. Then add on half a dozen and make sure each little point and seam is sealed tight. I let this sit for about five minutes like this, then glued the other inner wing to the other side. Then I double checked the position on each one, wrapped the whole assembly in wax paper, and stuck it Under The Dome again.

A while later I pulled it out and glued this assembly to the upper fuselage. Do one side at a time and clamp it in place. Unless you’ve got a lot of clamps or clothespins, you need to let the first side dry a bit before you start to work on the next one. If the scores or folds aren’t good, there may be a bit of resistance as you tweak pieces into the right position. Once you’ve got it all in place, leave it for an hour or so. You want the glue to be very dry on this. After half an hour or so, you can probably stick the wings under a book to keep them straight and flat.

This Is Important-- If you’ve put all your scores in the right place (and on the right sides), the model will not lay flat at this point in the assembly. If you stick the whole thing under a book you’re going to crush the main part of the fuselage. Press only the wings. Use clothespins on the rest until you’re sure they’re mostly dry and then take them off so their extra weight doesn’t bend the model at the table edge.

Once this is dry, it’s time to attach the cockpit. The two inside tabs are going to go up on the edges of the tail section. If the score lines are right, the long lines should match the edge of the wings so the outside tabs rest flat on the tops of the wings. This also needs to be glued tight, so feel free to use a lot of clamps and clothespins.

Now I put in a little addition of my own. A flat toothpick, cut 7/8” long. I wedged it between the center fold of the cockpit and the center fold of the lower fuselage. A little glue makes it permanent. Double check the length on your own model before gluing and make sure it looks right. No two paperhammer models are exactly the same because these are actual models, not CAD constructs. A sixteenth of an inch here or there will add up.

The toothpick makes the fuselage pretty solid, but I took one more step (which will also serve another purpose). I knew how wide the interior space was, so I cut a piece of card to be about 1/4” shorter than that measurement. This became a horizontal platform butting up to the toothpick, sitting on the lower section just below the “center” of the fuselage. We’ll come back to it in a bit. Again, double-check what the length should be on your own model.

I also took a moment and glued on the base for the upper stabilizer. It’s a nice little detail touch that won’t hinder later work.

At this point, the bulk of the existing template is assembled. Next time I’ll show you how to use those extra parts to make some (hopefully) cool detail.