Oddboyz

Orks, orks, orks...

I can admit (and have before) I tend to base my armies around a theme rather than a strategy.  My Orks, the Tekboyz, have always been themed toward the idea of Orky technology with a bit of complete feral violence on the side.  This was kind of a challenge with the previous codex because so many things were left a bit up in the air.  Where did Meks fit into the great Orky scheme of things?  Could you have a Mek-centric army?  Were Weirdboyz game-legal or just a bit of fluff that had drifted in from older rulebooks?

           

I had a Weirdboy and a few Meks that I’d made out of regular orks many years back.  At the time, there just weren’t any decent models for either of them.  Now that the new codex had firmed up a few things, and the new models had set some precedents, I needed to rebuild some of them at Nob-size, and on 40mm bases.

A great thing to do this sort of thing with is Black Reach nobs (get ‘em while you can).  There are lots of places online to find them cheap.  Plus, they’re the same size as the regular box o’ Nobs, so you can swap arms, heads, or just hands with no problem.  There’s a one-handed big choppa my girlfriend used on one of her Black Reach nobs, and we’ve used the arms to get a few different poses and looks for them.  You can even just swap out one of those raised arms for a power claw.  It’s a great way to add some good-looking muscle to an Ork army.

As for my oddboyz, though...

My Weirdboy—lovingly known as Orky Gellah (anyone?)—pretty much needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.  I took a Black Reach Nob and added a loincloth from the Nob set and some Kroot capes.  I had to trim down the ammo belts and pouch on his left side to make that cape fit.  When the capes are run together, they look like one long, ragged cloak lined with bones.

Gellah’s copper staff is made from the existing handle of his axe.  I added the barrel of a Kroot rifle, plus the head from an old Fantasy Goblin drumstick that had been kicking around in my bitzbin for a while. The top is an Ork skull and a thin shoulderpad detail from the Fantasy sets.  The idea was to imply the skull-and-halo motif that a lot of Imperial Psykers use, while still looking sturdy and haphazard enough to clearly be an Ork creation.  I added some bells from different Fantasy sets for structural purposes, and also because Weirdboyz are supposed to be covered in bells so everyone knows they’re coming...

Helpful Hint - The skull is actually a standard Ork head.  I trimmed the lips and ears off with my hobby knife, then drilled out the eye sockets (starting with a small bit and then going a little larger with each of two successive bits).  As a final touch, I filed the sides of the head just a bit to accent the cheekbones.  It took about ten minutes of careful work.  You can do the same thing with Kroot heads if you want to add alien skulls to your scenery or trophy racks.

Also, I needed a Dok for my team of Cybok Nobs—the Bork.  Games Workshop has a really beautiful Dok model, but I wanted to keep it cheap.  I added a bunch of knives, hooks, and blades all over him, scavenged from the Kroot and Ogre lines.  I also gave him a steel gob.  It helps sell his cybork nature.  I also knew I could paint it white with a messy red cross on it and it would instantly imply medic with a face mask.

Since he was going to be part of the Bork, Dok Krusha (I did mention the Trek references, yes?) got the circular saw arm from the Nob set.  This also matched up with the GW model.  For his other arm, I trimmed the muzzle off his slugga and attached three of the thin flagpoles from the classic Rhino sets.   They’re kind of needle-ish, and with the right paint job this will easily fly as his ‘urty syringe.  If you haven’t been playing that long, you could do the same thing with a straight piece of stiff wire, say from a paper clip.  Just drill a hole or two in the slugga as if you were going to pin something to it, but leave the wire exposed.

One of my major Tekboyz was Obryne (aside from their boss, Tiktok, all of my various Meks are named after Star Trek engineers—I’ve also got a Skotty, Laforj, and Blanna).  Obryne was the guy who held the kustom force field... but he was built on a regular boyz body.  With the new rules he really needed to be Nob sized, and on a larger base.

I removed the force field projector and the mek backpack from the old Obryne.  Then I cut off the projector’s two small antennae and added a trio of orbs.  They’re actually from the backs of the Necron Triarch torsos.  Each one has three spheres that look just as good in brass or copper as they do in eldritch green.  I built Lychguard, so that means I’ve got fifteen of these (now twelve) for future projects.

In my first attempt, Obryne was holding the force field projector up above his head on one of the solid arms.  While it works in the sense of Orks being superhumanly strong, it just looked kind of wrong to have a Big Mek flinging his precious equipment around.  I mean, at least the stuff that wasn’t intended to be flung.  So my plan is to do some cuts and snips and move it to his other hand so it’ll be straight out in front of him.  A few extra pouches should finish him up fine.

So, there’s a bunch of nob-sized characters made from the Black Reach nobs and spare parts.  Which means each one probably cost less than four dollars.

Next up, a return to my dirt cheap roots with a Paperhammer flyer.

Killa Kans

The new Ork Codex (well not so new at this point--let's say the most recent) was a great thing for me. My Ork army, the TekBoyz, were lovers of all hi-tek warstuff, but were kind of hampered by the need to keep a warboss in the army. Anyway, right around the time I started this little ongoing art project of a blog, Games Workshop started dropping hints of some first-of-the-year releases to follow up on that codex. Among them, of course, were the new plastic Deff Dread and the Killa Kan squadron.

On most days I'd be singing praises of a plastic set, and the new Kans are gorgeous, no question about it. As it happens, though, I'd already been playing with a Kan template created two years ago by a gent named Adam Souza. It's a great one-sheet template (part of the big file over at the Golden Bolter Society) and it'll let you build a very nice Killa Kan in about an hour. Three cereal boxes will give you six Kans over the course of a weekend. And the price can't be beat.

So start by printing out said sheet. Use a glue stick to fix it to the back of a cereal box or some such piece of card. An old credit card will let you glue it down nice and smooth. In my experiments so far, I’ve found it’s easy to do two at the same time (using the front and back of the same box).

This is Important-- There aren’t any tabs on any of these components, so take a moment before you start cutting and sketch in some rough ones you’ll be able to use. Look carefully and try to picture how these components fold. Some of these components are pretty small and you don’t want overlapping or unnecessary tabs. Watch the little section on the back of the torso, too--you’ll need to make a reverse-score (on the opposite side of the sheet) for a tab to be useful there.

This template’s very easy. You can build all the components-- the main body, arm sections, legs, etc--and then assemble them bit by bit. I started at the bottom and worked up, but because of this design you can do it in any order you like.

Helpful Hint--I made the bottom layer of the feet double-thick. Trace them again on the card and it’s fine. This gives the toes a little more heft, considering they're supposed to be steel claws supporting this little monstrosity. You can also add on a few small rods or card strips to look like pistons or hinges.

The model gives you diagrams so you can build the legs with blocks the whole way (thighs, hips, ankles, shins). I went with a suggestion Souza makes in the notes and decided to use tubing instead. It’s an old Bic pen (10 for a dollar most places) that had dried out. One pen gave me legs for two Kans. If you happen to have a chisel-blade X-Acto it works great. A regular one works too, it just takes a bit longer. I glue the tubes to the feet first. Then once those are dry their glued to the thigh blocks (so I can make sure the thighs are square to one another). I wanted to use some wire from an old set of iPod headphones to make some power cables or hydraulic tubes or... heck, it’s Ork technology. Who knows what they’d be. It’d just look good. That’ll probably be on the next set.

The torso is a single piece with a bit or detail on it. I suggest gluing it shut on the bottom first and perhaps piling a bit in there for weight. I have a little tin where I save all the metal flash from models. It’s great for counterbalancing models. Drop a few pieces of that, a dozen BBs, or whatever similar thing into the torso. Then just drip some glue over it to keep it stable. White glue’s probably best as some superglues are thin enough to run out any gaps in the kan’s bottom.

Helpful Hint-- Again, Orkiness pays off. If you want different details on the kan, go for it. It’s hard for them to look wrong. A lot of these have the control panel from the template, but I freehanded a skull on one and made a very simple “jaw” on another. I also stacked 1/8” and 1/16” pieces over the eye-slit of one to make a “targeter” of sorts. Whether or not the grot inside will ever use it, well...

The three arm sections have a bit of leeway. You can make the center one a bit shorter and it’ll give you a slightly different look. Make sure that the “bicep” of the arm (the lowest section on the template) gets a good-sized tab on the end. That square is going to take the weight of the whole arm, so you want it solid.

When you assemble the arm, take a moment to pose it right. If it’s out too far you’re either going to need a base or the whole model will tip over. You also don’t want it in one of those positions that just looks weird for some reason. Once it’s together I use some pieces from the 1/8” hole punch to give the joints a bit more detail.

The close-combat claw is really nice. This is probably the most time-consuming part of the whole model. It’s a bit of work to cut out the little teeth and the multiple layers, but well worth it. You can also cut straight lines and make it look more like a set of giant shears, which I did with one of them. If you’ve got one of the Boyz chainsaw-choppas kicking around, it would probably glue in there real nice, too.

Helpful Hint--Even five layers thick, the claw doesn't fill the "wrist" space in the arm. So I took out my handy 1/4" hole punch and knocked out a dozen or so card circles. I glued together two sets of four circles each so I had a squat cylinder, than attached them to either side of the claw at the wrist. Voila--a hinge joint. It's detail and it makes the model more solid. I also skipped the shoulder pieces on the template and just did three or four-thick 1/4” circles there, too.

Take your time attaching the arm to the body and hold it until it’s dry. Not kind of dry or mostly dry--make sure there’s no doubt whatsoever this join is holding. Then brace it somehow and leave it overnight to dry more. This one point is probably going to take more stress and abuse than any other part of the model, so you want it as solid as possible.

The template has plans for a big shoota, and they’re probably the weakest part of the whole model. Not horrible, but kind of weak. It does make a passable grotzooka, though, especially with a new muzzle and a scrap bin on top. I also ended up scratch-building two kustom mega-blastas using a very old Ork plasma cannon and Marine plasma pistols. The last one’s probably going to get a rack of rokkits scraped together from a variety of sources.

Once you’re all done, add some final details. Souza says this right on his blueprints. Rivets make anything look Orky. I made a pile from the 1/16” hole punch and applied liberally to corners, edges, joints, and so on. In a few places I stacked them on top of 1/8” discs for more depth.

Helpful Hint-- If you ever end up with a gap or a loose join that just won’t stay, slap a patch on it. Just fold a small square or rectangle of card, glue it up, and place it where it needs to be. Then outline it in rivets. It makes the model more solid and it blends right in on an Ork model. If you look close, I did it on a few of the thigh-blocks and some of the arm joints. You could probably do this on a lot of Chaos models, too, without too much worry.

And there you have it. Very solid, very passable Killa Kans for pennies apiece and an hour of your undivided attention (maybe two hours if you’ve got an interesting movie on in the background). I’m probably going to keep a card-mounted template handy so I can keep build more whenever I’ve got spare time and no other projects going.

The Skullhamma, pt. III

So, when we last left the Skullhamma, I'd built a ton of components that needed to be added on. This is how they all connected together.

Running down the left side I placed the sponson, the armor plate, and then two more armor plates custom-made to this side. All four of them fit up into that slot on the hull I mentioned before (where the model's actual side skirts were supposed to connect) and also rest against the wheels. Their all good and solid. The brace on the back of the sponson is from a Basilisk model, if memory serves. Note one of the plates is "broken" to give a good view of that mismatched wheel.

The other side is the same, but different. The replaced wheel is in a different position, so my broken plate is, too. It's probably worth noting, too, that in the GW Skullhamma model the two big shoota sponsons are both on the same side of the tank. Seriously, go look. I like silly Orkiness as much as the rest guy, but I'm not going to openly handicap my super-heavy from the start. What I did instead was mismatch the two sponsons--the port one is half an inch farther forward that the starboard. This actually worked really well with the different armor plates, and it's a nice Orky touch that takes people a few minutes to notice.

It was also about this time that I glued a ram from the old Ork Trukk kit on the front. This was just a random thing I did for more detail, but it turned out to be a lifesaver. If you look at GW's model again, the big skull in the front has two huge tusks that give it a real savage look. I spent hours figuring out how to mount some on my model, because the underside of the hull has a really steep slant. In one of those "right in front of you" moments, I finally realized I could just mount them straight to the ram. They're made from the side-skirts of the actual tank model, cut and trimmed a bit rough with an X-Acto knife, and detailed with a few rivets, of course.

I glued the four smokestacks in the back. I played around with the placement a bit first to get the maximum randomness, if that makes sense. It's also hard to tell in this shot but I used some of that rounded sprue from the T 74 model to create more tubes and hoses in the back. I was actually tempted to build a small boiler and have grots shoveling coal into a furnace, but I think I might save that idea for later.

So, barring a few last minute details, the model was pretty much done at this point. You can see how it measures up with a Land Raider and a Rhino from the Alpha Legion. As I said at the start, it's not quite Baneblade-sized, but big enough that someone would have to be a bit of a jerk to challenge using it as a super-heavy. Fortunately my friends and I don't invite any jerks to our Apocalypse games.

There were still a few last details. A big skull and crossbones banner from the old metal Nobs box set went up on the back of the turret. The poles are more whittled-down sprue. A few random handles here and there for transport purposes, and some spikes from an old plastic Rhino. I also took a leftover piece from those side skirts, heated it over a burner--

(Helpful Hint - kids, always get Mom or Dad's permission before melting plastic on the stove)

--and that let me bend it over the muzzle as another armor plate. And a few more rivets. I decided to put them on the big skull, too.

An old metal Predator hatch fit really well in one of those turret-sockets, so I didn't even glue it in place. Plus somewhere down the line I'd love to replace it with a Stompa mek-captain, who I think would look very nice on top of the Skullhamma, especially with his cap.

In the other socket I used the spyglass grot from a Zzap Gun set. I dug around and found a large square fantasy base with a diagonal slot. It took a bit of wiggling, but I got the grot up through the socket from the inside. His base fit against the inside of the turret and glued right in place, and I braced it with a cut-down piece of sprue just to make sure it was rock solid. I also tossed on another grot (made from a very old Warhammer Fantasy snotling) with a hammer on the back near the engine, so he looks like he's doing random (and perhaps unnecessary) maintenance.

There you have it. A very passable Skullhamma tank, more than intimidating to Terminators or even a Dreadnaught. I'm probably going to paint it with a lot of red (for speed!!), blue to represent the Deathskull origins of my Orks, the Tekboyz, and a fair amount of bare metal and rust. Expect pictures sometime after I pass my next work deadline.

Now I just need time to play a game with it...