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.