Land Raider WIP

The next item on my Grey Knights list is a Land Raider. Frankly, I've wanted to build one of these for a while, and could hardly wait to get started. Painting the Dreadnought had to wait!

There's quite a few folks out there who, despite the fact the inside a vehicle/aircraft will seldom be seen, feel the need to paint it. This despite my paint pot procrastinating tendancies. Probably for the same reason the folks at GW put some time into detailing the inside. The Land Raider kit has nice detail, and I looked at it as a chance to play around with ideas.

The top picture is the engine compartment and a control panel. My favorite part is the brass fittings, which are done using a Tin Bitz base over light grey primer, overcoated with Burnished Gold and a Badab Black wash. The skull and gear icon was my first attempt at mirroring colors. I like the way it looks, and was looking for an excuse to try it.

Next is a picture of the sides. Here was an experiment in yellow using VMC Light Yellow and Gryphonne Sepia wash. I'm wondering if I got a bad batch of Gryphonne Sepia, as it comes out of the pot looking orangish. I imagined it as something much more yellow. Also here is a failed experiment with highlighting the edges, probably not going to use that much again.

I do have some Forgeword Grey Knight doors for this. I got the Land Raider, including the doors, in a good deal on Ebay, still much cheaper than what a Land Raider would cost in a store. Timing is everything. Here is the inside of the front, top hatch. Very happy with the colors, and am actually looking forward to having some red on the outside as well. After looking at this picture, I touch up some spots I had missed. May have to take pictures of everything from now on...

An odd part about the side doors is that they were too small. I'm not sure if that is the case with all FW Land Raider doors. If I had bought these direct from FW, I would have called about the problem. One bad thing about buying second hand, you can't take advantage of FW customer service. It's a relatively easy fix. I glued thin strips of plasticard around the outside, filed away any overlap, so it should be unnoticable after a good priming. Fix is on the left here, next to the other door still needing to be done.

Magnetizing a Rhino / Predator

Friend of my son needed help magnetizing a Predator. I've never built a Predator, may never have done one on my own, so this gave me a chance to give it a try. Not to mention, it was a great excuse to procrastinate instead of hitting the paint pots. Though much of what I did has been seen before, I thought I'd show how I did it. I already had magnets, mainly in sizes 1/16" x 1/16" and 1/8" x 1/8" cylinders, so I concentrated on using these. I actually came about having the 1/16" cylinder magnets by mistake, and often wondered what I was going to do with 500 of them. They've actually been quite useful.

I started with the side sponsons, as I figured most of the work would be involved there. First I drilled out the normal attachment holes on both sides with a 1/8" bit, and glued in the magnets here. I used the 1/16" magnets on the sponson arm, as the arm's width wasn't wide enough for a 1/8" magnet. To ensure a good hold, I doubled up the 1/16" magnets on the arm, both side by side and lengthwise to fit in the arm. You can see the before and after pictures above.

To the right is my method of attaching magnets. Once I glue the sponson arm magnet in place, I put a piece of wax paper over the magnet and let the weapon side magnet attach on, holding the wax paper in place. This way I can glue the next magnet and know it will line up perfectly. For gluing magnets, I often use a metal epoxy called JB Weld. It's magnetic so will surround the magnet as it cures giving a good hold. Wax paper is essential though, as you don't want it surrounding the magnet and bulking up any surfaces you want to keep flat.

Below are the finished pieces.Next up is the turret set up. This is very straight forward, as the pins on the weapon barrels are exactly 1/8", so no drilling on the turret is required. You do want to add some green stuff or glue sprue pieces inside the turret to keep the magnets from being pushed too far in when you glue them in place. For the weapon barrels, simply remove the pins and drill 1/8" holes. Important here to line up the magnets in the proper direction. I actually did not use the wax paper trick on this one and regretted it. I had not inserted the magnet far enough into the turret hole and had to pry it out because there wasn't enough room for the barrel piece to fit in.
For the back of the turret, I used one magnet here. I've seen a lot of folks use two, and that's fine, but as long as you don't use too much paint between turret and box/power pack, one should to be strong enough. My magnets are N50s, which are almost the strongest magnets you can buy, so two may be better if weaker magnets are used.

You can see here and above how I've added magnets to hold the hatches in. Another fairly straightforward magnet application. On the closed hatch and in the turret hole, a piece or two of sprue is required to build it up so the magnets meet at the right spot. I used the SM gunner as the basis for placing the magnet. I wasn't quite happy with the location, as it wasn't quite center. They still rotate, but I made the mistake of using the SM gunner when I lined up the magnets in the hull hatches, so the other fill-in bits don't marry up quite right. You can see what I mean in the Predator top shot, I hope. The right hull hatch hole is centered, so fits everything well. The left hull hatch hole is set back a bit. While the hatches work fine, the other fill in circular bits sit funny, as their magnet is centered. Minor annoyance. The bottom of the turret is what you see here. Filling the hole here is a piece of sprue with a magnet it in. It attaches to either of the two magnets seen on the sprue bits crossing the main hatch. While the hatches themselves have magnets on them to hold them in place, the turret top bit does not. The strength of the turret magnet holds the two sided top bit in place so you can use it either way. If I had the bits to make a Razorback turret, either of the three vehicles could be made from this set up.

The side door and sponson parts are also magnetized. I couldn't figure out a standard way for a single set of magnets to hold both the door and the sponson, so I used different magnets for each. The sponson uses 1/8" magnets in a single location, while the doors use 1/16" in three places two at the top and one at the bottom (bottom not shown). I actually placed the bottom magnet after taking all these pictures because, as you can see in the rhino picture at the top of the page, the bottom of the door hung out. Once painted, the magnets will hardly be noticable.

The back hatch uses 1/16" magnets at the upper corner of the door. The 1/16" magnets are perfect for these doors. They are small enough to fit in the narrow plastic part, and strong enough to hold the lightweight doors in place, but not so strong that you have to struggle to open them. The only bad part is there is little room for error; you need to be careful where you drill.

Armored Basilisk Conversion

My apologies for not posting in a while. After getting caught up from the holidays, I found I was getting frustrated with my paint pot procrastinating. As busy as I stay with building and converting, and even getting a start to the painting, I still run into a painters block and can't seem to get things finished. Rather than post unfinished stuff, I held off in hopes I'd finish and be able to post a complete project. So far, no good. I've decided to post my WIP here, in hope that you all will forgive my painters block for a while.

First up is my Armored Basilisk Conversion. You might remember my post a while back about double tracking the new Hellhound hull. I had noted I was working on something I'd show later. This is the something. In the top picture you can see I used a Shadowsword turret assembly as the basis for an armored Basilisk. The turret is too wide to fit the standard Chimera hull, so some modification was needed to make it work. The picture to the right is the WIP for the double tracking of the hull I discussed in a previous post. The old Chimera sides made it too wide, so I used the new Chimera sides. It actually works quite well.

The next challenge was to make the barrel assembly. I didn't want to just plop a Shadowsword top on a widened Chimera hull. Plus I was getting the big parts from bitz buys and wanted to limit my purchases. So I scratch-built the barrel using a writing pen tube, an Xacto blade protector, and barrel bits from an old style Demolisher. I found a large plastic bushing to transition from barrel to turret. A nail holds it in place, allowing the barrel to elevate. The turret doesn't rotate, which begs the question, “Is it still a turret?” My original barrel-to-hull transition was cumbersome, and would have complicated making the turret rotate, so I decided not to try. I wished I’d rethought when I change to the bushing, because I think making it rotatable, like modern self propelled artillery, wouldn’t have been that much more effort. If I can get the bitz cheap, I may try it.

As you can see, there's a fair amount of card stock involved. I've had plain plastic stock saved up for a while, but I didn't hesitate to use other stock of opportunity. In this picture, you can see a used gift card. The blue pieces are punch-outs from an electrical circuit box and are supposed to be vents. The clear pieces were once a twist off top to a drink bottle, and will be tail/backup lights and perhaps a place to add some markings. I broke one of the antennas off before I was even done with it, and both are now magnetized.


Two more pictures to show the front and other side. While the intent was to magnetized the hull weapon, instead of adding a magnet I glued a piece of metal under the hole. I figured the magnet would be strong enough, but now I miss the holding power of using two. For instance, I’m not sure where the HB I magnetized, missing in these latest pics, has gone. Yep, magnet on both sides from now on…

Basilisk: More WIP

Amongst the four models on my work bench now (not counting various infantry in the paint pot queue), is this standard Basilisk. I posted a WIP a few weeks ago. After two tone painting a few Leman Russ tanks, I've decided my standard paint scheme needed a small bit of light grey. The main two colors on my vehicles are a gray spray primer and a camo tan Krylon paint for plastics. Since this Basilisk was the first planned from the outset as three colors, I decided to start with a light grey base coat. I then taped the areas needing to remain light grey, and followed with a coat of dark grey. Another taping (over the original), and follow up with the final coat of camo tan.

While I like how it turned out, I found I tend toward applying heavy coats of spray. I guess I wanted to be sure I got a solid, even coat all around, but this can lead to some thick areas where the third coat is applied. Some of the tape lines needed smoothing as well. Frankly it probably isn't much different than I'd have achieved brushing it on, so I'm not concerned about this particular piece. I will however take a lighter touch on the next try.

I am also considering applying the light grey last. The light grey overlaps the other two colors, so that would require removing the previous tape and reapplying for the final coat. Something I had hoped to avoid by spraying light grey first, but I think applying it last would thin the paint over most of the model.

As you can tell from my earlier post about it, this Basilisk is the victim of my Paint Pot Procrastination because of another distraction on the workbench, a Valkyrie. I couldn't resist detailing the inside, and have probably put more time into it than I will the outside. A shame considering the outside will be seen much more than the inside, but I really enjoy the detail GW put into it and wanted to do it up nice. One thing I relearned here is the sticking power of primer over straight paint. To be sure of a strong bond where the hull pieces will attache, I removed the grey primer along the edges. It took a bit of scraping to get it all. Scraping regular paint from plastic means big chunks at a time. Paint over primer is much more stubborn. Really hit home the need to prime first.

Double Tracking the new Hellhound Hull

So, I've decided to build an armored basilisk. In my typical eureka fashion, I thought up something I haven't seen done, and am somehow finding a way to make it work. I'll cover the basic idea in another post, once I get a bit farther along. I don't want to give it all up right away. Though I hadn't originally planned to widen the tracks, the bits I decided to use for the armored part require it. After a couple experiments, this is what I came up with.

To widen the tracks of the old Chimera/Hellhound kit, you simply glued road wheels side by side and glued the track to that. While that probably could still work, you'd have to find a new source of road wheels, as the new kit doesn't use them. The new Hellhound sides come with spacers that fit together, one side is a "male," the other is a "female." So, first off, you need to make them both "female" as shown in the top photo. You need to make the new holes the same size as the old ones, so keep that in mind.

Next, find eight nails with the same diameter, and cut them the length of two pieces of tank tread side by side. If you can't find a nail the right diameter, like me, you'll need to get one a little larger and file it down a bit. It needs to be a snug fit.

The third picture shows the width of the standard Hellhound side piece. The next picture is of the widened side piece, having the nails as spacers. The nails, tightly fitted in the spacer holes, give you the rigidity you need to remove any play in the finished side piece. If they end up moving around too much, you're going to start loosing tread pieces. We don't want that.

Next up is the treads themselves. It's not good enough to simply glue two pieces of tread together. One strong push on the joint and you'll break the glue join. Also, the edges of the tread has natural gaps, which would allow you to "see-through" them once finished. While there may be other ways to do this, I chose to use some old two-part epoxy I had laying around and connect them together as shown in the fifth picture.

The sixth picture shows a partially finished wide track side. If you look close, you can see the epoxy poking up through the tread. Please ignore the plasticard attachment, for now. You'll see what that's for in a later post.

One shame to note. There is absolutely no difference in the new tracks than the old. They are exactly the same, down to every hinge and tread pad. What you see here are actually old treads I had lying around. And, although they look a bit different, the sides have the same overall dimensions. The fact that the tread lines up perfectly once assembled shames me, as I could never get them to do that with the old road wheel system. Kudos to GW for improving this part of the kit.

Basilisk WIP

So, I purchased a Basilisk on eBay a while back. I had always had good luck with my eBay purchases. That was not the case here. It was pretty bad off. Most of the back end and some gun carriage parts were broken or missing, and there was glue in too many places. I now buy only un, or partly, finished stuff. The sides were still salvageable, as was the gun itself. Shortly after this purchase, I was lucky to get a couple more Basilisks still on the sprue for a steal. Unfortunately, they mostly sat waiting for their time to be built. I was inspired recently to build an armored Basilisk; now still very much WIP, to be covered soon. Many of the parts I won't be needing on the armored variant are exactly what I needed to flip the ruined piece. Here is the WIP.


This is pretty much the standard Basilisk. I don't like the tall shield, so cut that down a bit. It's got some old pewter pieces thrown in, and I've still got some little adjusting to do, but it's pretty much done. I did try a little something different with the back. I added some window screen to fill in the gap between floor and hand rail. Last thing the crew wants is a wayward round rolling off the back. Plus, it's a great place to hang their packs and other assorted gear. Note the backpack in the lower left will be hanging off one of the side hand rails after it's all painted.

One thing I've been concerned with for my own Basilisks was the ladder on the back end. It's a very breakable piece, just hanging out the back by two fragile pieces of plastic. Even a Forge World example shows this break point (see bottom picture here). So, I gave it a bit of thought and came up with an idea for a "hinge." I drilled a hole through one of the round bits you find on the back of every sprue, sliced pieces of the round, trimmed a flat end and glued it to where the ladder usually connects, where the rivets are. I trimmed, rounded and holed each top of the ladder, and connected it all together with the head of a pin. Now I can flip it over to a somewhat safer area for transit. I had hoped it would lay over flat, but I didn't get it trimmed right. I didn't want to adjust this one anymore, as that would just weaken the remaining plastic. I still think it's possible to get it to lay flat, and will give it another go when I finally get around to building my other standard Basilisk.

Vanquisher Barrel Conversion

A couple weeks ago, Col. Hessler asked if anyone knew a good way to extend the LR barrel. He's planning to build a Vanquisher. I had actually been playing with this idea for a bit, and finally got to the point I could share. While this particular project didn't involve a standard LR tube, I did have a FW Conqueror turret that needed a barrel extension. So that is what I'm using here. The LR tube is about the same diameter, so this should work with that as well. My limitation was it needed to be removable, so this barrel isn't permanently attached.

What I did was to find a hard plastic Bic style pen tube and took the ink and ball-point parts out. Next I held it to the end of the Conqueror tube and measured the length. I actually have a similar FW Vanquisher turret, so I used that length for reference. I then angled the end of the new barrel as seen in the top picture. After experimenting with various plastic parts, what I ended up using was a 1/4 inch copper coupling (50 cents at the local home improvement center). While the inner diameter is a tad large, the outer diamer is perfect. I found a soft plastic bushing to help fill in the gap, but Green Stuff would work fine here as well. I also had to fill in a bit to transition from coupler to barrel.

To build up the front of the barrel, I used some leftover metal tape I had from a home improvement project. This is very thin, very smooth stuff, which works good for this conversion. Thin strips of plastic card might work as well, but I was concerned with how well the glue would hold so went with the tape. I cut two lengths of different widths, using the wider width on the bottom. A bit of glue over where the tape ended to fill the gap, and there you have it.

Sentinels

Here's a recently completed trio of sentinels, with an armored sentinel on the left following two scout sentinels. The one in the middle has been done for a couple months. The other two I just finished up last week. The armored sentinel is the Steel Legion version, with extra armor on the legs. Extra points for anyone who can recognize the source of those. All three sport a very simple painting technique. First apply a coat of grey primer, mask with Play-Do, add a coat of tan camouflage paint (Krylon Fusion spray), add additional colors/highlights to suit, finish with P3 tank wash, and highlight where needed. All weapons are magnetized, but the armored variant's plasma and missile launchers are (currently) only useable on this particular model. What missile launcher, you ask?

Why, this one of course, shown here in a side by side with its plasma cannon self. The missile launcher is from the Dark Angels Ravenwing accessory sprue. The plasma cannon is the one from the Space Marines Devastator box. I had planned for these conversions before the new sentinel box came out, but only recently fount time to make it. The missile launcher was a fairly straight forward conversion, the most difficult parts being where to cut the missile pod arm and drilling for the magnets. The plasma cannon arm was a bit more challenging.

The basic bitz are from the SM Devastator set. The cabling just wasn't going to work for this conversion, as it was designed to curve around a SM torso. So they and the arm were removed. Finding the replacement cable was easy, as I had leftovers from a long completed electrical project. While the thinner red wire was good to go, making the blue into articulated cabling required more effort. I needed to cut roughly equal lengths in the wire's outer insulation without pushing the insulation off the end, and avoid cutting the inner copper wire. Easy enough to do, but a bit time consuming. The nice thing about doing it this way was, once spaced, friction pretty much kept the insulation pieces in place, even after some rough handling.

Cutting to length was the next challenge. I attached the magnets first, in order to free up my hands for fitting the wire. Once I had the desired wire length, I drilled holes in the power pack and the cannon's front receptacle, stripped a short bit of insulation from the end of the wires, added a bit of glue, and inserted the wire center into the drilled holes, much like pinning. After the glue dried, I bent the wire until I was happy with how it looked. It's rigid enough to hold its shape when the plasma cannon is being attached or removed from the Sentinel. Just to be sure, I added some super glue to help with that. In hindsight, I would have spread the gap a bit wider to better show off the wire core.

Though using a plasma cannon from the new Sentinel kit would probably have been much easier, I'm happy with the results of this conversion. Always nice to know there’s different options.

Modeling a real vehicle.

So I seem to have fallen off the net for a bit, but it was not for having nothing to do. The company I work for supports Marine Corps acquisition efforts, and a project officer was leaving after three years. The support team wanted to give something unique, a reminder of the effort. A model of the vehicle, called a Ground Sensor Surveillance Vehicle (GSSV), was the ideal memento, but the team didn't have anyone that could make it happen. Fortunately, I found out about it and wanted to give it a try. The photo here was the goal, and it needed to be 1/72 scale. Unfortunately, I only had about three and a half weeks to purchase the basic kit and make the conversion. I readily admit I'm not the quickest with construction, conversion and ultimately painting. Frankly, I wasn't sure I was up to the task, given the short time period and other commitments. This had to be done on my own time.

I started out by researching what HMMWV kits are available in 1/72 scale. The most modern version I could find was this M1114 version made by Dragon. As you can see from the box art, it’s the armored hatch back variant. While there was enough similarity, there was still a lot to do to make it a GSSV. Before I started I had already lost a week volunteering at a Boy Scout event and finding the model. Luckily, I was able to find it at a local hobby store. It has been a while since I worked with such a small scale, but the small size actually turned into an advantage. It meant I didn't have to go into excruciating detail to present a creditable version.

Essentially, what I had to do was to remove the model's hatch back and replace it with the boxy structure at the back. I made the back using some plastic card (actually, a hotel room card key) around a frame of squared GW sprues and some green stuff to smooth the edges. Another challenge was the radio and IED antennas, which were done using round sprue bits from the Dragon kit. The larger antennas were straight sprue, the smaller ones were done by softening the round sprue over heat and stretching it to the required diameter and length. The thimble shaped IED antenna at the back was also made using sprue bits from both GW and the Dragon kit. Had I another week, I would have fixed the windows too, but just didn't have the time to make that happen. The end result is pictured here on a base made out of foam board with simple basing of glue, sand and paint.

Another challenge was how to best present it. This wasn't part of the initial request, and I hadn't really considered it much when I first offered to build it. The more I worked on it though, the more I felt it needed something. Not only to protect it from being handled, but to provide an attractive display. It was a going away memento after all, so couldn't rightfully be handed over as a fragile finished model. I wrestled with how to do this as I'd never had to meet his requirement before. It needed to be inexpensive, and I had passed the window for ordering one, assuming I could even find something online. The small size and tall antennas were limiting factors, and most of what I was finding was either too short, or had too big a base. Luckily, I made another trip to Michaels and happened down an aisle I hadn't been before. I found a glass jar made for holding shells or other small collectables. While the lid was glass, it was a friction hold using soft plastic. I figured by turning it upside down, and covering up the soft plastic with card stock and the memento information, it would still have enough friction to hold and make a very nice display. It worked very well and was presented last week. It was a big hit.

Other than the cost of materials, there was no money involved. So while this wasn't "commission" work, it is the first work I've done for someone else. It sports the same colors I use on my Imperial Guard vehicles, so I did manage some work on models already waiting their turn at the paint pot. A couple Leman Russ' were primed, and I finished two sentinels last night. I'll post them up the middle of next week.

Leman Russ Annihilator

My last post included a Leman Russ Annihilator that I’ve had scratch built for a while, still waiting for its turn at painting. Like Admiral Drax, I had hoped for the Annihilator to be included in the new IG Codex. I like the idea of IG twin-linked lascannon goodness. Shame it was not meant to be. It'll get painted up (soon), as I’m sure it will come in handy for friendly Apocalypse battles. I’ve already used it for one battle, but it presented a tempting target and got taken out early.

I’ve included a couple WIP pics that better show some of the parts involved. It would be hard to recreate this one now, as some parts were purchased before GW stopped selling bits. The big piece in the front is from a Baal Predator. I filed off the symbol as best I could and then covered it with a clear piece from a blister pack. I love the detail on the smoke launchers too, but they are from the old Scout biker kit and are also no longer available.

I decided it was time to get some guitar string to use in conversions, I saw the look on many Forgeworld turrets, and finally made the trek to my local music store. One US dollar gave me plenty of “cabling” for future scratch building fun. It’s easy to work with, though you need a strong wire cutter; not a problem for me. I like the look it adds, and will use it on large model conversions in the future. I’m thinking of buying a smaller gauge wire for use on drop troop and similar conversions.

One other feature I like about this conversion is the wider turret. This was done using the demolisher turret bits. I had to make the turret wider so the wide Baal Predator bit would fit, but like the look enough that I’m considering making it standard on my future Russes. Since these bits are also not sold separately, I’ll need to learn to make a mold and use resin, so don’t count on anything real soon with this idea.

The hatch and commander are magnetized and removable which I did to a couple of my Russes for ease of transport. There is also a small magnet on the targetter box on the left side of the turret, which is for a HK missile (shown in the top picture). The WIP shots don’t have it, but there is an antenna mount at the rear of the turret, also magnetized for adding improved comms if desired.