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@Gitsplitta, wouldn't you have to hand carve the mould out of soapstone? Wouldnt that be brutally difficult?

Nope, it's rediculously easy. I've got a dozen molds that I made years ago just lying around in the basement. The trick is to get a nice, uniform, clean piece of stone that doesn't have any occlusions or dense streaks running through it as they can make carving detail much more difficult or result in little chunks of the mold getting blown out, ruining the cast.

I made a hat band for my dad's birthday once. Made a mold of an arrowhead from scratch while he waited, we cast the pieces together right there in the garage & I took the cooled mounts, cleaned them up and mounted them for him on a leather band... Best present I ever got him (he says) as I did the whole thing from scratch, custom made, right before his eyes. He still wears that hat.

That's why I'd thought about soapstone casting in pewter for the wings earlier on... it's not that difficult and with a nice hot mold you can cast some pretty finely detailed (and thin) stuff. Trick is (as with all metal casting) to be smart about how the piece/mold is designed so the shape works with you toward a successful casting & not against you. Unfortunately I've never done (cold) resin casting before so I don't know the dynamics enough to provide Blackhand with any useful ideas. He's the pro on that subject.

Well, compared to yours
I bet if I went over it again now, it would be better.

did pewter casting once with a cuttlebone (the chalky white bit from in side a cuttle-fish) worked great! who would have thought.

@BBL: sure it would... take a look in my gallery... look at the picture of my original (dark green) dread, then of the newly painted green dread, then the yellow dread. No comparison, even from the newer green to the yellow. Read, practice, learn, practice, ask questions, practice. I've watched nearly everyone in the GMS get significantly better over the last few months, including both you and I. So don't worry how your old dread compares with my new one... just make sure that your next dread is better than the last. Do that every time and you'll be using Golden Demons for door-stops in no time at all!




@weety: Yeah, did that too. Awfully hard to find a big enough piece of cuttlefish bone to do anything interesting & they're really fragile. Doesn't take much rough handling to have them crumble in your hands. Think I'll stick with the soapstone.


What I neglected to mention about the soapstone is that doing a 2-sided mold in soapstone is more complex a process than a simple 1 sided mold. So a proper wing would require registration points (pins) in the stone so that you could get everything aligned properly.

I have used talc powder and it works fine, it just has never been necassary before, I hope it helps a nit with this mould, as for using soapstone and metal it would mean having to work outside as I don't have a garage, the fun of the resin is I can do all my casting in front of the computer watching downloaded movies and stuff




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Found this list of Badab war blogs , thought it might be useful as for you to mine some ideas from for your adepticon army

http://thefallenprinces.blogspot.com/p/badab-veterans.html

Thought you guys would get a laugh out of this...

Started here...


Ended here...


Now all I need to do is reassemble the corpse. I feel like Dr. Frankenstein... or Frankensplitta as the case may be.

The power of a jeweler's saw is a wonder to behold.

Lol, nice to see someone else likes to cut their marines into even more bits before they build them

The frankenbeakie marine!

And... my attempt to re-pose the right leg into a more upright position (all the beakie legs are crouching). Now you know why guys like Blackhand and Pyriel- at Chapterhouse do all my greens.... my sculpting skills suck!

cant wait to see how you put it back together again!

I would have justused a plastic Marine leg set.

i use linolium when i want too make a mould for something really thin. you only have too make sure the mold is flat with no marks at all

wolfshadow wrote:I would have justused a plastic Marine leg set.

Yeah, but the point of this army is to be as close to RT as possible. I only used the more modern beakie head because I needed the "neck" to give some elevation to the head and the original heads were made to be set into the armor. This figure was hunched and skrunched as it was... so I'm trying to work out of that with the build.

Ah the old "One second I'm squatting to go to the loo" Pose RT plastic SM mini's
gotta love the thought put into them ha ha I did love the old Missile launcher though a nice bit of gear that was!

I have 5 of those. Lucky for me the modern crouching devastator legs are made in the RT style (same legs that are on my kneeling sternguard figures), so I'll be replacing the original legs with those (which gives the model a bit of extra height and mass, important with the old RTs when you want them on the table with modern minis). The project above kind of got away from me. Originally I just intended to switch out the bolt pistol for the combi-melta... but the more I looked at him the less I liked everything else. I probably just should have built him up from a beakie body... but once I decide to use a figure I get kind of stubborn about giving up.

Don't know if you guys noticed but I changed the design on the combi-melta slightly. I moved the clip (after it fell off when I dropped the fig) from the side to underneath. It looses that sten-like look, but this is closer to how GW handles the modern combi-weapons and I must admit... I like it better. My big issue with this design is where to have a figure holding the gun in two hands (as opposed to one) put their second hand. Particularly if I make a switchable model where their might be a plasma gun on the bottom.

But... might not bother at this point. I only need a few of these guys for the army so it might not be worth the extra hassle. We'll see how the next build goes.

TBH, I prefer the side... That way it doest look like you have a bolder feed running through the mechanicals of a meltagun. But ti still looks better than average.

Well, we'll see how it looks once the model is reassembled, I can aways change the design back on the next one.

Just a quick heads up, Black Reach marines offer some good legs as well. Maxmini also makes some good bionic legs/arms that you could use.

Thanks WM, I'll look into them.

I have 53 more pages to go through before I post anything pertinent, but I will say after reading the 1st page and this page I'm really excited to see someone working with a really obscure chapter (Legion, really) with really old Space Marine miniatures.

I'll be back.

Oh, you're supposed to put them back together after cutting them up? That's where I've been going wrong.

Personally I prefered the magazine on the side too. But hey, your fluff supports having a few variations in there

Hey Skalk, welcome! It's kind of a chatty blog... more of a conversation that a "lookie what I did" kind of place. Once you get caught up, please join us!

@monkeytroll: That's right... I'm just experimenting. The clip on this one is pinned in, but I'll do the side clip on the next one so we can see the side-by-side.

(Actually a clever sculptor would just make naginatas that literally looked like a katana on the end of a pole (which is not far from the truth) that way you'd only have to make one mold and the buyer could just cut them down to make the katana if that's what they wanted.) wait... did I just say that out loud??

Subtle like a freight train
I hear ya dude, will think about it for sure.

*thinking done* Drop me a PM about this when you get the chance and we might think up something.

Now keep up kicking a** with those nice mantis marines!

monkeytroll wrote:Oh, you're supposed to put them back together after cutting them up? That's where I've been going wrong.

That made me chuckle monkeytroll.

I like what your doing with the beakie Gits. I've also ended up hacking marines to peices in order to re-assemble them (in particular my BT marshall who I've made 4 head swaps, 2 arm swaps, 2 weapon swaps and a Torso and Leg swap on since construction, good times ). The new look on the combi-melta is quite cool, but... I prefered the original design.

So you've got a BT themed chaos spawn now?

monkeytroll wrote:So you've got a BT themed chaos spawn now?

No, just a Space Marine which will never be completed...

My brother could never decide how he wanted the Marshal to look or what equipment it should have.

ROFL!

I guess your right Gits, this thread really is a "chatty" blog.

Amazing work man!