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A thousand ways for things to go wrong even before the local gangs start getting twitchy? Sounds 40k Imperium to me!

Looks good overall, only thing making me twitchy is the lack of a brace to keep the edges of the landing pad from flopping/tilting when the craft don’t land dead center over or between the pillars. A couple I beams from the edge to the pillars would be sufficient.

Thank you all for looking in and the feedback!

 shasolenzabi wrote:
Looking good! so the landing pad has an actual office now!

Hi Shas! Yup, the container office was always a planned part of this project build, ever since I saw Insaniak messing around with them on his blog awhiles back. It also made a good starter subject for the airbrush- too big for me to miss, too cheap to worry about ruining. Having done one, I'm now highly desirous of doing more, more realistically. Believe it or not, I tried to replicate the weathering on a real, dingy yellow shipping container in my neighborhood- I took a photo on my phone (I'm old enough that saying that still sounds odd, or at least very 'Get Smart-ish') to use as a guide.

Wirecat wrote:
I am not a fan (snicker) of office _under_ the landing pad that is not as thick as a carrier deck. You may survive the down blast, but will You get out when someone screws the approach protocol or an engine gives up?

Nah, it is good! Serviceable.

Nope, you are right on this snicker, Wirecat. Among my many self-defeating and conflicting 'musts' for this project was a need to use up a piece of plywood I had already cut for a base, get the storage container office worked in there and use up the double DvD holder I had lying around. I also wanted to do something 'deliberately' not regular- in other words, not on a perfectly square, right angle alignment. If you look at my promethium refinery from the LOER contest, it is _very_ regimented in its alignment. So, I arranged things off right angles, more free-flow, and everything was fine. Until I realized that my landing skid equipped Condor couldn't possibly land on such a tiny landing pad. So it had to be VTOL to make 'sense'. And now the office (at a minimum, really, the whole blinking site) gets bathed in noxious jet fumes every tme the Condor lands or takes off. Making the bird a VTOL was a duex-ex-machina for the short landing pad- now I need another duex-et-machina to handle the exhaust fumes! I must hie myself hence to cogitate upon this conundrum!

 ChaoticMind wrote:
A thousand ways for things to go wrong even before the local gangs start getting twitchy? Sounds 40k Imperium to me!

Looks good overall, only thing making me twitchy is the lack of a brace to keep the edges of the landing pad from flopping/tilting when the craft don’t land dead center over or between the pillars. A couple I beams from the edge to the pillars would be sufficient.

Agreed, CM- many things in the Imperium are deliberately made to be dangerous to the user- plasma guns and multi-meltas come to mind. I may fix a piece of 'blast shielding under the deck to bear the brunt. But struts I had envisioned from get go; in a couple fo the pics earlier you can see where I drilled the pilot holes to use to affix them to the main poles. They'll run up to the edge of the landing pad. Theoretically.

I may also scale back my plans for two elevators, I'm running out of room on the small footprint I've decreed for myself. Ditton the LED lighting- that may have to wait for a simpler, more straightforward project to play with. Or, knowing me, I'll tackle my Reaver Titan next and light that up for a first time go. I do still want to include my little mechanic, but she may have to be working on something up on the landing pad itself, rather than on an engine hoist down in the yard. We'll see. A lot I won't know until things get stuck down and I see what I have left.

Thank you all again for the interest and the feedback. I'm having a ball with this project and remember: it's not done until it's OVERDONE!

The next big piece that the diorama needed was one of the elevators up to the landing pad. (Given the space limitations on the base I'm using, it may be the _only_ elevator- although I plan an enclosed ladder up one of the columns.)

I used Hirst Arts Mold #294 for the pieces and glued them up:





Used the airbrush to basecoat (a color called 'Thrash Metal' by Scalecolor)- didn't primer or anything, just straight on:



Used the airbrush again to put a 'dusting' of Pavement Dark Grey (almost black) over just about everything, to dull it down,and heavier in places where the rust was going to go:





And finally used a brush to (for me) carefully apply rust in strategic and limited places. I didn't want the elevator to look like new, but I didn't want it to be a towering pile of crepescance, either:





And here's how it looks tacked into position:





I'm thinking about making the bit at the top a sort of control tower- glass enclosed and with antennae and such like, since it is too tall. We'll see. And I need to throw together an elevator car, of course.

On a different note, who knew there was so much usable stuff in a simple mouse?



And yup, the mouse carcass is for a project in which I rip off all of kestral's recent terrain modeling goodness. It's already underway and half built!

Thank you for looking in, constructive criticism always welcome.

More follows soonest!

Elevator is coming along great , I keep seeing scale 75 paints getting used, I might have to check a few out.

Good work. coming together nicely.

Thanks Doc! I've notched out the landing pad a bit so the elevator tower/frame fits snugly on the base- it was bugging me that it was hanging off, and I'd already epoxied the pillars down! This is what happens when you 'build first, design later'.

Thanks Theo! I'm running a little bit of everything through the airbrush at the moment, from ScaleColor (the best of the pre-thinned paints I've used so far) to Walmart 50 cents a bottle craft paints (with heavy use of flow improver). The metal set I got from ScaleColor is almost too subtle in some of its shades (Aluminum, Steel and Thrash Metal are almost indistinguishable from each other- which might make them good candidates for very subtle shading, now that I mention it) but the other metallic- Emerald, White and Plasma (electric, pulsing, virulent Blue) are very distinct. I am finding that I like working with pre-thinned paints more, sometimes the pigment in the cheap craft paints is just not ground very finely, and you can't get a smooth coat no matter what you do. But sometimes you get surprisingly good results (the copper I used on the pipes project, for instance). I'm keeping a notebook.

I have my project inspired by kestral's Tau scenery underway, and will be trying some layering techniques with the airbrush to simulate a building's basecoat paint overlaid with desert scoring and dust- we'll see how that works out. Very glad I got the airbrush though, lots of new possibilities (although there are many things I can still only do with a brush ).

More follows soonest.

So here's an update on a lot of subcomponents of more than one project. I wanted to keep things under wraps until more nearly finished, but I'm not advancing quickly enough so will throw some WIP shots out.

First, borrowing kestral's excellent use of a watch display, here's an antenna for on top of the other idea I ripped off from kestrel (but am not showing yet). Frankly, seeing it here, it could also be an anti-ship laser:

Basic components:



Refined:



Assembled:



Some pieces of another project that goes along with:



The Condor with the top basecoated (love that airbrush!):



Hey Captain Brown- now my guys can sing "She's gone so long" around a burn barrel like the group Chilliwack!



And finally, this is part of the suck on what little time I do have to paint/build/create- I've been messing with it for more than a week trying to get a decent print off it:





The piece looks fuzzy because I'm not doing something right, somewhere. But I will persevere- this is my side-hustle when I retire in a couple of years!

More follows soonest.

Love the radar dish doo-dad!

Meer,

I have a lot of experience with 3D printing and such, drop me a line if you need help!

--Brian

Thanks Briancj- I've sent you the deets!

That satellite dish-looking doohickie looks interesting. Very clever use disposable items laying around the house.

Good work on the dish , great use of parts

3D printing... Watching intensifies.Have a good extrusion, Meer-Cat.

The dish is neat, although with such big axial assembly it is going off the way to somewhere. I wander how such a diverse assembly of parts will prime and hold the paint....

 oldravenman3025 wrote:


That satellite dish-looking doohickie looks interesting. Very clever use disposable items laying around the house.

 Theophony wrote:
Good work on the dish , great use of parts

Thanks ORM, Theo! I should name this project 'Stuff I stole from kestrel', because everything I've got going (with one exception) is an idea he used on his Tau table! I've had that watch thingy hanging around forever- I was thinking about using it as a gun or missle mount for a Manticore counts-as, or equivalent, but when I saw his solar panel array I was hooked. Didn't have anything good around to make the solar panel though, so cheated and made the yuuuge antenna.

Wirecat wrote:
3D printing... Watching intensifies. Have a good extrusion, Meer-Cat.

The dish is neat, although with such big axial assembly it is going off the way to somewhere. I wander how such a diverse assembly of parts will prime and hold the paint....

Thanks Wirecat! I'm doing some 3d printing things right- I also get good adhesion (so far) because I re-level/check level the bed almost every print and certainly for every one that's going to take more than a couple of hours. There's just something about how the layers are laid down that isn't right- but I've got a lot of advice coming in, plus what I see on YouTube and the blogs online. BrianCJ is sending me some pointers as well.
I'm not worried about priming the antenna- a hefty dose of Rustoleum 2x (Primer and Paint in one) as the undercoat, that stuff sticks to anything. Then hit it with the airbrush to take the shine off, weather, salt, pepper to taste and Bob's your uncle- you're done!

Still working on the aerial delivery company- that's further along that it seems, got the wizard's house to do, a Kromlech version of a jet-bike mounted Eldar seer, a High Elf building idea that came to me after I found a bit of flotsam that's just screaming out to made into a project, I've infantry that need painting up and of course, more fiddling with the 3d printer.

More follows soonest!

A lot of cool projects going on Meer_cat. I would not have visualized those pieces into becoming a cool radar dish the way you did. I especially curious what the shell of the computer mouse will become. Also good luck with the 3D printing fun

Thanks Syro! Eventually I'll settle back down into taking on one thing at a time- it's my nature. But every once in awhole it's nice to throw caution to the winds and actually open two boxes at once!

Ok, finished a side trip from the aerial delivery company, one less distraction before finishing it, and getting started on my LOER project.

Here are some very poorly lighted shots of a desert outpost, with uplink antenna. Or, also known as "everything kestrel showed how to do in his blog a little while back".



You saw the antenna earlier- made from a piece of cheap personal fan from the dollar store, a toothpaste cap and a watch display stand from my cheap Timex and a couple of other bits and bobs. It's magnetized to the roof so it can removed for easier travel packing, display at ground level as another piece of scatter or used separately. I'm not entirely happy with the weathering and may hit it with some different colors, to look more like aluminum oxidation and less like ferrous rust.



The numbers are dry transfers for Pinewood Derby wooden race cars and they were surprisingly easy to apply- easier than water-slide transfers/decals. I got them cheap on sale at Hobby Lobby.





The pipe is made up of more castings from my Hirst Arts mold and airbrushed pretty much the same way as the earlier pipe project. I did use two more lighter shades of turquois and white to try to enhance the 'desert-y' look. I also used some of my grass clump bits, with greener ones close to the pipe (itself either a source of water or acting as a condenser in the early morning) and drier, dead clumps further away.



The door is another Hirst Arts casting. The main body of the outpost is a 3 inch to 4 inch PVC pipe connector (free from Home Depot because it was cracked) topped by an old smoke detector (thank you kestrel!). Using my airbrush, I base coated the whle thing metallic white, splotched it with burnt sienna dust patches and then dusted it all over with khaki.



The hatch is yet another Hirst Arts piece, from the robots mold. I covered the two indicator lightbulbs over with Blu-tac during painting, so they would look like navigation lights or something- if I'd been thinking, I'd have drilled them out from underneath and installed LEDs, oh well, maybe next time! You can also see the magnet glued on and looking like a bit of roof clutter (hopefully).





And a last couple of shots of the antenna, showing the weathering. On the radial elements I'm happier with the weathering, but the central radiator needs to be re-done and that's a fact. Still, overall, I'm pleased with the look and learned a lot more about using the airbrush. I'm still messing about with the 3d printer, so that took time away from actual modeling also.

I'm counting this one as done until I break out the weathering paints for the next project, I'll touch this one up at the same time.

And along about Christmas, holiday, I want to try speed painting these armies:



I backed the Forgotten Realms Norse versus Undead Kickstarter a long while ago- they've finally come in. I've never speed painted an army before, so this will be another interesting learning experience. I'll probably fit in a couple of one-offs of the character figures to get an idea of what paint scheme(s) I want, and then plan the production for when I've got some sit down and paint time- like Cam says, he gets so much done in a sitting because that's all he does- no TV, no music, no distractions.

We'll see what happens. More follows soonest.

The desert outpost looks good Meer_Cat
I'm curious about those minis from the kickstarter, good luck with the speed paint. I don't know why I always miss knowing about kickstarters

Wow. That radar dish is inspired!

Undead are really forgiving for speed painting - I did my entire lot of Mantic Undead in about a month total.

But for norse, the shields could be a big challenge! I saw someone using printed shields with the middle cut out with a hole punch as time saver, and I have to say it looked really good.

My preshiiiiuuussss….



Needed a pick-me-up coming home from work today, and viola! Here it was!

This is for the current League of Extraordinary Riveters competition. It's the beginning of an Engagement and Targeting Multiple Environment (E.A.T.M.E.) platform for hasty spaceport defense during orbital and airborne insertions.

The main platform itself will be fabricated from some leftover ceiling fan parts and bits of CD/DVD boxes:



Conveniently, the central spindle simply unthreads from the base:



I need to fasten two of these together to form the fighting platform, once complete all of the weapons and other systems will be mounted on old CDs (mostly came in the mail as advertisements, I use them for painting palettes) and can be swapped in and out based on what you want/need- thus fulfilling the Double Entendre requirement for the contest- a piece of terrain that can be converted over by design to fill more than one function:



The posts are for the two halves to line up and make it easier on the glue and/or greenstuff to hold things.

More follows soonest.

This blog is full of genius. Amazing creativity and really neat builds.

Thank you for the kind words, Gordy! It has been a lot of fun over the past couple of years and more so because Dakka provides a place to share everything.

Meer_Cat,

That Antenna Uplink is really neat,

Cheers,

CB

Thanks very much, Captain! I want to take another crack at the weathering- I'm not happy with the rust streaking I tried for and want to go over it with sponge-dab darker greys, with just a little bit of rust in. Insaniak's new vehicle (I can't believe that it is made from MDF) is exactly almost what I want for the antenna and the building door.

The build for LoER is off to a good start, looking forward to it progressing. I also like the name

Thanks for looking in, Syro! Yep, the Imperial Guard would be lost without a few good acronyms.

Here's tonight's work:

The plastic 'pegs' made from styrene channel and fixed in place with superglue broke off, so I cut strips from an AARP advertisement card and fixed them in place with JB Weld:



I've since added the top plate to it, also fixed in place with JB Weld, but it's drying and has a ton of books on it to keep the seam closed tight, so a picture of that tomorrow, I think.

I used machine screws to fasten the ceiling light sem to its base:



And countersunk the screw heads so that if I ever get to go someplace to game, they won't scratch up someone's nice table. I have some felt lying around, I'l probably cover the bottom of the base with that, just to be fussy:



Here's the central column that holds the fighting platform up, fitted into place but not glued/epoxied/welded/etc yet:



And, this is the League of Extraordinary Riveters, so here's some riveting; black 1mm sequins on flat black metal- please just shoot me now. Actually, I think they came out kind of okay, and there are many more to emplace. I found that I couldn't pick them up and put them down so that the faceted side showed, I had to flip them and put them down so that the flat side was up- it was the only way I could grab them with tweezers:





And through the magic of close-up photography, I see at least one rivet that needs to be re-stuck down!

More follows soonest.

There's just no time to paint/model lately and my stupid 3d printer is sucking up a lot of the oxygen in the room- it may have to go.

First, here's a new gizmo I found on Etsy from Mack the Maker- he calls it a 'shark fin paint pot holder' and it keeps the lid back on Citadel-type paint bottles (it holds both sizes):





As for the E.A.T.M.E., the tower base is mostly done(needs some gubbins attached) and the base of what will be a spiral metal stair up to the fighting platform is done.



The 'ship-killer' laser cannon is starting to come together too. We have a lady at church who can paint the inside of a Christmas ornament by working the brush through the small hole where the hanger attaches at the neck of the ball- it's amazing. I have a _much_ larger opening to work with and want to paint some 'lightning in the bottle' if I can manage to represent that titanic forces waiting to be aimed an unleashed on a low-orbit warship:



These bits and bobs are to make the stairway and two of the inter-changeable platforms to allow the tower to provide a multitude of functions, depending on what the game calls for:



More follows soonest.

Interesting! Will be following to see where this takes you, I love how you can turn anything in cool looking models!

Thanks CK- and welcome back! I saw your photos showing up in the gallery again, so I knew you were somewhere about!