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This is coming togeather very well! Glad to hear you are no longer sick and able to keep goign at it!

 Ouze wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I will say I think orks would not allow the grots any of the really fun jobs, so there'd be an ork driving and orks opperating all the guns, with grots feeding ammo or making fixins.

Also really looking forward to seeing what you decide to do on the front with the deffrolla/ram etc.

Sorry to keep updating this thread with non-updates, at least not meaningful ones. But, I have been thinking about this post for a few days, and I also had an order out for both 2 ork gunners and a box regular grots on ebay (which arrived this morning) and my FW grots (which also arrived this morning).

This weekend I should be able to get some stuff done, and here is what I am working on:

1.) You are right about Orks vs Grots. There is nothing in IA8 that allows a Battle Fortress to have Grot Gunners. As such, the gunners will be the 2 orks off ebay, and whatever you sent me. It does allow grot riggers - an option I usually don't use - but in this case its going to have some grots on it anyway. Plus, now I have another 10 grots & a herder to add to my grot-mob in 40k.

2.) Additionally, I am definitely going to make a Deffrolla, since the battle fortress requires a reinforced ram or Deffrolla. Since the Deffrolla has so many more uses, I guess that's the way I'm going to go despite the lack of either on the reference model. The problem I'm having with this is I really don't know how to fit it in and I've been struggling conceptually with how to do it. If I make it the width of the cab, it's going to look too small. If I make it the width of the entire front of the vehicle, it's going to look a little too big. If I made it midway between those, it will look about right, but I also don't know where to put the arms that support it - they'd be right in the middle of the tracks. I'm kind of stuck here. I'm sort of opposed to using S-shaped arms that come out from the sides of the cab, and then go out over the width of the body, and then go forward again to join the Rolla, making the whole front of the vehicle look like one of those sticky lint-sweepers you use to get pet hair off your clothes, but not sure how else it can be done.

Hmm, I sent those gunners to you first class on Monday, they should have arrived to you by now?

I certainly meant the orks v grots in a background sense, but if they are not allowed to take grots on the guns it certainly makes sense to me, also an ork would definitely be driving it, for the thrill of driving over beakies and bugs and 'earing dem pop'.

Deff Rolla; with improvements to the actual bladed parts to be far more killy and terrifying, I really love this 'combine harvester' look:

 Ouze wrote:
The problem I'm having with this is I really don't know how to fit it in and I've been struggling conceptually with how to do it. If I make it the width of the cab, it's going to look too small. If I make it the width of the entire front of the vehicle, it's going to look a little too big. If I made it midway between those, it will look about right, but I also don't know where to put the arms that support it - they'd be right in the middle of the tracks. I'm kind of stuck here. I'm sort of opposed to using S-shaped arms that come out from the sides of the cab, and then go out over the width of the body, and then go forward again to join the Rolla, making the whole front of the vehicle look like one of those sticky lint-sweepers you use to get pet hair off your clothes, but not sure how else it can be done.

How about you split the roller in three? (ie a full width roller, but supported by two struts either side of the cab) Have the arms come out from the side of the cab, with a central roller the width of the cab, but with two smaller rollers on each end in front of the tracks? The rollers could be different or the same, or the two outer the same and the middle different (ie a crusher in front with smaller shredders on the sides).

Heyyy... that's an idea I had not considered. Let me see how that fits.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I will say I think orks would not allow the grots any of the really fun jobs, so there'd be an ork driving and orks opperating all the guns, with grots feeding ammo or making fixins.

Also really looking forward to seeing what you decide to do on the front with the deffrolla/ram etc.

Sorry to keep updating this thread with non-updates, at least not meaningful ones. But, I have been thinking about this post for a few days, and I also had an order out for both 2 ork gunners and a box regular grots on ebay (which arrived this morning) and my FW grots (which also arrived this morning).

This weekend I should be able to get some stuff done, and here is what I am working on:

1.) You are right about Orks vs Grots. There is nothing in IA8 that allows a Battle Fortress to have Grot Gunners. As such, the gunners will be the 2 orks off ebay, and whatever you sent me. It does allow grot riggers - an option I usually don't use - but in this case its going to have some grots on it anyway. Plus, now I have another 10 grots & a herder to add to my grot-mob in 40k.

2.) Additionally, I am definitely going to make a Deffrolla, since the battle fortress requires a reinforced ram or Deffrolla. Since the Deffrolla has so many more uses, I guess that's the way I'm going to go despite the lack of either on the reference model. The problem I'm having with this is I really don't know how to fit it in and I've been struggling conceptually with how to do it. If I make it the width of the cab, it's going to look too small. If I make it the width of the entire front of the vehicle, it's going to look a little too big. If I made it midway between those, it will look about right, but I also don't know where to put the arms that support it - they'd be right in the middle of the tracks. I'm kind of stuck here. I'm sort of opposed to using S-shaped arms that come out from the sides of the cab, and then go out over the width of the body, and then go forward again to join the Rolla, making the whole front of the vehicle look like one of those sticky lint-sweepers you use to get pet hair off your clothes, but not sure how else it can be done.

Hmm, I sent those gunners to you first class on Monday, they should have arrived to you by now?

I certainly meant the orks v grots in a background sense, but if they are not allowed to take grots on the guns it certainly makes sense to me, also an ork would definitely be driving it, for the thrill of driving over beakies and bugs and 'earing dem pop'.

Deff Rolla; with improvements to the actual bladed parts to be far more killy and terrifying, I really love this 'combine harvester' look:

Okay... dude...you just gotta model some blood/gore geyers off that thing somehow... like, Army of Darkness/Evil Dead explosion of gore! Well done mate!

Ouze... I'm drooling with envy! Wished I had some of that mad skillz.

 whembly wrote:
Ouze... I'm drooling with envy! Wished I had some of that mad skillz.

It's really super easy, generally.

--

So I have some good news and some less good news. The good news is I actually made some progress on this today, and have the deffrolla almost done. I also remembered to take pictures of the whole process. The less good news is the pictures came out awful. I used the very last drop of the Alumilite today, and will be replacing it with Tap resin as a replacement, which is ivory and matte. The Alumilite is interesting in some ways but at the end of the day the super high gloss, bright white finish of it makes it very, very difficult to photograph, at least for someone of limited photography skills like myself. The only saving grace is that these pictures generally don't need a lot of details to be useful from a tutorial/worklog perspective, and the few parts that do have detail that has been obscured (the deffrolla) will have more pictures later in the process. That's the best I can polish this turd, moving on...

So. I went to Lowes, and got some pipe. I think it was 2.5" diameter, but if you're following along at home, get whatever size you feel is appropriate. It was $3 or so.



I then lightly sanded the entire outside of the pipe with fine sandpaper (220 grit), just to take the shine off.

I capped the end of it with a piece of wide masking tape, and then flipped it over and pressed it into a piece of paper towel folded in quarters. It's not, as my wife cackled, " a piece of toilet paper" despite how poor the picture is.



I then mixed up 20ml of Alumilite and poured it into the pipe.15 minutes later, I had the pictured plug.



As it turns out, there may have been a better way to have done this. The Alumilite bonded with all the glue from the tape; so when I peeled the tape off it was utterly smooth, and the adhesive was really, really stuck to the Alumilite plug. I wound up removing it by simply rubbing it off with my thumbs (snicker) and then sanding it down a little, but in retrospect I probably should have just flipped it over and worked on the other side. Hindsight.

So, I then added some details to make it into a spindle for the rolla:



The center is a brass tube I filled with Alumilite. I had made the flange bit for a different project, which i made in this method: I took one of those covers from the syringes we talked about earlier, cut off an end, and slid it onto the brass tube, then dripped in a little resin to make it. The little discs are made with a leather punch and styrene, and I addeed hex bolt heads from Tychy Train Group. I then made a mold.



After molding it, I recast 2 more copies. It's been pretty important for me create molds of all the difficult bits so that, if I decide to make another one at some point, it will be easier since I can crank out components much more quickly. I've been working on this for about 3 months now, spending a few hours per weekend on it, but I think I can make the next one in a few days if I really worked on it with what I've made here.

So, you guys remember those armor plates I made earlier? These:



So, I used the mold for this to crank out a bunch of plates. The curing time for Alumilite is about 8 minutes or so (less when it's warm like it's supposed to be). I cranked a window to let some of the freezing-ass Iowa air in the room to arr-tard the curing process, and then cast the plates. I pulled them early, intentionally, about 5 minutes in. They were solid enough to hold their shape, but still a little soft, like a Jolly Rancher you've sucked to the halfway point. I then put a little thin CA on the rolla and pressed the plates on, molding them to shape of the tube, and gluing my fingers to the tube about 9 times before I got a feel for how much CA to use (less is more).

This was tedious. It took about 3 hours until I had it all covered. Here's an awful picture where the brightness of the resin combined with my lousy photography completelty obliterated just about all of the detail:



Those plates all have riveting edging them.

So here's where I am right now:



As you can see, I decided to go with a very traditional, full width rolla, and am going to just put the arms on the side. I thought about this an awful lot, and I think it segues nicely into how I'm going to paint it: I am going to go with my traditional 3 color grey camo, b-b-but I'm going to darken the base colors a hair, and then on the sides of the arms, I'm going to do them in red, and add big, bulky white teefs to the side. I'm then going to do lots of gore and red washes on the Deffrolla to give the whole thing the look of a hungry mouth (I hope).

Still to do:

1.) Spikify and Bladerize the Rolla
2.) Figure out the arms, and add teefs
3.) Get the gunners I got from MGS (thanks again, btw!) and the one I got on ebay cleaned up.
4.) Finish the quad mount gun and work in the grot gunner I got from Ebay, if workable.
5.) Make tripods for the dek shootas.
6.) Make some kind of an engine. I haven't decided much on this yet. I'll probably just try and copy the one off the back of my Kill Bursta as much as possible, because last I saw in the gallery, there are only voting radio dials for "paint job" and "coolness", not "Originality"
8.) ????
9.) Profit
10.) move to the public fora?
11.) Prime and paint

Now THAT is a Deffrolla - very nice!

That rolla is looking nice n brutal.

Definitely needs some spikes and perhaps you should hang some trophies about the vehicle?

Something that bothers me a mite, the walls either side of the vehicle above the tracks, they still look too much like smooth and equally cut flat surfaces with plates attached to them, some additional weathering and layers of more plates, chains, rivets and spikes should break their crisp outline up. Same for the walls above them with the guns.

I also think something like a glyph/grill on the front, perhaps like a skull or teef, on the front of the cab and some big 'eadlites'.

Yeah, I hadn't finished armoring any of the walls before I got bored and moved on to the other stuff, and then I forgot about it. I'll fix the to-do list.

Ok, I did some work this morning.

Here are some spikes on the Deffrolla. Still WIP:



I also got the Grot Gunner ready to go. I added some feet to him, and made him a little chair. I'm going to have him centered in the middle of the quad gun. I also added a loop to change his ear-cups into headphones, because those guns are loud and Orks believe in safety first.



Here's a frontal view. It's a little dusty in there.



So we talked about the Dek (Dekk?) earlier. Turns out it's really, really hard to fit 4 orks on top of it. So I made lemonade out of lemons and expanded it a little. Its still WIP - when the glues good and cured I'll cut out the wall sections you can currently see in the way.



That one closest to the camera, that's a little lopsided? I might rip it off and do a better job on it. The others are all pretty good, that one was the first one.

And here's where I'm at:

Got a little more done, probably it for the weekend.

Here are the connecting arms:



And here's a test fit:



I didn't really measure too much when I built the rolla, and so the plugs can slide in and out of the tube to adjust it. It looks about right.

I haven't yet put any teefs on the structure of the arms, but that's where it's going.

Now that's looking grand mate.

Looks nice and Killy

 Ouze wrote:

Here's a frontal view. It's a little dusty in there.

Really reminds me of the guy with the quad M4s from waterworld...

I've never seen Waterworld, it looks absolutely bananas though.

Contrary to popular belief and legend, it is a fairly decent movie...

 Alpharius wrote:
Contrary to popular belief and legend, it is a fairly decent movie...

Yeah... I find myself watching it everytime I flip to it.

It was better than The Postman was. The funny thing is the valdize sp? was renamed prior to the making of the movie. for a while it resided here in Portland.

Ouze, I hadn't seen the 4th page here- it is looking fantastic! The deff rolla and grot gunner are great and the new deck helps a lot. I think it makes the whole thing have a bit more shape / look less like a big box.

The arms for the deff rolla look good, as long as they don't make this already monstrous model too wide!

Ok, progress on this has slowed a little, due to, frankly, Mechwarrior Online. It's eating up a lot of my free time. Additionally, I'm covering some extra shifts this week, so no real updates this weekend yet either. I do have this to offer for now.


I got stuck on the engine. I'm not burdened with a lot of creativity - I mostly just recreate things I've seen elsewhere. To do the engine for this won't be any different - I'm going to essentially try to copy the engine from the Kill Bursta. This has been substantially harder then I expected; I spent a really long time looking around the house for junk to use. I came up empty, and wound up using Super Sculpey to make a body shape and bake it. I then added some styrene strips, as below:



I then recast it. This was sort of a waste of silicone because the engine had no detailing on it yet, but I think it was a necessary evil. Super Sculpey is, like, immune to super glue. I was barely able to hold those styrene strips on there long enough to recast it, and making anything from it would have been impossible. My Tap Plastics resin arrived this morning (yay!) so here is where I am with the engine, in resin:



Funny, even though it's ivory colored, the picture is still super overexposed. It's like maybe it's not that the material is hard to photograph so much as I'm just a really, really lousy photographer.

I'm planning on adding some really bulky rivets to those strips and adding various gubbins. I've ordered some nice big Tichy Train Group ones off Ebay today, so early next week.

This was in the fortune cookie that came with my dinner.

Most portentious!

I demand progress!

Ouze has been sucked in by Bioshock Infinite...

And Mechwarrior Online, before that... but I also have other stuff related to this that caused hiccups. I ran out of resin, and that just got delivered, and I ordered a ton of different types of rivets to do the engine. I should have some progress this weekend - I found some interesting bits to try and advance it.

I got a little bit more done today.

I made a mold of the top of some bubble bath:



cast it twice, and came up with this kind of boiler\tank thing. I added some styrene strips to it:



I did some more work on the engine as well.



The tank will fit aside the engine like so:



only a little higher up, with some kind of hose connecting them.

My rivets arrived today:



and I'm going to use a lot of them to try and finish the engine.

And then suddenly, Grots.

Nice looking grots there! There's some corking parts in the Gnoblars that work well for mixing it up at low cost for tank crews.

Oh my gosh, I love the grots!! Will you consider adding any from the GoblinAid project? Not that you need any more that is quite a collection to go on one (albiet huge) tank!

Also the cast tank/vessel looks great

Chapter 19: In Which Weird Science Makes a Long Overdue Appearance

So, there have been a number of things keeping me away from this. Partially it's a combination of Bioshock Infinite and Mechwarrior Online, partially it's this new policy at work that gave everyone 5 times more floating holidays (so I've been working a lot of overtime to cover them) but mostly... I've been stuck. I've been thinking about what to do for about a week and a half.

I wasn't sure how to do an engine for this. I wanted something big, and sort of like the one on the Kill Bursta, but not just a copy. I wanted something that was my own. I thought about trying something with exposed pistons, but I couldn't figure out how to make them fit together correctly. Then, it came to me - when it doubt, do the third favorite Ork thing to do: weird science. So, that's where I went with this.

First, every weird science project needs tesla coils. To make some, I made a mold of a wire nut, then demolded it and recast it. I then sliced it up, drilled a hole, and strung it out over 3/32 rod, and topped it with a bead. The results don't look as good as what Zinge sells but they'll do. Note; they also make really good looking gears, that should come in handy at some point.



Then I just went to work on it. I wish I had taken more images of the work in progress, but I was on fire and just kept going till I got to here:





I did stop and make about 10 of those pressure gauges, and made a mold of them. So I've got pressure gauges for life. To make the originals, I just stuck sliced off tubing onto some double sided tape, poured a drop of resin inside, waited 15 minutes, them peeled them off the tape, pushed the resin plug back into it a little (since the other end is concave, not flat) and added a styrene needle.

The rest of the stuff is I think sort of self explanatory. I seated a lot of rivets. I also made some vent stacks and molded them as well for future use. The brass tubing is a miter bend as suggested in P&M, and I think it could have been better, but it's not too bad either. I didn't mold it since I think I could probably improve upon it.

Here it is blu-tacked onto the back of the fortress:



I don't think there's much left to do except

1.) Finish the armor plating on the sides of the vehicle
2.) Similarly, finish fleshing out the sides of the top dekk
3.) Make a better system for mounting that quad onto the roof
4.) Figure out what to put in that open space on the mid-deck, if anything - I could raise the engine a bit and just close it off, I suppose
5.) Finish the deffrolla support struts, add the teefs
6.) Exterior of the kab is a little plain still
7.) Did I miss something? You tell me.

I think this might be ready to rotate into the public fora, as I think I'm likely to actually finish this. I was disinclined to post another project I wouldn't finish there but I see little competition in the near future from bringing this home. I'm over all the conceptual hurdles, and IA12 looks like maybe a good read but not likely to inspire a lot of model inspiration in me.


So far as Goblin Aid goes, I'd like to help but I have to be frank, I don't understand wtf is going on with that project. Is that a kickstarter, or an auction, or what? I see a lot of people making greens but are these going into production or what?