Cheaphammer Triumphs

Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:

No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.

If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

**Da Boss**

I'm not a clever kitbasher or someone who seeks it out as a purely creative exercise, though I love seeing it when other people do that.

Nah, I'm inspired and motivated by being a cheap bastard. Every time I've done a kitbash it's been because I was too cheap to spend on a new model but really wanted to have the unit in my force.
I've got a force of Necrons that I put together from a Start Collecting and a few additional boxes. But it has not Destroyers. I'm interested in the Oldcron style, I essentially want my guys to look like the Dark Crusade Necrons though I was willing to compromise and use Triarch Praetorians or whatever as my Pariah stand ins.

I looked at the price of the Destroyers, and it's the old models I remember, but for ludicrous money. Close to 50 quid for 3, and I wanted a Lord with Destroyer body as well!

So I had a dig in the bitz box and came up with:
Lower Body - Dropfleet Commander Space Station bits - got this in the discount bin in the FLGS when they were cleaning Dropfleet stock for half price. Loads of bits on the sprues. The curved space station bits seemed perfect for the lower Destroyer body.
Upper Body - spare Triarch Praetorian fronts with spare Deathmark backs and heads. I chopped some spare arms off at the elbow to make a second contact point for the torso to the lower body, and cut a spare spin into segments to fill in the neck area. Lord gets a spare Triarch head. Had to milliput a pretty big gap, I think it'll look fine when painted, if not I'll sand it a bit.
Guns - I just used the spare guns from my Immortals kit, and a big gun that must have come from one of the vehicle kits.

I'm pretty happy with this, I think they look the part and cost me basically nothing since I made them out of spare parts I had lying around. Obviously that's easier to do with a deep bitz box. But I'm sure some thrifty Dakkanauts will put my money saving efforts to shame, and if so I want to see it!

**Andykp**

Those look really good. No doubt what they are and don’t look “cheap hammer” at all, just a kitbashed alternative to a really old dated kit.

**sambojin**

We got a buff/ nerf thing going in the latest dataslate for TSons. But, you can still make a 2000pt army from two starter sets and a bit of kit bashing. You need to buy some toothpicks for assault cannons/bows, a bag of cocktail swizzlers and poker chips for flying bases, a small toy van as a rhino, and that's about it. It's like 2$ store kit bashing levels of stuff required. A cardboard box for rebasing miniatures too.

Spoilered due to awesomeness.

Starter Set x2 (1980 points)

Spoiler:

You've still got heaps of models left over. Are your Leapers going to be Spawn or Exalted/Flamers? Are your other termagants Tzaangor, Cultists, Blue Horrors (use the Ripper Swarms as individual Crimson Horrors) or something else? So, with a small amount of kit bashing, WH40k doesn't have to be expensive. It's a fun army to learn with too, because it's got a fair bit of movement, a bit of firepower, a bit of melee, and a few shenanigans, but not really leaning too hard into any of them.

And it's pretty on point for a Tzeentch army to make a mockery of their enemies. It's not that powerful of an army, but it's not that bad either. Sorta C+/B-, considering just how powerful of an army TSons can end up as. Like, you'd need to buy some more Infernus marines, Magnus, Ahriman, and maybe another toy van, and you're kinda in B+/A- tier. But as a starter army, this can and does win more through victory points than total annihilation, so isn't too bad to play against as well (unless when it is. It's kinda horrifying when it is).

**ccs**

See these vintage guys?
They (and about 40some more just like them) were free.

Along about 2006 (07?) a then local shop bought a 40k collection. They kept anything decent enough & just chucked the "trash".
A couple of us went dumpster diving after the shop closed, salvaged what we could, & re-chucked the stuff that was truly beyond hope. I claimed the DG stuff.

I don't know what the original owner painted these guys with, but some of them, after numerous stripings over the years, STILL have a partial thick glossy enamel. Not ever being able to fully remove it I finally gave up & hit the models with a nice spray of Corax a while back during 9th.
I honestly think anything strong enough to completely strip it would just dissolve the poor models.... Fortunately(?) they're Plague Marines so a little detail obscuring puss/ooze on some of them....

While I've added numerous replacement packs, bases, & weapons out of the bitz box/bitz orders I'm not anywhere even near what a single box costs today.
Now I'm finally getting around to painting them.

Without this hoard of rescued figures I definitely wouldn't have a DG army today.

**Da Boss**

Andykp: Cheers! I'm pretty happy with them - I mostly play Grimdark Future with people where I provide all the figures but I still want them to look right for me!
Sambojin: Yeah using cheap starter sets to make armies is a classic one. My Dwarf and Night Goblin armies are mostly just two Battle for Skull Pass sets, and I've got loads of Assault on Black Reach knocking around that I've cannibalised for various projects - some of the termies got hacked into Chaos Terminators so I could make the squad leader a Lord in Terminator Armour and use up all the special weapon options in the kit.
ccs: Dumpster diving for bargains is the next level! Kudos! I still have one of those monopose plague marines doing duty in my Chaos Marine army.

**sambojin**

It's funny just how diverse of an army you can get out of starter sets. I ended up using my 2x BfSP as O+G, and a Chaos Dwarf army mostly.

Made some pretty cool ninja goblins, jumping spiders, fanatics, etc out of it. Gave random boxes of junk to my local games club when I stopped playing WHFB. The Wolfrider boxed sets were nice too, because they could be everything from chaos hounds, to wolfriders, to dire wolves. Between BfSP, a few boxes of wolfriders, and 2-3 boxes of Imperial Knights, you could get a small O+G list, an Empire/ Middenland list, a Chaos list, a VC list, a C.Dwarf list, and a Mercs list going, all out of your random "counts as" stuff. They played similarly, but different flavours of vanilla is nice to have. Saved me a fortune.

Still pretty happy with a 2000pt Thousand Sons army for $240Aussie + 10-20$ dollar shop parts though (online discount retailer, we get hit hard on prices in Oz). Haven't gotten around to actually doing all the hacks, but compared to what I did with BfSP + wolves + knights, this will be easy. Half the stuff is wysiwyg aside from a few weapons anyway. I'll probably paint the marines green with gold trim, just in case I want a Salamander fallback on Codex release, but do blue+ gold for the Tzaangor/ daemons, for a bit of colour variety (and no-one can say it's not that thing, when it's obviously TSons)

**Da Boss**

If I had to pay Aussie prices for GW stuff I'd be even more keen on cheaphammer than I already am!

**Cyel**

One of my 40k armies was a challenge project that was purely about
-how cheap I can get it
-how fast I can paint it

So I went for Necrons. Built everything out of second-hand plastic warriors and trash. It resulted in a perfectly playable, really big army that was painted in a couple of evenings and cost less than a Land Raider.

As you can see, the plastic spoon motif featured heavily throughout the army

**vipoid**

Cyel wrote:
One of my 40k armies was a challenge project that was purely about
-how cheap I can get it
-how fast I can paint it

So I went for Necrons. Built everything out of second-hand plastic warriors and trash. It resulted in a perfectly playable, really big army that was painted in a couple of evenings and cost less than a Land Raider.

Spoiler:

As you can see, the plastic spoon motif featured heavily throughout the army

Those are amazing.

I especially love the Lord and Tomb Spider.

Can I ask how you made these?

**Cyel**

vipoid wrote:

Those are amazing.

I especially love the Lord and Tomb Spider.

Can I ask how you made these?

Thanks!

Both feature a plastic spoon, ofc

The Destroyer Lord has a body of a plastic warrior with a cloak made from glue-hardened paper tissue and some scythe made from bits.

The Spider has a core body and head made of cheap modelling putty for kids and arms taken from some toy, maybe (I don't remember that well, it was a long time ago). The claws seem to be just pieces of sprue. Eyes are just slices of those round pegs you find on every sprue.

**Da Boss**

Those necrons are incredible, really well done. What really makes it work is the excellent paintjobs and effort in the basing as well, really sells the whole thing. Love it.

**sambojin**

Here's a super cheap 1000pt starter army from the magazine with miniatures thingo. Just buy two of each issue. Very similar to my own above. But hey, £40 for 1000pts, and that's the retail cost, not bad.

(Reference:
https://youtu.be/eMkmJfJK2fg?si=7wErEA-lZIViOzir
)

Issue 1: Terminator Captain & Winged Prime £3
Issue 2: 3 Von Ryan's Leapers £7
Issue 3: 5 Infernus Marines £10
Times two, for a grand total of £40.

Spoiler:

Be an a-hole, deep strike and teleport around the board to a silly amount. Use magic (quite a lot), use strategems (ok, one a turn). Have way too much of a character-heavy list in 1000pt games. Have possibly too much (ok'ish?) melee. And not enough shooting (considering the army). Actually use Chaos Spawn for once. This list has everything. You'll even have two Leapers left over, so it has more than everything!

Ok, it doesn't, but for £40, it's not a bad intro into TSons. You could even chuck the Termie Captains on flying bases and call them Exalteds on Discs if you wanted, so they could actually lead the Rubrics (instead of just scamming objectives with DS and last-moment teleports). Leapers are also a highly likely contender to have their claws clipped, and glued back on so they look like bows and stuck on flying bases too. So that they're Tzaangor Enlightened instead of Spawn, because it's just a better unit in general (and cheaper pts-wise. And really expensive to actually buy. You could probably fit a Rhino/ toy van in the list if you did).

But now Heroic Intervention is only 1-cost, it's fun to do it with big-gribbles or termies. It's like roulette, on saves and stuff. Overwatch is good, but just splat/holding stuff might be valuable too. Also, there's nothing better/easier at that, than TSons Chaos Spawns. 5Toughness/4+/5++/5+++, 4 wounds. Nice. Best blocker good boys. Woof! They're like the fully-in-sight version of lone operative.

We'll call this the "C-, but cheap army". But you'll probably get a C, because you tried, and you play TSons at 1000pts, and some of our stuff is broken af at most levels of play, even with the nerfs. Probably more at 1000pts. Yay!

((It still annoys me that our Daemon Princes don't have deep strike. But what can you do? Take individual Terminators that can deep strike...? Well, yes. I guess I could.... Meh))

**Haighus**

I found some rawl plugs that look like perfect zzap cannon barrels with a lightning motive up the sides. Got a couple for free when Wilko was closing down because the cashier didn't think it was worth finding the item code for about 5p of product.

Haven't used them yet and they are sitting in a box somewhere as most my stuff is still packed from a recent house move until the renovations are done (hobby room is the current in-progress room).

**Eilif**

For me, budget 40k (now Grimdark Future) had been all about buying used armies. If you hang around with gamers , opportunities will present themselves. Also buying up poorly assembled/painted stuff. Most of my IG was stuff I had to strip and repaint, but I've got a couple army's that are painted fine bought from gamers getting out of the hobby.

Cyel wrote:
One of my 40k armies was a challenge project that was purely about
-how cheap I can get it
-how fast I can paint it

So I went for Necrons. Built everything out of second-hand plastic warriors and trash. It resulted in a perfectly playable, really big army that was painted in a couple of evenings and cost less than a Land Raider.]

As you can see, the plastic spoon motif featured heavily throughout the army

Excellent work on that army. That monolith is great!

Neon rod era Necron armies are a great budget option now that they've been discontinued. I bought 2k+ of Neon Necrons for 60 bucks from a resale shop.

If you need more rods to repair or replace, you can buy knock off Lego lightsaber blades on Ali Express. 50 rods for a couple bucks.

Terrain is where I get into junk and salvage. Most of my terrain is hacked together from toys and craft items found at take shops.

**cuda1179**

I have a number of "cheap" armies.

Back when 4th edition came out my FLGS was selling the old 3rd edition starter set (they still had tons of them) for $30 each. I thought "WTF?" and bought three of them. It became the backbone of a Dark Angels (30 marines and 3 speeders) and Dark Eldar (60 Warriors) armies, plus gave me all the ruins and trees I ever needed.

More recently (8th edition) I made an entire Ultramarines army from starter set marines. Tons of guys in my area wanting to play Plague marines and selling off Loyalist Marines. I was also savaging my bits box, a StormTalon my wife had given me (couldn't be used in any army I had at the time, but bless her heart), and a WWI Emhar tank I had laying around. It is amazing what you can do with marines that aren't too blinged out.

**cuda1179**

Vexatrix guard are easy enough to convert, and when you have a FDM printer you can even make less silly Centurions.

**ccs**

Since the Custodes Codex arrived the other week I've noticed a huge uptick in cheap Custodes units on Ebay, etc.
I'm not sure if the cause is;
a) crap rules
b) fallout from the reveal that there's apparently FM Custodes
c) alot of stuff being split out of Patrol boxes etc.
d) some combo of the above

But whatever the cause? I think soon I'm going to see how little I can spend on official minis for a 1k pt force. (so no 3d printing)
Now building it up to 2k (or maybe 3k for Heresy) might get pricey and/or have to involve some printing as I want Telemons & Gyrfalcon jet bikes....

**Dolnikan**

For almost all my armies, I made my officers and heroes out of regular figures. And especially nowadays, with what's being asked for individual characters, there's even more motivation for that.

**cuda1179**

Dolnikan wrote:
For almost all my armies, I made my officers and heroes out of regular figures. And especially nowadays, with what's being asked for individual characters, there's even more motivation for that.

Just quoting this for it's truth. I officially do not own any Primarch model, but I do own 18 3rd party ones, two of which (with small custom work) are in my armies. If I won't pay $40 for a Primarch, I sure as heck won't pay $45 for a Lieutenant.

**Eilif**

Dolnikan wrote:
For almost all my armies, I made my officers and heroes out of regular figures. And especially nowadays, with what's being asked for individual characters, there's even more motivation for that.

Heck yeah. Several of my IG Lieutenants are converted from Lt-Varras figures from 5th or 6th edition starter sets. They were darn-near throw-aways at the time.

**cuda1179**

I'll let slip my secret to ebay sniping. Over the years I have notice a lot of sellers parting out old collections can't spell for gak, many making the same errors. "Forgworld" being a popular one.

Fewer people finding an item means fewer bidders. Lower prices. So, I keep a list of all the misspelled words and intentionally search them from time to time. About 10 years ago I snagged an unreleased 40k scale Epicast Paladin Knight for $40, free shipping.

**Haighus**

Eilif wrote:
Dolnikan wrote:
For almost all my armies, I made my officers and heroes out of regular figures. And especially nowadays, with what's being asked for individual characters, there's even more motivation for that.

Heck yeah. Several of my IG Lieutenants are converted from Lt-Varras figures from 5th or 6th edition starter sets. They were darn-near throw-aways at the time.

I have a soft-spot for Lt Varras and will jealously guard mine.

cuda1179 wrote:I'll let slip my secret to ebay sniping. Over the years I have notice a lot of sellers parting out old collections can't spell for gak, many making the same errors. "Forgworld" being a popular one.

Fewer people finding an item means fewer bidders. Lower prices. So, I keep a list of all the misspelled words and intentionally search them from time to time. About 10 years ago I snagged an unreleased 40k scale Epicast Paladin Knight for $40, free shipping.

I found a decently-priced joblot of about 25 OOP Vostroyans this way.

**ccs**

cuda1179 wrote:
I'll let slip my secret to ebay sniping. Over the years I have notice a lot of sellers parting out old collections can't spell for gak, many making the same errors. "Forgworld" being a popular one.

Fewer people finding an item means fewer bidders. Lower prices. So, I keep a list of all the misspelled words and intentionally search them from time to time.

Thanks a bunch, now we'll have more completion. : (