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Today was photo op day, so I took a group shot of all my Squats together in one place. I've always loved the characterful old GW sculpts in particular, but many other companies also make decent ones.

You can also see my heavy weapon team base adapters, which I recommend to anyone wanting to use large amounts of old heavy weapons guys for Guard or Squats and have them be game-legal in the modern AM codex. Far easier to transport and safer, too (traditional heavy weapons teams are in my experience a total pain in this respect.




Every army needs a stout commander, and for mine it's this over-armed fellow. I especially love his funky half-mask, which is why I've called him "Erik", after the Christian name of the Phantom of the Opera.



Annoyingly out of focus second command squad. Much more sensibly armed commander for when I didn't feel like giving my opponent a handicap by taking a powerfist.



Ramshackle Games bikers. These I bought on Kickstarter, and despite the somewhat crude sculpts and the troublesome resin material, they turned out all right in the end.



Does anyone remember who made this mech? I want to say it was a Kickstarted arena combat mech game, but I'm not 100% sure, and there's no packaging or materials left for me to check.

Whoa, retro! Awesome minis. Good job keeping the classics alive.

My next eBay purchase showed up yesterday, and I got to work on repairing it in preparation for a repaint.



Upon receiving the model and inspecting it, my heart sank. As the keen eyed might notice, the plastic chassis is misaligned, which is a common fault in these old Rhino based kits, and almost impossible to neatly fix without tearing the whole thing apart. Overall the thing has been put together remarkably badly, which was somewhat masked by someone having primed the entire thing grey (after having removed a previous paintjob). As you might expect for a 1989-90 vintage plastic model, the Rhino is somewhat tricky to build and easy to screw up, so buying a preassembled one is always a risk. The worst joint to try to rebuild is the one between each track unit and the main hull, which is a huge flat expanse of plastic with a massive surface area, so it's almost impossible to unstick, especially if solvent based glue has been used, as is the case here.

I have no idea whether or not I can turn this into a presentable unit for my display case. I'm going to have to take some rather drastic measures to fix every single slapdash glue joint and misalignment. It's entirely possible I'll be left with nothing but a metal turret and a pile of mangled Rhino panels at the end of it all

I've fixed a lot of those rhinos, and the only bit of encouragement I can offer is that, once you can separate the tracks from the body, even if you need to cut away a lot of material to refit the parts in a properly aligned way, there is a lot of gluing area to allow you to re-glue in a better position.

I did have an ace in my sleeve in the form of a second partially usable chassis. In the end, I wound up rebuilding the body with the top plate and exhausts from this one and the tracks and bottom part of my old one. This meant foregoing the round side doors, but that's okay, I'll put on some extra armor plates there.

I also have a metal rear plate from the old Vindicator kit that I'll make use of, since the ramp on it makes sense for a transport vehicle. I'll also still need some kind of exhaust tips since all four have been snapped off.

Really cool to see some squats, not often you see that many together! Good luck sorting the Razorback out!

Here's where the Razorback stands right now.



The keen-eyed might notice it no longer has the same chassis sides. The hull top and the exhaust stacks are still the same, but extracting them from the original tank body was very difficult and somewhat destructive. My old Rhino chassis no longer had the round doors (the sides were horribly mangled, in fact) so I gave it some extra hull armor plates there. Access points are no longer strictly necessary like they were in days of old, so I'm okay with this. The old side hatches were never particularly credible-looking anyway.

Other than maybe trying to do something more with the exhaust stacks (very tedious and fiddly, I've already split three of them trying to drill them out), I'm content to call this done and ready for painting soon. The gun shield will be fixed once I've painted the turret gun and gunner a little bit. I'll probably omit the rear hatches, since they'd be very hard to pin on to make them durable (most of the models I've seen of this particular sculpt have at least one hatch segment missing).

A bit more work got done. I added a plastic shim to the front of the gun shield to make it fit more snugly. Since I'll be gluing it after at least some painting is done and there's no easy way to pin the joint, I wanted the best possible fit. I also carved out a couple of dings and chips in for the body panels, and added a couple of spare aquila icons I found in the depths of my parts bin. There's also a turret hatch now, though it's a single piece one rather than the three separate segments of the original (the hinge parts in the turret were too damaged for me to use anyway).



This tank's had a hard life, and I wanted to give it the VIP treatment it deserves.

Well, got some paint on my Razorback at last. Still needs some chapter badges and other detailing, but good enough for now.

Nice retro squats, and always good to see the old school rhino chassis getting some love.

That mech is indeed from a Kickstarter - Mechadrome, from Gunfight Games.

Aha, Mechadrome, that does ring a bell. I must've backed their kickstarter. Looks like the models themselves are OOP in the physical space now, but Gangfightgames has them listed in the 3D printer files section of their website (though currently empty) so it might be possible to one day get him a compatriot or two.

You've done a great job of restoring that fella, well done. The side panels are effective, and the simple addition of the aquila on there too makes it look complete.

If it is not too condescending, I'll just say that I find it helpful to use a sharp pin to centre where I want to drill first, then use the actual drill. Even a relatively small point to guide thepin vice helps, I find.

With the exhaust stacks I made the mistake that I tried to drill them out with a power drill, really bad idea. Might go back with my pin vise and do it properly

"Awise fwom youw gwave!"

It's a few years later, and my desk is still messy. Presently, this battlewagon has center stage.



The basic chassis is from the Tamiya Leclerc kit in 1/35, and everything on top of that is built out of a mess of plastic pieces and sprue. I didn't want to have the vehicle look too much like what it started out as, and I achieved my goal passably well, I feel.

Fancy wagon to make a return! I think you succeeded in hiding it’s Leclerc origins too

Loving the little bits, especially the string of tank tracks.

I realized I haven't posted any pics of my current project here yet. It's... well, a battlefortress of sorts.



The base model is a very large TMNT Turtle Van I found at a local thrift store. In-universe, I'm imagining this was a knight world sacristan's mobile workshop, used for maintaining armigers and perhaps larger walkers as well.

Cool conversion of the TMNT van, I think I know the one you started with. Repair and Recovery Vehicles are surprisingly rare in the 41st Millennium, which given the age and rarity of their vehicles, you’d think they’d be as numerous as Apothecary’s

Yeah, I actually thought about scratchbuilding an un-Orkified version based on this text writeup: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Sacristan_Crawler Either that, or whatever landing craft or drop pod used to orbitally insert knights and even titans might be a fun future project.

I started painting this beast, and because it's a massive and hard to handle piece, I went with a very sketchy stippled paintjob over a basecoat of rusty browns mixed with some Leadbelcher. I'm not sure if it will turn out acceptable, but there's nowhere to go but ahead



EDIT: The painting's been a disaster, with primer losing its grip in the plastic across the board. I don't know if the model is actually salvageable at all. I'm going to mothball it at least for the time being, and try to stabilize the paint layer with some varnish at a later date.

I've not posted updates here since the battlefortress is still mothballed for now, but here's something else I've been working on.



I've bought a few models in the past couple of months, and since I found myself with a pair of mangled helbrute legs, some broken grots and a lot of deffdread spares, threw them together in the appropriate fashion.

That killa kan looks really cool. Planning on a full unit? A completely kitbashed mob will look menacing on the gamefield.

For now he'll round out a squad of 3 GW ones I also have, but I would love to build some more out of scratch at some point, leveraging various 3d prints and other gubbins.

Your stuff looks great. Are you going to put some exhaust stacks or something on the back of the Killa Kan?