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Electro-Adventures

I recently read FaceofChaos' fantastic tutorial on LED-lighting his Chaos Lord. If you've ever been even remotely interested in lighting up your minis, and haven't watched his videos on that thread, go do so now. I did, and it lit a fire under me to light up EVERY MODEL I COULD LAY MY HANDS ON.

So, I spent more money than I probably should have at my local electronics store, grabbed a Warmachine starter kit (a system I've been curious about for a while, and which seems like it would lend itself well to lighting) and got drilling. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, though my (awful) photography skills don't really show it to full effect:





You'll note the expertly-applied extreme-weathering paintjob. The secret to this finish is to start painting the model, then ten minutes in decide that you'd actually like to drill and wire the heck out of it, wiping off most of the paint in the process

The 5mm LED is housed in the backpack/furnace arrangement, poking through into the body. The smokestacks are drilled down to meet the LED, and a narrow tunnel is drilled through to the neck. Then, the eyes were drilled out of the head with a .6mm bit, and two lengths of optical fibre (annexed from a cheap lamp) fed through to touch the tip of the LED.

I'm terribly sorry for the photography. Otherwise, though, I'm super happy with how it turned out, for my first experiment in lighting. I used FoC's ingenious reed-switch-and-rare-earth-magnet for a switch; you can see the 3mm magnet on the base.

Dreadfleet

I've also recently laid my clutching hands on a copy of Dreadfleet. It's a great little game (well, I say 'little', but I had to buy a couple of sheets of MDF to expand my dining table so that the seascape mat would fit on it), and I heartily recommend it. My better half and I have been going thorugh the scenarios, and we're already scheming about how to expand on the base game with extra models, new rules, better scenarios, et cetera. And, of course, the models are fantastic. I've just finished painting up Shadewraith, the ghost ship:



I've gone for more of a 'zombie' look than a ghostly one - more as if a wrecked ship has been raised and animated.



You can find more pics of most of these in my gallery, if you so desire.

The other great thing about Dreadfleet is that its models also lend themselves fantastically to LED lighting. So far, I've drilled and wired four of the ten capital ships, with plans to do most of the rest. My favourite by far is the Tomb Kings ship, the Curse of Zandri:



I cored out the pyramid, taped up the four visible surfaces, then filled it with a clear resin mized with a bit of turquoise paint. I'm absolutely in love with the result.

Skabrus, the Skaven 'ship' (or, in this case, warpstone-animated fish carcass) also turned out pretty well:



Here's Grimnir's Thunder, the dwarf ironclad, and Black Kraken, the Chaos dwarf submersible, both still pre-undercoat and still undergoing wiring adjustments and alterations:



You'll note the odd chalky texture on these un-undercoated models. They were undercoated on the sprue with a new brand of primer, as the shop had run out of my usual sort. While the new variety claimed to be "flat white", it was actually apparently "sand-PVA-and-suicidal-tendencies-textured white" This led to what is now referred to in our house as 'the Dettol times', a full day and a half of soaking the entire set, all eight massive sprues of it, in Dettol, then scrubbing. So much scrubbing The one good thing to come out of this was discovering that Dettol, which I had also not tried before, is fantastic; I can't recommend it highly enough for stripping paint. But I digress.




There's a ways to go on these two yet. I'm not particularly happy with the dwarf ship at this point... given that you can only see the lighting through the little windows I've cut into the interior bulkhead and through the smokestacks, the effort of drilling and wiring just hasn't paid off, so far. Any suggestions on how I might improve the effect would be more than welcome.

That's all for now, but do stay tuned. We've just scratched the surface of the fruits of my impossibly short attention span ]]> http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/preList/522464/5531015.page http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/preList/522464/5531015.page GMT