Modular Starship Tiles

Well, I've (yet again) started working on my modular space ship project. This project was started well before this blog so this will be the first posting about it. I've actually been casting blocks for it off and on using the excess resin from other pieces the whole time, but just recently I noticed I actually had enough to start working on the next stage. So I've managed to assemble the basic wall for one side of a straight hallway.




This panel is actually 2 three inch halves so I can mix and match other half combinations. This also allows the halves to be used as part of a number of other tiles, and happens to fit in one of my standard mold sizes, so I don't have to start yet another mold size. I plan making molds to speed up the construction process and so there are fewer glue joints (which are by far the weakest link). You can see some of my other custom molds for Hirst blocks in the background.

Each tile fits in a 6" by 6" space allowing a variety of spaceship interiors to be set-up. Below is an example of a 3 foot by 3 foot setup done in Google SketchUp.


In other news I bought a Piranha last week and have slowly been assembling/painting it. I'll do a blog on it when it's closer to finished.

Tau-chikoma

After seeing the tau-chikoma over at Musings of a Metal Mind I just knew I had to make at least one of my own. So instead of painting last Tuesday like I planned, I built a tau-chikoma. And I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to get it posted here >.> Sadly it's not because I've been doing other miniatures related things. ;.;

The assembly is actually a lot more straight forward then I thought at first. Though I neglected to take pictures of the stages. Initially I was trying to attach the 'front' torso to the back torso first. This was horribly hard. So I gave up on that and attached the back legs first. They should be attached so the curvy part (usually toward the crotch of the suit) goes forward with the armour on top. I played with the legs a bit in both arrangements and found that the space forward gives the better range of motion.

After the back legs are on the front torso slides right into place with little trouble. One thing I do suggest is to cut off the stock shoulder ball joints before gluing the torsos together. I also drilled into the spaces the joints were so the front legs sunk in a little and looked better. On the next one I'll probably drill/carve them out more.

After attaching the front legs, I made my big oops. Wanting to make it so I could swap out the nose weapon on the model and to reinforce the torso to torso joint (which for me wasn't as sturdy as I'd have liked), I decided it was a good idea to fill in the space in the torsos with resin. This in and of itself was a fine idea... however, I neglected to take the proper precautions so the model wouldn't fall over while the resin was curing, so I made a bit of a mess. Luckily I was able to peel/scrape off most of the spilled resin, so the model doesn't look like a blob. I did loose a lot of the detail on one of the rear legs, but it's in a mostly hidden place, so I'm not too worried.

The final piece was the head/face. It'd made from a trimmed thinner Stealth suit optics and a piece of standard house power wire that I had sitting around.



I think next time I'm going to trim the overhangs of the front torso a bit so it can sit lower on the model. This second image is actually the first I took, but as is normal for the white resin, I couldn't pick out details and took it before I found the housing wire, so I gave it a quick green brushing (which isn't done too well, but eh), which is the first image of the blog.