Tauchikoma Broadside

She is pieced together from both a regular XV8 Crisis Suit and a Forgeworld XV88-2.  I liked how the Forgeworld Broadside weapons look, and after inadvertently learning they could be easily mounted on the backpack mounts of a normal suit (the connector bar for the arm slots right into the backpack groove), I couldn't get the image of the broadside Tauchikoma out of my head.

I started with the normal tauchikoma body and trimmed down the FW Broadside 'heatsinks' to glue to the normal backpack's jetpack arms, trimming down some of the nozzles.  The space between the jetpack and heatsinks was filled with greenstuff.  I left the bottom-most nozzle open, figuring it might be fired when the railguns fire to help stabilize.

I had to ponder for a while to place the second array of missiles, the first set was obvious in the space the normal tauchikoma carry their primary weapon system.  I ended up attaching them to the 'screw' nubs on either side of the backpack where I suppose normal tauchikoma would have line launchers like in GitS.  This should allow the existing line launcher power and control interface to fire off missiles without having to run any new control circuitry.

Looking over the pictures, there are resin bubbles in the railgun muzzle vent things.  Those are going to be a pain to clean out >.<

As an interesting aside, I went hunting for the tau'chi'koma that were my inspiration, and while I believe I found the thread they were in; all the images have been removed.  I recall there being a broadside or 2 in that set, but can't verify it or compare the 2 units.  ;.;

Edit: Hahaha!  Thanks #2501 for reminding me that you were the one!  Here's his Tau'chikomas.  Though this does lead me to wonder what the thread I found was...  It's here by the way.  Anyway his broadsides are quite a bit different then mine, but that's ideal.  And my second one will look different from either as I don't have any more spare FW Broadside torsos (which is odd as I have another set of railguns >.> ). 

 

El'Larrun places second.

Well, I'm thrilled, I placed second in the Gifts of Mork Character Competition. I wasn't really expecting to place higher then honorable mention if I was lucky.  I will say congratulations to all the other winners of the contest, especially Dan1789 for being the Winner and Misty Rain (Honorable Mention: Rules) for doing a tribute to the Tau Guru Tael (and for doing a Tau entry at all).  ^.^

I'm planning on finishing up my Tau army now that I've had interest in it rekindled (I think I burned myself out trying to assemble and paint it all at once.)  And managed to assemble another Tauchikoma, this one outfitted as a counts-as Broadside.   Expect pictures...  probably Tuesday, depending on how my 4th of July day goes. 


In unrelated information, I apologize for not having a post ready for Thursday.  I was busy getting ready for a job interview and didn't do much miniature stuff anyway.  Oh, I also now have a job.

El'Larrun Painted

Well, she's painted and submitted to the Character Competition.   I could definitely tell I haven't painted anything in a while as I struggled through getting her painted.  For my fancy attempt I tried the camo-field (dis)engaging effect.  the Camo part turned out well, but I'm not super happy with the energy border.  Probably need to add a white core to it or something.  Oh well, next week should be on to something different, then a quick back to this post with the results from the CC (hopefully).  Then who knows.

The drones still make me giggle though.

Grr, forgot to 'publish' this post so it didn't appear on Thursday like it was supposed to.

El'larrun Special Character

Whee, assembly done.  Not super happy with it, but that's just my skill not reaching up to where my wants/desires lie.  I started with a stealth suit and cut it into many, many pieces.  Some of you might recognize the legs from the old O'larron sculpt which was cannibalized for this.  The rail rifle she has equipped came from a Sniper Drone (I believe, not positive). Her head is a daemonette head from the new plastic range, sadly her nose is crooked.

She's going to be painted green to match the rest of my army, though I think I'll try the partially disengaged stealthfield effect for her.

Tau Robots

While waiting for greenstuff on my entry for the Character Competition to cure, I built this little guy from a memory.  Sadly I don't have any Necron Warrior arms with which to complete it. (I have 7 other sets of Warrior Legs, and 16?  scarabs, but no arms ;.;  Imagine the back half of the basic Gauss Flayer and the long barrel of the Tau Rifle, maybe with some odds and ends to bulk it out.

I should have a couple posts up in the following weeks for the CC entry, and sorry for neglecting to post, was dealing with a Great Grandfather's passing, so got practically nothing done the last couple weeks.

Super Blog Chain Giveaway!

Having won a couple of Dark Angels Sprues in JRV's giveaway at Okidus, I'm offering up my own Super Blog Chain Give Away.

For mine I have a nice unassembled XV89 crisis suit up for grabs.

Interested in a chance to win stuff?
To Participate:
1) You must have a blog

2) You must have something worthwhile to offer up to give away for free.

3) If you win, you must hold your own blogsite give away using the same rules to pay it forward. You must contact me and Santa Cruz Warhammer with a link to your give away so we can send bloggers to your site.

4) You may only enter once per give away. If you enter twice, only your first entry will be considered.

To Enter:

1) Be a follower of this blog (I do update, honest I do! :p  )

2) Leave a comment to this post with the following information:

--Why you want or need the prize.

--What you will give away on your blog to pay it forward.

--Where your blog is.

The Prize:

Well, when I went to take pictures of the parts, I noticed I have a R'myr chest plate even though I only have 1 R'myr and it's assembled and painted (with the right chest plate).  So I went through my stuff and found a cast 'regular' torso that was for my Tauchicoma project that I'll include as well.  It's cast in a almost translucent white resin that anyone who's followed my blog knows doesn't photograph well.  Sorry the suit isn't on sprues, but i have a bad habit of removing the sprues to store the parts in compartmentalized bins.

Winner Selection:

The winner will be chosen by me based on the reason for wanting the suit and your blog.  Not to say new blogs won't win (I'm a relatively new blog myself, and I'm not saying what about the blogs I'm looking at/for ^.~ ) but I like looking at blogs.

The winner will be chosen Friday the 17th of September (two weeks from today).

Crisis suits

I have done some painting / construction on my crisis suits so I have basecoats on four more suits. I apologize for the low quality of a couple of the images, not sure why they're acting up. I'll try to get some better pictures tomorrow in the daylight.

I fails at the bloggosphere thing! I just noticed it's been over a month sense I posted anything here. Sadly it's a 2 fold problem. Firstly I haven't done much in the way of miniatures... Secondly I've been too lazy to post anything or take pictures.

This is the best picture of the crisis suits, and the suit is kneeling to take aim (I thought it was a good use of the nice rotatable ForgeWorld legs).


This is one I assembled earlier, not sure what it's up to... Looks kinda confused.


This one is so going to end up with a broken foot, he's my first attempt at a running pose, and as such there is only one foot in contact with the base... Kinda scary. this one hasn't had the OSH hand mod done as it had it's fingers retracted for running.


This one I like. Having just mashed a plague marine (visible on her base), she's beckoning toward her next target.


None of these crisis suits are glued to their final bases yet, as a few still need them painted, and they're not finished being painted themselves.

And last but not least the Newest Devilfish! (Well, maybe, it is only a devilfish compared to crisis suits, but eh)

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.

Another Tau Female Torso pic

Excuses, excuses, I know. At least I have a good one this time on why I haven't posted much. I managed to gash open my finger working on cleaning up some casts. The gash (which is healing up rather nicely) was about 2 mm deep in the center, shallowing as it neared the edges as my finger is curved, but the X-acto knife wasn't. Luckily I didn't need any stitches. I'd post a picture, but I haven't been able to get a good one only using one hand. >.>

Anyway, I'm mainly posting another picture of my Female Tau Torso. Sadly there aren't a lot of non-across the chest poses without some serious work, and as I mangled my finger, wasn't willing to do. I hope this pose is a bit better to see the torso. I've also decided I need to set up a dedicated photo box to photograph miniatures in. >.<

Female Fire Warrior First Assembly

My female Fire Warrior torso next to a stock torso. Apparently I've decided female Tau are taller and narrower then male Tau. I gave the female torso a quick wash so it would show up in the camera. Looks like I caught an air bubble in the belt buckle >.<

I had suspected that making the torso narrower would have issues. Not that I don't have issues anyway connecting Firewarrior arms to normal torsos. I should ask OSH's help desk if there is a trick to it >.>


The glue holding her off arm looks odd as I dropped her into my water cup on accident while it was drying, causing the superglue to react oddly. Oh well, it'll need some clean up.


And next to one of my painted FWs. I'll have to paint her up for a better comparison ^.^

However, all in all, I like how the female torso came out this time around. I neglected to get any pictures of the process I went through to cast the torso, so that'll have to wait.

Random thought: Has anyone else noticed that the citadel washes have a sweet taste to them?

Devilfish Chassis

As I'm leaving for the weekend to help repair the plumbing of my parent's old school house, I wanted to get this posted before I left. I'd been working on it off and on for weeks (I started it before the Fire Warriors). It's the hand painted chassis, not the airbrushed one. The nose gattling itself isn't painted as I completely forgot about it due to the modular nature of my fish.



All my devilfish chassis (except one, which I got used and would be too annoying to remove the nose-gun) are modular to be able to play the roll of Devilfish, Hammerhead, or Skyray.



Also, does anyone know what Blogger does with images uploaded to the blog, but then not used?

2 Part Mold Making Part 2

2 Part Mold Making Part 2!

Hello again, the silicone from last time has cured so we're going to move on to the next step.

First off, the mold is flipped over to reveal the clay support from last time.


It's carefully peeled off the mold as we want to try and get as much of it as possible with this first removal. Often I'll remove one of the blocks in the wall to get a good starting position.



After it's been removed, look over the mold for any bubbles that had formed against the piece. Be careful to NOT remove the piece from the mold, it needs to stay sealed to the silicone at this point. If there are any obvious bubbles, decide if they're worth redoing the side of the mold. Also while doing this, use a cheap toothpick (the ones that are flat and have a fat end and a skinny end) to gently scrape up any residual clay left behind. I'd probably get better results with the clay if I'd use new (and proper) clay every time, but it's what I have, and it works well enough. A layer of blocks is added to the bottom to form a deeper space to fill with silicone.




Now we need to prevent the silicone we're going to be adding from bonding to the silicone that already exists or we'll end up with a block of silicone with our part trapped inside. I've tried a number of things to do the job. This includes a variety of 'official' mold releases, vasaline, vegtable oil, etc. But what I've found works as well as the official releases and is orders of magnitude cheaper... is Elmer's white school glue. Yes, the cheap stuff you can pick up for a nickel a tube right before school starts each year. Take the school glue and use or transfer to another container about half of it. Then refill the bottle with distilled water (normal water works too, but adds other contaminants which may or may not help) and a drop of liquid detergent. Either dishwashing or clothing detergent work, I use whichever we happen to have for our laundry/dishes at the time.




I have an old brush I have dedicated to being used with waterbased glues. I use it for making bases and terrain as well, so it's not only for mold making. But a brush should be dedicated as the glue changes how the bristles on the brush react making it hard to paint with it later. Anyway, put a few drops of the 1-1 glue we made someplace and then brush it over the silicone rubber surface of the mold. Try to avoid getting it on the model itself, but make sure the rubber by the model is covered. It doesn't take a thick layer, just some. I've found mine tends to want to puddle a bit while it's trying to dry. Just use the brush (damp with water or 1-1 glue still) to pull the wet glue back out to the higher points of the mold.




After this glue has dried. We repeat the procedure last time and hmm... aparently I didn't take a lot of pictures of that stage, so I'll do a quick synopsis with more pictures.

I didn't get a picture of it, but first I weigh the inner cup that I'll be putting the silicone in. This gives me the offset I need for calculating how much catalyst I need. I use a 2 cup measuring system. It's made by taking 2 cups and sticking one inside the other. Water is then added in known incremements to the inner container, and the outer is marked for each incremement. This way I can replace the inner cup and not have to relabel my cup every time. I can't remember where I learned of this idea, but it's not originally mine. After measuring out volume of silicone I want, I remove the marked cup (as I didn't weigh it too,) and weigh the silicone.




After calculating the needed amount of catalyst ({silicone+cup} - {cup}) * 0.03. I add the catalyst to it and mix.




The pouring is identical to the before and is hard to take a picture of while doing it, so I don't have any pictures of that.

I'll probably do a post on casting with the mold sometime in the near future as well.

Female Fire Warrior Mold Making

Having neglected to take pictures at good times of the last few stages of the female firewarrior project, I had decided to not even mention them on the blog. I'm regretting that as now I have to play catch-up. I finished up the initial scuplt and made a mold of it. Which took three or four days (most of which was spent waiting on silicone to cure). Then a handful of casts. This is the stage where I learn a lot about my sculpt and usually where I do a lot of revising on it. The image at the start of this post is the mold of the first cast.

As usual, I decided I didn't like a large chunk of it and using one of the cast pieces as the base, chopped off large chunks of it and redid them. I tried getting some pictures of the new scuplt, but it kept ending up with greenstuff work on a white blob. The lighting was just unable to pick up any definition on the unpainted white resin.

So instead as I mention casting relatively regularly, so I figured people might be interested in my particular methods. I use 2 different methods depending on if I'm making a one part or two part mold. I'll plobably cover one part molds later, but as I need to cast the reworked FWF torso I'll start there. I build an interlocking brick box (I think these ones are megablocks) and then roll out a blob of clay.



I press the part in the clay, press the building brick box around the part, and lastly add some divets using the 'wrong' end of a paintbrush to work as keys. I would use some other method besides clay, but I'm poor and haven't gotten around to hunting down and pricing out some of the temporary mold materials.



The silicone I'm currently using is made by GE Silicones and is "RTV426" with catalyst "Beta 26". I got a 5 gallon pail of it as a sample from them a while back. I'm assuming they're used to dealing with people that use multiple gallons per cast as that's a LOT of silicone. Their datasheet suggests 3 different mixes, and I aim for the 100 parts silicone to 3 parts catalyst as I almost always add too much catalyst (bringing making the actual ratio about 100 to 4) which is halfway between 2 of the suggested ratios. I mix it up and drizzle a tiny dab onto the part which I carefully spread into the cracks of the model (sorry, forgot to snap a picture at this stage) before slowly filling the mold with the rest of the silicone. This helps us poor mold makers without vacuum chambers avoid bubbles.



It then sits for 24 hours to cure. And that's the first half of the 2 part mold. I'll cover the second part as i do it.

Crisis Suits Painted

First XV8 suit from the paint shop is the infamous R'myr pattern which became popular after the success of the T'ros campaign. This suit is painted in the scheme of Larron's Uash'O hailing from the forest moon Da'ya, and has yet to earn any distinguishing decorations.



Incidentally, the R'myr suit and the 'standard' XV8 below are not glued to their bases yet. The R'myr suit stands on it's base without support (proving that the models can balance! O.o twas an accident, but neat anyway). The R'myr above is a completely stock model. I'm tempted to add a big knife to it to truly tie it into the rest of my suits. Below is the other suit I'm working on. It has most of it's basecoat done painting wise. It's built with the right hand, shoulder pads and head of an XV84. I believe the legs are for a XV89 as they have kneepads, but I'm not positive. The left arm is a vanilla suit arm with a chaos terminator's fingers glued in. (A nod to Old Shatter Hands for the idea!) The large knife on this model's left jump engine is originally from a friend's Khorne Berzerker sprue, I filed down the face-like decoration and added it as I thought it looked neat as a representative of their bonding knife, the painted on ones just felt like a cop-out. I'm planning all my suits to have one, even though only the leader can take the upgrade. I haven't decided how to mount one to the right side as half my suits will have left handed gun arms, meaning the right arm is going to have the fingers.



Anyway, enjoy. Hopefully I'll have more progress on the Firewarrior torso soon.