A fey mood descended on me...
Sometimes I just get hit by the hobby genie. Some sort of mad vision haunts me, and then I need to get it done. This one was a sideboard from the Pringles towers I did earlier in the year.
While I was printing out the pdf stuff to stick on them, I discovered something very bad indeed. Somebody had scanned all the original Necromunda scenery, the card stuff that you clipped into the famous plastic bulkheads. And even worse, they'd also done the 40k Firebase from the late nineties.
That was it - the manic switch tripped, and I started planning.
First up, print the sheets. Then discover that some of them needed to be flipped through 180 and printed again so I had both sides of the piece printed.
One of the nicest things about the pdfs was that you could see the original wear and tear, where the card had been pulled in and out of the bulkheads one too many times. Great, but card wasn't going to be durable enough for me this time. I got an order of 1mm plasticard in and then glued all the sheets to it with PVA.
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| Early stages - the paper sticks well to the card, and the layer of PVA helps toughen it all up, but it's still prone to tearing. That long edge happened when I tried to use a stanley knife to cut it, it was scissors all the way after. |
Plasticard is quite hard to cut with scissors, it turns out. Or indeed a hobby knife - several hours of laboured work later, I had all the bits sorted and I'd hardly ruined any of them. Cutting the tiny triangles out of the struts was the worst part, the blade slipped and tore the paper a couple of times.
Now I had all the parts, I had a new hurdle - the bulkheads. Would I make my own from card and ingenuity? Would I spend the bazillion pounds that eBay was asking for? Or would I get some Etzy resin print copies?
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| All the parts ready, so I could start building. |
Nope - in the end, I went to Troll Trader and found a packet of 12 for a pretty reasonable £30. I mean, I think that's pretty reasonable, which says a lot about the kind of idiot I am. A dozen squares of antique plastic for that much cash is bonkers when you think about it, so I very carefully didn't.
This had all taken about three months so far, with the long waits for deliveries being the hold up. Once I got the bulkheads, I went full auto, painting them and assembling the kit over one weekend.
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| Complete assembly. Or the first try, anyway, I had to pull it apart and try again when I realised I'd put the ladder the wrong way round on the bulkheads on the right there (and also painted the wrong sides, as I was trying to save time and leave internal bits unpainted). |
It looked pretty bad - the white edges of the plasticard for one thing, then the fact that lots of it didn't really fit particularly well. If I thought I hadn't ruined them when cutting them out, I was kidding myself!
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| I'd added in the rusty bridge from the Outlanders expansion. It's on a separate base to help keep it small in the cupboard - the mechanicus crane beams are reinforcing the bottom. |
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| Here's another angle, so you can admire the chains and ivy that block some of the worst gaps from view |
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| And here's a bonus Squat, the freebie model from GW this month. |
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| I know they're getting plastic weapon options soon, but it was too late for me. I converted her Yaegerkin bolt shotgun to an Ironhead Meltagun, a ridiculous rapid-firing overkiller, so she can join the rest of the gang. She needs her eyes doing at some point. |
Ah well - always nice to take the bits box out for a stroll. Various old girders, beams, posts and random plastic chunks were employed to cover the gaps, then I painted the white bits blue and added a few flourishes here and there. Basing, flock and flora and it's all done!
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| Bit squint, that. Meh - it's got a coin-operated Heavy Bolter that more than balances out the wonkiness. In game rules - a squad on the building can pay a VP to fire it. |
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| I had a spare internal bulkhead, which I cut in half and turned into some decorative floor tiling |
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