My Little Tank(s)

Hello!
It's been slighlty later arriving than I'd planned, and since these pictures were taken I may also have undercoated these blighters...

But here we have a group of 12 Grot Tanks, hand crafted by Yours Truly.

Now, For anyone wanting to build Grot tanks, and look for a Good Tutorial, I can highly recommend Kanvass' tutorial on Youtube. The guy has crazy skills and if you follow his tute, you'll end up with some beuatiful looking models.

If you do it my way, you will probably end up some rather haphazard things (which I'm very proud of) which all do indeed look very different and hopefully are also fun to build.

To go into a bit of background on these (and I wouldn't recommend anyone follow the methodology behind my construction of these past the initial groundwork!) Last November, The Code Gang had a big apocalypse game. Beakies Vs Orks in the Return of the Battle for Big Toof. As is (apparently!) tradition, The Orks always need new, and bigger, and crazier toys.

The problem with this... is that I always leave it too late...
...which is how I came to find myself in my tracksuit bottoms, at 5am, finishing the construction of the last tank, the day we were due to play... and I hadn't done the rivets.

Needless to say I was *quite* tired (talk about an understatement!) on the day, and the game probably suffered for it (plus we put them into tactical reserve, and they didn't come on for ages, and were a bit disappointing on the day, but that's going down to User Error)
so anyway, enough waffle.


Here are some tanks!

and this is an explanation of how I made them!

Every tank's basic shape is constructed in a roughly identical fashion.

One track is made of the following.

2 pieces of Plasticard 20mm x 30mm

1 piece of blue insulation foam 18mm x 28mm

1 piece of thin plasticard scored lightly (this simply needs to be long enough to go around the tread which means, roughly, it should be 110mm (extra 10mm is for wrap around gluing factor)

then as you can hopefully see from the pictures, I've angled each tread to hopefully mak it look a bit more tank like, this is absolutely to personal taste. Here do what you want, just make sure that each set of 2 treads per tank are the same!

so, for one tank, you will need double the above.

PVA two pieces of matching plasticard to one piece of matching blue foam and let set.

Then PVA the entire facing of the blue foam that is showing in 'the sandwich' and wrap you scored thin plasticard tread around (bending it it around the angled treads in the places it needs to), using the overhang and some polycement to stick the tread to itself.

now for the chassis.

you will need

4 pieces of Plasticard 20mm x 30mm (These are 2 x sides and 1 x front and 1 x back)

2 pieces of Plasticard 30mm x 30mm (this is the top and bottom)

It's basically a square. Now you can angle these as well, but I happen to think they look best with only 1 angle cut, either front or back. (but again, your mileage may vary)

If you angle it, be aware that you will need to shorten one of your front/back sections accordingly, and cut a new angled frnt/back section to match.

Polycement these all together to make your boxy tank body shape.

Then take your 2 x treads, and polycement them to the body of the tank.

you now have your basic shape.

From here, hopefully, the rest should be fairly straightforward. using 10mmx10mm pieces of plasticard, you can make the gun turret, or, shoudl the fancy take you, use other GW cupolas from other tanks (as I have done on a few of them)

alternatively you can use a hemisphere to make your turret... the key is that you do something a little different somewhere on the tanks!

to make them look a little less like homogenous boxes, I also used a lot of plasticard extra plating, and cannibalised lots of unused Killa Kan/Truck/Orky parts to individualise each tank.

Rivets are also key. To be honest, I think I went a little overboard on the Fighta Bomma... (coming next!) However, where Ork Vehicles are concerned, rivets are what takes it from a scratchbuilt piece, with very flat panelling (and looking a bit simple) to something that could conceivably have been cobbled together by some crazy Mek!

So later on this week, I will show you how Gruber's finest Little tanks look with a bit o'red paint on them (I think it's made a huge difference) as well as a certain Butchered up Italieri kit and some more rivets morphed into a Fighta Bomma!

Hypa Out.