Dread-full December, Space Ork Mega Dread, The Build.................Part 2

Hi All

So here's part 2 of my walk through of the Mega Dread build. This will show how the primary weapon arms were built. Importantly it should be noted that both arms can be built for left or right fitting, depending on the orientation of the upper arm to shoulder piece connections. Your choice but be careful not to make 2 left arms! ;)

First up you should recall that I did a dry run and drilled and pinned the shoulder sockets previously but didn't fix them to the torso as shown here;

The Kilkannon arm;

The following series of shots show step by step how I built the main gun and the left shoulder;

The shoulder joint and upper arm, drilled and pinned;

The Barrel and Support prior to fixing showing the excess lug protruding and then with the excess material removed so that the barrel joins snugly to the chambers later. DO NOT fix the support to the barrel yet!

The Kannon frame attached to the upper arm/shoulder sub assembly with the kannon klamp, shown from several angles. The large hole is for a wide pin to connect the shell chambers to the frame later.

The wide pin which will hold the cylinder in place, the kit doesn't contain this. Whether mine was missing or not I don't know, the instructions/contents sheet doesn't show anything. I made this pin from the chopped off lug from the barrel, by shaving it down to the correct diameter. You could use whatever you have available.

The cylinder attached to the assembly. Ensure you fit it with the shells pointing forward! ;)

The barrel support now fitted in place, note that the hole for the barrel is aligned with one of the shell chambers.

Barrel fitted. This was a nice strong joint.

The shoulder guard fitted onto the shoulder joint. This was a total mare! The join is small and not well moulded. I spent a lot of time filing and sanding and in the end used 3 pins to get a decent fix. Be wary!

Left arm in place but not glued, the pin is tight enough that the arm doesn't droop under the barrels weight so I'll probably leave it unfixed after painting for ease of packing and transport.

The Ripper Klaw arm

Now the right arm, this was tricky! The worst bit was fitting the 4 pistons, the instructions are rubbish! My pistons did not conform to theirs, I did lots of dry runs and ended up using them in different positions and having to create an extension for one of them. There was some bad moulding involved with 2 of the pistons. My advice is to take this bit really slowly and be very very patient!

The shoulder pivot connected to the shoulder joint. I pinned this just in case.

The next 3 shots show the pin holes in the wrist and the 3 Klaws and finally the completed "hand".

Adding the pistons to the arm. As I said earlier this was tricky and required a lot of trimming and repositioning.

The arm connected to the shoulder pivot. This required a pin and some careful positioning so that the finished arm was in the desired position when complete. Again dry runs required at every stage.

The pin and hole for the wrist joint;

The klaw attached to the arm. Full rotation is possible here for a wide choice of positions;

The shoulder guard fitted. Again this required a lot of work and 2 pins to get a decent joint.

At this point I will share an important lesson I learnt; Don't Stop Doing Dry Runs!!! With the guard on, the arm didn't fit to the torso with the pin in its current position. Only a fraction off, but enough for the join to not work. So I removed the guard and fixed the arm as I wanted it and then put the guard in place. The arm is now fixed to the torso and cannot be removed.
Lesson Learnt!

The finished model;

Overall well pleased with the build, I made a few mistakes along the way but also learnt a couple of things. This is a big and complex build which deserves a careful approach and the model is well worth that effort.
I have since modified the model slightly as I want to field it in a codex orks army and the latest data sheet for it in I.A.Apoc, which is the only way to have one in a codex list, doesn't allow a third big shoota! Boo! So I've removed it.

The next post will cover painting the model and the base I decided to put it on.

Bluddtoof

Dread-full December; Space Ork Mega Dread, The Build........ Part 1.

So this is my first entry into the Code40k "Dread-full December" event; my Ork Mega Dread!
For a start this a great kit and once built looks v. cool! It took a lot of building and suffered from some of the more common issues with resin kits but with judicious pinning and patience it came out as I wanted.
I'm going to show step by step how I built this, so first here's the finished build;

And now I'll go through each step with piccies (Take it as read that each piece is trimmed of flash, filed, sanded as required and washed in warm soapy water before any gluing commences).
All pinning uses 1.20mm (18 gauge) uncoated jewellery wire and 1.00mm drilled holes using a pin vice.

The Legs;

These are quite complex structures and I would highly recommend dry runs before you even trim the mould lugs off as you may decide you want to use some of this excess resin in the finished structure. Each leg comprises a foot piece, lower leg, knee joint pin, upper leg piece and several pistons which stick on but are not structural. The knee pin is designed to fit through holes in both leg sections at the knee joint and thus allow a movable joint; in reality as there is no movement in the lower leg/ankle joint I saw no point in this knee movement and also you need to drill the holes for the pin to go in. Instead I chose to chop the heads off the pins and fix the knee joints in place with metal pins for strength, the resin pin heads were then glued on where the pins would be.
The next 2 photos are the lower legs and feet with pinning holes and pins showing prior to fixing;

This is all the subassemblies for the legs and pelvis prior to trimming and fixing;

You can see above the locator holes in the upper leg sections where you would need to drill a hole for the supplied knee pin, quite a large diameter hole (3 or even 4mm if I remember right). I drilled and pinned the joints off centre from those dimples and thus could use the solid resin of the lower leg section, the pin heads are quite large and covered up the new pins location, sanded smooth the sections fit snuggly and were glued to create a strong joint.
The upper leg sections have moulded lugs which locate in dimples in the pelvis piece, it is important to point out that at this stage you can alter the final pose of the model by changing the orientation of the pelvis section relative to the upper legs, i.e. by leaning it forwards or backwards. To do this simply remove the lugs and pin the assembly in the position you require, the natural position gives a pose which has the torso leaning forward slightly, I was happy with this and so kept the lugs in place. Note that this is the only joint that allows such positioning, later assemblies allow no movement of the torso forward or backwards!
I used additional pinning in the pelvis joints because this section will support the models full weight and will also take a lot of stress if the model is picked up by any part above the pelvis. All 3 pieces are quite large and solid so could take nice long pins.
Here's the leg assembly completed;

The Torso and Shoulders;

This section comes in several parts too; main torso, engine block, 2 shoulder joints and teef plate. Here you can choose the torso's position relative to the leg assembly by rotating its large bottom lug within the pelvis. The join between torso and pelvis took a lot of sanding and filing to get a true fit.
Here's the torso and shoulder joints with pins shown;

Again you need to carefully decide on the positioning of these pieces as they will determine the position of the arms and also where the large shoulder guards will sit in relation to the torso, try dry runs. I positioned mine so that the ripper klaw arm would be raised above the torso and lunging down on its target, with the kilkannon arm held level.
MOST IMPORTANT: Don't fix the shoulder plates to the torso yet, it's better to leave them off so you can construct the arms on the them later and paint the arms before fixing in place, you may also want to keep the arms interchangeable if you've splashed out on extra arms. At this stage just drill your pin holes as required.
Next is the joint between torso and engine block, a straightforward joint with just a little sanding required to be flush, a pin helps to give strength to the joint;

The Teef plate also fits simply with lugs and dimples, again I recommend pinning to give strength;

Here is the torso section constructed and fitted onto the legs;

The joint between torso and pelvis was solid enough to not require a pin, however you should make that decision yourself based on the mould quality of your kit.
In the last photo above you can see the pin holes I drilled in each of the 8 cylinders to mount the piston heads on later. This was a decision I made after the construction of the torso, in hindsight they would have been easier to drill before hand.

Engine Gubbinz;

These are the exhausts and piston heads, the exhausts needed a little work to get them to fit snuggly, a little cutting and filing and 1 was a little warped, but they're thin enough to shape using just the warmth from your hands.
I used a single pin for each piece, 1 to join the 2 part exhaust;

The 2 part exhaust has no guide holes at all so a pin is essential. I found a pin in the top of the 3 pipes on each exhaust was the easiest to work with and was sufficient to give a strong bond. The pipes all fit snug into their recesses and just required some filing and sanding.

This is the finished engine block with a piston head fitted to each cylinder;

Starting to look proper Orky!

Da Big Shootas;

The kit comes with 2 rotary cannon style big shootas, in the codex entry you can swap these for a variety of other weapons and can also add a third big shoota, none of which come with the kit. I want mine to have 3 big shootas so I used the 2 from the kit and added a third from my bitz box.
The 2 from the kit are simple to build and fit either side of the torso, they were located with a short pin into the ammo feed box;

The third big shoota needed a little work to give the model a personal touch, don't want it to look like any other meks work do I!?  The position of the 3rd big shoota had me thinking for a while, crotch mounted just wasn't right, the waist was taken by the other shootas and neither arm had a suitable mounting position. I considered shoulder mounted as both shoulder plates are v. large and have plenty of space but I'd already decided that I wasn't going to fit the pilot coming out of the hatch as I am firmly in the school of thought that Ork Dredd pilots are welded, nailed, tied, glued or otherwise permanently fixed inside their new stompy machine and would have absolutely no desire or interest in getting out even if they could!! So the obvious place to mount the 3rd gun was on top of the torso, in place of the hatch, with control connections coming out of the torso. A little plasticard and some tubing later the 3rd gun was fitted;

The 3rd big shoota is from the Forge World "Ork Weapon Set". A little chopping and filing and I quite like the effect.

That's part 1 of the build. In part 2 I'll show how I built the primary arm weapons. Part 3 will cover the painting.

Bluddtoof.

Orkoid Air Superiority

Hello All

I've now finished the last of my models for the upcoming SVA XIII, my dakkajet, "Da Flying Squig".
If you're contemplating your own Ork fighta/bomma for the first time then the best advice I can give is that it is quite a large model and there's a lot of painting on this baby! Now I'm not a quick painter by any means, I like to take my time with just about everything I paint but my Ork paint scheme is far quicker to complete than, for example, my marine paint scheme. So after building this model, which uses components from 2 bomma kits, I realised I would have to treat it like I would any other large Ork vehicle, there was no way I was gonna paint it in a weekend as I would a dread or buggy. So first up I decided against a "red paint job", rules wise it doesn't need it and I also wanted to paint it as fresh out of da meks workshop and hurtling into the fray with some of it's welds still cooling!
The first step then in my vehicle paint scheme (this applies to all my ork vehicles with no visible krew fixed in place) is to paint all the plates and mechanical bits in the full range of metallic shades I possess, so as to give the impression of a patchwork of looted scrap from a wide range of sources. I select one paint at a time and paint random sections and plates in that colour, repeat for the 8 metallic shades in my collection. The resulting metallic base coats look like this.........

 

The areas which are still black undercoat will be painted in maily red, white or black, the primary colours of Waaaaggghh! Bluddtoof, or they will carry Bluddtoofs logo, the red and white teeth on a black background. A few of the other ares will be painted in a random selection of bright primary shades, again to suggest random looted parts.
The next step though is to wash all the metallic areas with a succession of ink washes, in series I use Ogryn Flesh, Gryphonne Sepia, Devlan Mud and Badab Black, of couse these are from GWs old paint range, from the new range I would use their equivalents.
I apply the second and subsequent washes in smaller and smaller quantities whilst the previous wash is still wet, this allows the colours to blend together in a patchy fashion and once dry gives a very dirty, flat look to the metal as seen here....

 

Next I'll paint all the red areas, this starts with a base coat of the old foundation paint mechrite red followed by layers of mephiston red and finally a baal red wash. Once that's done all the other panels and gubinz wil be painted in a variaty of bright primary colours and washed with the relevant shades.
The last step is a fresh coat of black on the panels which will carry the tooth pattern, followed by the painting of the teeth themselves.
This is the plane complete with glyphs, transfers, the pilot and windscreen (which were painted seperately) and finished base.........

So that's it, Waaaagggghhhhh! Bluddtoof is all done and ready to hit SVA XIII. Hope to see many of you there and Crump you all to bits!!

Bluddtoof