Spider tank, Spider tank; or why not to buy recasts

So yesterday I got a package all the way from China, which took over 3 weeks to get to me- a little spider tank. Looking for a little mech to use when I start playing Secrets of the Third Reich and completely in love with this build I decided to try to track down a kit. Which I kind of did and here we get to the main point of this post- recasts. I was pretty damn certain the kit I was getting off of eBay was a recast, but I wasn't really aware of all the issues which come with that when I ordered it. But lo, when the package turned up yesterday and indeed it is a recast. Now I don't really know much about quality of kits, coming almost entirely from a little Games Workshop hole, but I can tell there are issues with this kit. Most of these pictures are after I've already started making the kit ready, but you can see the issues pretty clearly.

HUGE sticky out bits on the front of the hull and in the recess where the gun goes and lots of weird lines and pits.

Very thin leg armour plates, some essentially transparent in places.

The engine block has joints where the legs are supposed to attach, which I'd imagine are supposed to correspond to the gaps on the underside of the hull for the legs. However, this is not the case, with the joints on the engine block and the gaps in the hull being way out of line with each other. The engine block also had a very thick layer of resin left over on the flat side which needed quite a bit of cutting & sanding down. The same was true of the gun section.

Credit where credit's due however- the leg pieces and the detailing on the hull are actually pretty nice, at least to my untrained eyes, despite weird black bits embedded in the hull...

All in all, for £10 I don't suppose it's too bad- I'm certainly still going to paint it up and use it. But next time I want a model I'll know to save my pennies rather than let my haste get the better of me. Anyway, back to the Rasenmaeher next post- the patterns are more or less done, so onto the detailing and weathering!

Painting phase 1- MaK scratch-build 5

Onto the painting stage! Painting something this big is a completely new experience for me, but I knew I'd need a spray gun. I asked a friend if I could borrow his, and the answer was yes. Unfortunately, it's a Games Workshop spray gun, which is a pile of cack. I could barely get it working at all, though admittedly it was OK for the brief periods when it was working. So most of the time I was using a 3/4" paintbrush, so the coverage is pretty rough.

First was a Chaos Black undercoat, for which the spray gun WAS working for most of the time.

After that was some paint mix I made years ago and annoyingly didn't make a recipe. I'm pretty certain it involved Camo Green & Snakebite Leather. Anyway, I mixed it 1:1 with water and started painting with the large paintbrush at this point. After that dried, I went over the areas with poor coverage again with just the paint.

Then I went over with another 1:1 mix of Kommando Khaki. This coat's pretty patchy, I reckon I'm going to have to do another one, but it is nice as weathering. What a shame I'm not on that stage yet...

Camo pattern (kinda) and detailing soon.

Milliput and engine bits- MaK scratch-build 4

After realising polyfilla was probably a terrible idea, I went out and got some milliput to round out the hull, and the result was this-

Needs a bit of smoothing out, but for my first time using milliput, I think it's alright. I then moved onto doing the engine bits. I realised that the parts would seem way too exposed and just bits on a flat-surface if they weren't placed in a lowered area, and I tried cutting this into the card which was already on the model, without realising that the PVA glue would stop that from working properly... Silly me.
So instead I made two additional layers of card, both with the same hole cut into them and glued these to the hull. For the engine parts- or at least visible bits of the engines workings I mostly used more 40K bits, but I also used a cable grip from the inside of a socket for a fan and some iPod earphones for cable. The large piece on the top right is supposed to be a heatsink or something similar, and is the foot from a Tau vehicle landing leg, left over from the radar dish on the turret.

After I'd finished the engine bits, I used more milliput to round the card off. After that I glued on the turret on top of its card base.
I felt the hull top looked too bare just with the engine in the middle so I used yet more 40K bits- aerials and the barrels from a Tau Burst cannon as exhaust pipes.

Now I think the build stage is more or less finished, though I may sand down the milliput as it isn't the smoothest of jobs- lots of lumps. I've also decided on a name for the tank, which I think suits its anti-infantry main gun- the Rasenmaeher, or lawnmower. Anyway, I'll leave you for now with what the Rasenmaeher looks like at the moment. Painting should start on Thursday, after I've borrowed a friends spraygun.

Hull gubbins- MaK scratch-build 3

The bad thing about the box I used as the hull on this project is that there's a lot of empty space. Fortunately, I had plenty of ideas on how to fill in the space.

Firstly, the Nutrocker has are fans around the bottom of the hull- it is a hover tank after all. After some rummaging around the local hardware shops, I found some special washers which looked like a good choice for use as fans. I used two small washers side-by side on each corner of the hull, as opposed to one big one on each corner. For the nubs in the middles I used little bits of trimmed off sprue.

The Nutrocker also has a bulge on one side, presumably for a radar or some such. I used another key finder back and greenstuff to model on this bulge (although I think it's on the wrong side if this were a true Nutrocker build).

I added another bump  by using a Tau shield generator and more greenstuff. For inspection panels, on the hull and around the fans I used card in 5mm strips, stuck on with superglue (I was too impatient to use PVA glue). The cards a bit thick really, and some of the lines are far from straight, so plenty of room for improvement next time.

At the back I used a Tau antennae array and made an inspection hatch and on the other side from the bulge I did some more rungs using staples & greenstuff.

That's it for now. I should hopefully be doing the polyfilla work on Monday.

Turret details galore! MaK scratch-build 2

Foolishly I decided to start doing detailing and gubbins before finishing off the actual hull. It is too much fun finding appropriate parts to use. For the gun I considered three options-

1. A railgun made of windscreen wiper parts, a la Mark Stevens.
2. A large chaingun made of metal piping, again a la Mark Stevens.
3. A smaller chaingun just made of Tau burst cannons.

I went with the last option, mostly because I'm lazy and had the parts lying around. The Hammerhead burst cannon was the right size, and I mounted it on some more card. I put this behind a hole in the pot so it looked like the gun can traverse up and down. 

As a camera/sensor for the gun I just used a joiner from a Tau gun drone with the stem cut off .The inspection hatch came from the cupola hatch which comes with the Tau Devilfish & Hammerhead kits- it's unused on the Hammerhead kit. EDIT- My bad, it's a left-over hatch from an old conversion which never got finished. The hatch does get used on the Hammerhead.

The bulge which the radar is mounted on is from a pound land key finder which was completely useless at its allotted job, but after being taken apart, the back was perfect. After being roughed up with sandpaper, superglue stuck the back to the pot, and gaps were filled in with green stuff. The radar itself was another part from the Devilfish/Hammerhead sprues- the landing gear- with the landing pad cut off and a wing from a Revell Star Wars kit.

As the key finder had two screwholes, I decided to fill in the other one just with the bottom of a Tau shield drone. The rungs are simply two small staples which haven't been separated from each other green stuffed onto the side of the pot. The aerial too is simple- part of a curtain rail with a paper clip bent out of shape partially.

I wanted to put more weaponry on the tank, but I couldn't see another gun fitting anywhere, so I decided to make a simple rocket launcher. This was made with a rocket from an Imperial Guard heavy weapon box and two screw things (technical term there :P). I chopped down the screw things to all but one notch and the fins off of the rocket, glued the rocket in the top screw thing and the two screw things together. The whole assembly was stuck onto a button which came off of the key finder, which was stuck to the side of the turret. 

Right, that's the turret bits finished off. Next posts will be on the hull and on how well the polyfilla works, when I get round to doing that.

Maschinen Kreiger Scratch-build

Hello internet!
I've set up this blog mainly to document me making my first scratch-build- a Maschinen Kreiger hover tank. Maschinen Kreiger, or SF3D, is a universe created by Kow Yokoyama and has some lovely mixed-media kits,   mostly in 1/20 or 1/35 scale.
However, said kits, coming from Japan and sometimes being made by small garage companies, are pretty hard to track down, and pretty expensive when you find them. Being a poor student I can't afford such luxuries and decided to scratch-build something MaKish. The initial idea came from another scratch build, by Mark Stevens, the person whose models first got me into MaK. Specifically, his Haka, which used car wing mirrors as a main part of the build. This got me thinking I could use wing mirrors for the base of a Nutrocker/ Nutcracker. After paying much more attention to wing mirrors than usual for a couple of days, I decided this wouldn't work, not without far more skills than I possess. Instead, after hunting around for a bit, I found a tupperware box which would fit the bill.

I was concerned it might have been a bit too large for the 1/35 scale I was roughly aiming for, but after comparing it to a Tau XV-8, which is about the same size as a 1/35 figure, I realised it was actually about right.

The plan was to build up a more curved shape on the top of the hull, in a style similar to the Nutrocker, by using polyfilla on top of layered card, and to use an upturned rice pudding pot for the turret. The layering of the card is imperfect, but hopefully after the polyfilla goes on top that should change. The card was glued together with PVA glue and after sanding down the box with coarse sandpaper and being weighted down, PVA worked to stick the card to the box too.

More details to come soon!