Progress Report #10 Choppas... The Arnie kind

I've been able to put in a good couple hours of work a night for the past couple of weeks. Not alot of projects on the go, but alot of progress is being made!

Also of note I helped start up a local gaming group. A couple of old friends got dragged back into the hobby willingly. (I would have also accepted kicking and screaming) and are putting together new armies as well as dusting ancient ones off. :D

We have only a few simple rules. We play once a month which is more than reasonable even for guys like us with lives and jobs. We have to try to get at least 1 new unit done and painted per session. Proxies are cool since we are there to play test. But most importantly of all, no painting or modeling at the session. We are there to play!

We had a meeting last Sunday and I have to admit it was a nice feeling to PLAY again. To Quote a friend "I didn't realize you actually played games of 40k!" to give you an idea how long its been since I played casually. I just enjoy the modelling and painting too much. It eats up all my free time and I inevitably end up complaining while at a tournament that I don't play test enough ;)

My battlewagon is coming along nicely. I added the engines recently, and worked alot on the rotors.
Got the krew "installed", added landing gear and alot of the armor plating is done. Still alot of work to go sadly and I haven't even armed it yet!
But if I power through, I think I can have it all ready for paint in another 2 weeks.

This is a better profile shot. The rotors are more complete than this now, this pic is a week old.
They also sit about 3/4" higher than the transmission towers, I hadn't finished building the collectives yet in this picture.

These are the rotors as they sit today. They still need to be filed down, more putty work and some detail gubbins but they already look better than I had hoped.
Something as eye catching as the rotors on a chopper can really make or break a model so I'm happy they turned out.

This is the start of one of my secret projects. I've started building crashed trukk bases. In addition to being nice pieces (and being very fun to put together) they're very practical.
Since my trukks are so tall by design, when they get wrecked they become a real nuisance on the table. Maneuvering around them with infantry, especially in assaults is very difficult. So now when they get wrecked I can replace it with a convenient marker. I did this with the previous rendition of the army and I never regretted it.

This one is a little more complete. You can see the electric tea candle in the background adding the glow effect. I wish I could take credit for the idea but it's stolen from a couple locals who made up flame and smoke markers with them at my con. I loved the idea so much that I ran with it and came up with these bases.
This base needs a bit more putty work, and I'm going to make a taller smoke plume . This one was just for the proof of concept.

After my games on Sunday I realized the Hueys rotors looked a little... plain? compared the Battlewagons so I brought them back to the painting bench and hacked them up to add the blade bitz like you see here. I'll add a few more detail gubbins too.
The Chinork is just being used for display.




 I finished building my lootas and meks a couple weeks ago. I had alot of fun with these guys. Which is good because I expected them to be a disaster since I had no idea what they were going to end up looking like when I was done.
The guy in the middle didn't quite turn out at first, but I ended up adding a bunch of misc cabling and a shoulder pad that rounded him out nicely.

As you can see they're alot further along this week. They're at the point where they just need a bunch of small detail stuff. Mostly to breakup the huge amount of metal on them. I actually broke one of my own rules with this squad and used black spray instead of my usual grey primer. I'm glad I did, I was able to do the metal work in less than 10 minutes. My usual method would have taken a couple of hours on these guys

Now what's this?
Loose bitz for another insane project?
I've been thinking about building a third chopper for some time, a clone of the Huey actually but that felt a little redundant.
I got some inspiration this weekend from some russian army pictures, a few sketches later I went and ordered $50 worth of bitz...
I'll post up more details when they get here.
But as a hint the project code name is Havork.