My, what a big bolter you have!

The next installment of "Yet another Siege Dreadnought" build is ready. I've made progress on the siege ladder, crushing claw, control levers....and of course the offending appendage.

Let's get started shall we.....

"Nothing to see here, move along, move along."

Beefed up the claw hand & added a forearm blade, donated from a set of clippers.

Pins for control levers.

Here's where the troops begin their climb.

And then continue up onto the battlements
via the ladder.

Grossly inappropriate "hard point" :)

So, this is where it's at ATM. I've still got cable's to run, weld marks to apply ala acrylic caulking compound & a few other thing's (that I've yet to think of) before I'll be calling it done.

Thanks to Niibl over on the Oldhammer forum for suggesting to me that I should make the hand look bigger/meaner. I think it looks a lot better now, cheers :)

Onwards & upwards!

Yet another Siege Dreadnought!

What can I say, I suffer from an addiction for building concrete smashing, towering wrecking machines. I made my first foray into this madness about a year & a half ago with a kitbashed RT Dreadnought....which was a bit of a failure. His appendages were way out of scale, but it was a fun project none the less, and besides which, even a failed project still gives an opportunity to practice :)

Next up on the project time line is the actual focus of this here blog post. Starting out as a Bandai robot model kit. I started building and modifying it at the start of last year. Then I got side tracked and put it to one side....for quite a while :)

But then I actually finished a Siege Dreadnought a few months back! And now I'm ready and raring to go with the second build again. I'm not going to make it overly complicated, otherwise it might end up like my Hovertank .....sigh :( That will be done too, but later, just a bit later ok :)

So, now that that intro/excuse blurb is over, here's a short little blog post, just to prove that work has recommenced. Enjoy :)

Hulking machine, ready to be subjected to more butchery by my poorly manicured hands.

Siege ladder, stolen from a toy fire truck. This will be mounted close to his shoulder. 

The wrecking appendage, awaiting it's wrecking implement.

What's this!? A spiky ball of carnage! I wonder where this will reside?

There's still a lot of work to be done, but I'm happy with how it's progressing. I'm gunna add a few cosmetic bits & bob's to him, ala spiked feet, a few "cock" bolters, control levers and a dash pad etcetera, but not enough to make it a very long build.

Paint wise, I'm going to try and give him a "heavily aged/rusted look". I've been keen to try out this technique in the past, but I'd never come across an adequate (at least in my mind) tutorial that covered it in enough detail. I've also not had a model that l thought would suit it either. That was up until a couple of weeks ago, when I came across this guys "rusting tutorial" on weathering up an old car body. After having a look through it a few times I'm pretty confident with how to go about achieving the look I'm after on this guy....stay tuned :)

Repairing the "Book of the Astronomican"

Hello gents & gentiles,

Today I present to you my rather hamfisted (but ultimately successful) step-by-step process of repairing an old softcover book. The tome in question is one that I've coveted for many many years, but my wallet had remained steadfast in not yielding its bounty for the ridiculous amount of coin that is generally asked for it. So I waited......and waited.....and waited some more, until I finally got one! All for the princely sum of $15!!! But, it needed some TLC & I was up for the challenge!

Read on! If you want to know more.....

Looked "OK" from the outside.

 

But from the side....it wasn't :(

So, out come the pages....carefully.

 

Pry the front & rear book covers apart.

Aided with a bit of gentle persuasion :)

With glue this old & brittle it doesn't take too much to remove the pages.

Old glue still stuck to the bulk of the pages.

But pulls away pretty easily.

Then your left with the cover sheet

Removed the traces of old glue.

Pulling one page away from the "glue slab" at a time....carefully.

More of the same fun.

Until I ended up with all of the pages unattached from each other.

I then removed the remaining glue from the front and back pages where it meets the covers near the spine.  

I roughened up the spine of the cover, to provide a better purchase for the glue.

Roughening process complete.

Clamped to the bench after stuffing about lining up the pages.

I used baking paper under & over the page block....too make sure the glue only stuck to the pages and nothing else.

Once this was clamped I applied about four or five thin coats of Latex glue to the spine. Waiting for each coat to dry fully before applying the next. Once that was done I tested the page block to see if the repair was successful, before I proceeded with the rest of the process.

Then I applied Latex glue to the cover spine & installed the page block. Lined it up & put a couple of sheets of baking paper between the front & back cover to ensure the glue that inevitably squeezes out from the spine doesn't stick the covers & pages together.

The two sheets of baking paper installed up to where you don't want
the glue to adhere.

Clamped to the bench for a few days to make sure the glue had fully cured.

All done, pages not falling out....awesome!

The spine & front /rear sections reattached correctly.

Looks good to me :)

This rock'n dude gave it his seal of approval too :)

Final notes:

I used Latex glue, as PVA glue dries quite hard/brittle. Where as the former is still flexible once fully cured. I think the hardest part of the whole process was getting the page block lined up before clamping. I'm a bit of a stingy bastard, so instead of buying or making a proper page block clamp I improvised. It did the job! But I'm sure if I had had the correct clamping tool it would have made the process a lot easier.

This copy of the Astronomican wasn't even glued along the narrow section (front & back) near the spine. Hence, why it had started to fall apart. Anyway, I'm a happy chappy now, coz I've got the book I've wanted for ages.... in good condition :)

Now, I can almost hear through the web, you guys asking, "How the hell did you manage to get hold of a copy of the Book of the Astronomican for $15!!!??". Well, I'll tell you, as it stands, I now have all of the old RT/WFB tomes that I've ever wanted. So I'm happy to pass on my little secret to collecting old GW tomes, which to tell you the truth probably isn't much of a secret anyway! But here goes......have a look on AbeBooks I've collected over half of the books from their listed booksellers over the years. And I've gotten them all quite cheaply, as they either don't know the value of what they have and/or they've incorrectly listed them with spelling or ISBN errors. Their lack of knowledge about their own stock is my gain.....and now it can be yours too :)


Anyway, all the best, catch you later :)

Siege Dreadnought MK.VI......ready to rock!

First up is a photo dump, then after that will flow some verbal diarrhoea from the creator.

And begin;

It's punchy punchy time!

Bit of a blurry side shot, incompetent cameraman!

Decided to add some glowing effect, simulating engine activity of some kind...maybe kerosene powered?

"Number five is alive"...oh what a terrible movie :P

I applied dry pigment to the hammerfist, representing concrete dust. 

For the "built up grime" look on the shafts that the Las-cannons are mounted too I applied several
coats of oil paints, then Tamiya gloss black & Tamiya smoke, and finally some clear gloss.

I didn't do anything fancy with the Las-cannons themselves, just rusted them up a bit.

Here you can see some oil leaks from the hydraulic hoses.

Another view of the grime, nasty looking stuff isn't it?

Here's little old Billy, holding onto yet another joystick....this time
between his legs :)

And to make the beast move forwards, what better way than to have
an accelerator pedal? Vrooom vroom!!!

It's a bit hard to see from any single angle, but I wrote "smash" on
Billys' left leg....coz that's sort of what he likes to do all day. 

The nine kills he's notched up could be for anything really. Demolished
buildings? Enemy combatants stood on? Amount of times he's
fallen over?...who knows?

The weathering process disguised the Ultramarine insignia a little
too much for my liking, but I was worried that I might make it worse
trying to fix it, so I just left it as it was.

Bullet holes & oil stains. It's pretty hard to keep these things in a
"new" state of repair on the battlefield.

Why is there so much rubbish on the ground in the far off future?
 Environmental vandals, the whole lot of' them I tell you!

Billy shares his opinion about of the previous owners capabilities.

Tamiya black & smoke make a great recipe for oils stains.

More fisting action :0

I think those concrete adversaries comply with the request every time.

Another blurry shot, sorry :(

What's that I can see affixed to the underside of it's chin? Is that a name plate? 

Why yes it is! It's the MK VI Hammeroid! Ready to be a pain in the arse to all those who oppose him :) 

Ok, so it's done. Another kitbashed Rogue Trader beast for the display cabinet. I'm kinda happy with the weathering...went a bit overboard I think. I used this weathering exercise as a practice run for my Hovertank. So I can get back into the swing of things before I tackle the big jalopy.

Why a name plate? Well, widening the body made this area quite bland, it was just a blank space. I thought about putting some spotlights there, but they wouldn't last too long in that location if concrete was raining down onto them now would they? So I decided upon a good old fashioned name plate, the ones they used to put on old boilers and cranes.

The name was the easy part, twas a challenge put forward (mostly in jest) to me by my Blogging buddy  Asslessman. You can read the challenge if you want to in the comments section of the blog post  here. I just couldn't think of a better name for a robot that has a big lumpy fist used for smashing concrete fortifications in with. So thanks for the idea JB :)

Gaming wise, I don't have any siege games lined up atm, but I may think of something to use him in soon?

I've got some scatter terrain & wooded areas that I've been working on while building this guy up, so expect to see them in the coming months.

Cheers.