Assembled another 3 Zombies. Applied some gravel to the base of the polystyrene hills. A bit more gravel and some drying time and I’ll base coat them with black (oh sorry ‘Nero’) Resene house paint.
Aug 202004
Aug 192004
Assembled another 3 Zombies. The damned Zombies are taking over my painting station. Must really do some more painting at at least attempt to finish the front rank of each unit!
Moved my old Mordheim website onto this server and it’s now available from the links bar over to the right as mordheim campaigns. This includes a bunch of new photos of my Mordheim terrain to date. The Canon Powershot S50 actually takes a damn nice photo even at indoor daylight levels (most of these photos were taken in my garage).
Aug 182004
Another goddamn cold kicking my ass. We’ve taken to calling our 11 month old son ‘The Incubator’. Quite frankly I’ve had enough of bloody winter. Anyway yesterday I called in sick yet still managed to get a little modelling done. Fancy that.
Primed both WHFB hills with that Resene textured paint. Should be good enough to seal the polystyrene I hope. Need to match GW’s Scorched Brown to some Resene colour so I can grab some test pots. Their acrylic house paint is ideal for wargame terrain. Might spend a bit of time gravelling the bases and cliff tops this evening before I start painting them.
Painted up the second storey of the Mordheim Coach House that’s been lurking in my garage for months. Just need a bit of detailing and painting on the top storey and it’ll be finished. As it is I’ve been varnishing floors as I go so it’s perfectly playable now.
Planned another unit of 20 Zombies and started assembling them for my WHFB VC force. Have just enough Zombie and Human Militia pieces to assemble around 40 Zombies all up I believe. Can’t really say I’m looking forward to painting that lot but they will look good once I finish them in about a year!
I’m quite happy to be toddling through my garage of unassembled/unpainted models at this point. Fortunately I seem to have lost all desire to purchase any new figures.
Aug 152004
Picked up a couple of 1200mm x 900m x 50mm polystyrene from Plastic Box. Might try borrowing Griff’s General’s Compendium for some inspiration regarding terrain. Spent an hour or so in the garage tonight and carved up a couple of simple hills for WHFB.
Based the large long hill on 3mm MDF with a bit of leeway so I can do some extra rock detailing around the base. Offcuts from the hill will be useful for this. The steel work desk I bought a while back still has a workable socket which is handy for plugging in the hot wire cutter (I disconnected the rest as they were in a block on top of the playable surface). Dug up the textured paint I bought from Resene a while back as well and painted an offcut just to see how it adheres to polystyrene.
After Ben’s suggestion and some pricing on the web I went with Surplustronics after all. Picked up a 9v/1000ma AC adaptor for $20. They had some dodgy looking old Sega 10v/1000ma adaptors for half that price but I thought I’d splash out. At least the $20 adaptor came in a snappy blue and white box.
The gruntier adaptor does the trick. The wire heats up quickly and easily melts through polystyrene. After some experimentation I realised I hadn’t quite made my first wire cutter large enough. So I jigsawed up some more 5mm MDF and created the mark II which has a much wider armature. Here’s the mark I and mark II with a 25mm Zombie for scale.
Then I took to some old packing polystyrene and experimented. I carved a kind of half height hill and megalith then a little cliff face before I fled the garage and the stink of melted polystyrene.
So for the grand total of $22.95 I have a useable cutter – want one Griff? That’s:
- $2.95 : 4 metres of ni-chrome wire from Dick Smith.
- $20 : 9v AC adaptor from Surplustronics.
I’ve discovered a couple of things:
- Melted polystyrene sure stinks. Will crack open the garage door a bit next time I think.
- The heat cures the rough surface of even cheap polystyrene quite nicely. Gives it a smooth finish that hopefully will be resistant to chipping.
- I see why most store-bought cutters are based around a metal arm. This is to keep tension on the wire as it naturally expands with heat. This leads to a bit of slack in my crude home made cutter, but it’s not a big problem. Possibly a mark III built around a coat hanger?
- I wonder how long it’ll take before the AC adaptor dies? It certainly seems to warm up rather quickly. Possibly best to keep cutting times as short as possible.
Right I suspect a trip to Plastic Box this weekend might be in order. I think they’ve even marked down their big sheets of thick polystyrene recently.
Aug 102004
Threw together a hot wire cutter last night with a bit of cut 5mm MDF a couple of nails, the ni-chrome wire and an old Sony 4.5V/500ma AC adaptor that I seem to own for some reason. I can’t find the device that relates to it so I sacrificed it to the cause.
The AC adaptor is powerful enough to warm up the wire enough to cut polystyrene with a bit of force applied. However I need to grab a 9-12V/1000ma AC adaptor from Dick Smith to really heat up the wire so I can just slide it through polysytrene easily.
Aug 092004
Picked up a Cadian HQ command boxed set from TradeMe for $20 over the weekend. Not bad considering these 6 metal figures usually retail for $55. I’m really only interested in the Cadian commander figure (that guy in the middle with the sword) but I’m sure I can find some use for the other guys. Pity the standard bearer is so explicitly Cadian. Wonder how hard it would be to file off some of the details?
Got totally dicked by Brent’s Khorne Chaos nutters over the weekend in Griff’s WHFB campaign. Back to the drawing board for me I suspect. Looks like I’ll have to horde up on Zombies and maybe add a few more Grave Guard to try and counter those damned Chosen Chaos Warriors.
Picked up some nickel-chrome wire in the weekend as well. Attempting to construct myself a hot-wire cutter.
Not a lot of time for modelling recently. Painting the living room ceiling at the moment. Looking forward to finishing it so I can start painting walls and stop ruining my back and neck.
Crikey this is a nice use of Hirst Arts molds.
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