I haven’t posted for a while, because I’ve been slowly assembling the various bits and pieces from my Imperial Games Warhammer order, and while I enjoy making GW plastic figures, it doesn’t make for very interesting blogging. To date I’ve built most of a Warhammer Giant, a box of 20 Night Goblins, three Fanatics, an Orc Boss and around 20 Orc Arrer boyz (from my original battalion boxes). I’ve also cleaned up and reprimed a bunch of stuff too – 20 Zombies are ready for painting, which would take the me up to 40 in total. I’ve also got the final five Orc Boyz primed too which would take my first Orc unit to 30, and I’m half way through painting the second Boar Chariot.
Anyway, while assembling the plastic Goblin Fanatics I was disappointed by the bland look of the straight chains their balls of whirling death are on. It doesn’t really match the fluff, so I thought I’d try heat bending the thermoplastic GW figures are molded from. Searching on the internet it seems people use all sorts of methods to reshape GW plastics. I didn’t fancy hair driers, heat guns or open flames so resorted to boiling water. Bringing a pot to the boil on the stove I held the Fanatics in for a minute using cooking chopsticks. The plastic chains became easily bendable so I put gentle curves into all of them, although I wonder if I shouldn’t have gone more extreme and tried for a spiral or u-bend?
It was so easy I wonder why I haven’t tried this years ago with other GW plastics. I discovered something else too – GW black plastic bases are made of an awful cheap and crappy thermoplastic. I made the mistake of leaving the round bases on the Fanatics while I was boiling them and the bases shrunk and warped considerably in the process. Oh well, I’ve got plenty of square bases to spare so just replaced them, since basing makes no difference as they move randomly with scatter dice.
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Thinging about it, the chains should be straight because when spun the balls centrifugal gravity would hold it straight, but that is a poog way to convey motion in a static model.
They look a lot better for being bent and its for the same reason I dont use GW flying bases, the straight stick looks static whilst a bent bit of brass rod or a bent nail looks a lot more dynamic.
Sure, but then if you’re going to worry about physics, how would a Golbin that size get a solid metal ball to spin in the first place. Plus they’re meant to be smashing through enemy (hopefully) troops as well!
The how they get it moving is easy, they are ramped up on Mad Cap Mushroom beer. This apparently gives them a huge strength boost. There are rules for using Mad Cap shrooms in mordinheim.
The actual effect of the beer may be stronger than the mad cap mushroom cap since the source material I found mentioned they drink it 3-4 hours beffore the battle whilst popping a cap during a battle so your just in the warm up phase of the full effect. The process of making the shroom brew may also alter its chemical make up but wargamming needs Mycology as much as it needs physics =]
Look vs. physics 1:0!
Excellent idea. As usual your blog is a great source for technics which never have been thought about. Great. I am sure that I will have a project with heat forming in the near future!
I usually make my figurines out of ABS. Great material that vacuum forms easy and works and machines well. I buy it online from http://hightechplastics.com/ Great material and highly recommend them