The Scavvies Daniel was kind enough to part with are original Necromunda scavvie figures – evidently Games Workshop have re-sculpted the gang, judging from what they’re selling now. I have to say I think I prefer the older figures, however while these are out-of-production classic high-lead GW Scavvie figures I felt no compulsion not to butcher them!

Since there were a couple of repeated of figures the first thing I did was a few head swaps using my 28mm Pig Iron Rebel heads. The head swaps are pretty obvious in the photos because Pig Iron uses a lighter, low lead pewter and the older GW figures have defining experienced some oxidation. At the moment the heads have simply been pinned onto the bodies and I need to do some basic sculpting to build up some rags around their necks.

I’ve also filed down all of the round Scavvie ‘angry face’ badges these figures seem to be adorned with. I’ll be blanking those off to flat medals with some green stuff and probably painting them up as simple metal tokens, or maybe some kind of crude rad-dosage badge?

Next I de-tagged all the figures – which is surprisingly easy to do when they’re high-lead – and put together a bunch of simple bases. These bases are textured with a selection of resin scraps from my bits box – including some 28mm scale resin corrugated iron, barrel halves and some cast skid-plates. The idea is to paint the bases up so that the bare base you see will become lurid green toxic sludge of some sort, when and if I get around to painting these figures. At any rate now I have a bunch of based Scavvie figures I can game with, in conjunction with the handful of Warhammer Fantasy zombies I have actually painted.

I’ve played a couple of games with this throw together Scavvie gang and haven’t found them completely worthless. I was wondering if they were overly penalised because of the Outlander rules they have to play which seems like it would severely limit your gang’s income during a campaign. However the flip side of that seems to be that Scavvie gang members are pretty cheap to hire, and even armed with homemade weapons, their numbers can add up during a game. Everybody also seems fairly terrified of the rather erratic Plague Zombies which does add a certain element of fun to playing this gang.

I ordered two baggies of Squad Support Weapons and two baggies of Sci fi Human and Halfling guns from Hasslefree. They arrived promptly and well packed in a bubble wrap envelope. Nothing was damaged or required straightening which is good considering the distance they had traveled to reach me in New Zealand.

In the photo above you see a couple of the white metal sprues as I took them out of their baggies. There was a moderate amount of venting spikes on both of them, but they were all easily flicked off with an Xacto blade. There were no prominent mold lines, but I did spend around five minutes per spure taking the weapons off and tiding them up with a needle file.

The ‘squad support’ sprue on the left contains a bunch of solid looking sci-fi weapons: a mix of automatic projectile weapons, a grenade launcher, a large plasma weapon and finally a gatling style weapon of some kind. The ‘Halfling and Human’ weapons sprue on the right contains a more interesting mix of weapons: an auto pistol, something that looks like an Aliens Pulse Carbine, a rather simple, large, flat plasma weapon and a couple of archaic firearms – a shotgun and a WWI Lewis gun!

Overall the weapons are fairly well sculpted and detailed, with one or two possible exceptions – personally I don’t really like the large flat boxy plasma style weapon on each sprue. Scale wise the weapons are certainly suitable for 25-28mm figures. To give many of you a better idea of scale I’ve placed them next to various Games Worskhop plastic parts.

Top row is a Warhammer Fantasy Empire Militia blunderbuss next to a Warhammer 40k Cadian Imperial Guard grenade launcher. In the middle right you have a 40k Cadian Imperial Guard laser rifle, while finally bottom left you have a Necromunda Goliath revolver. You can see that the Hasslefree weapons are generally smaller than the heroic scale 28mm Games Workshop plastic parts.

The difference in scale does make them a little less fearsome looking – compare the Goliath revolver to the Hasslefree auto-pistol bottom left for example. So I’m not entirely sure they’re a good match for Games Workshop plastics which is a little disappointing. However I’m still going to try and work a few into my scratch built Necro Scavvies and see how they go. In terms of price, sculpting and casting quality I can’t fault Hasslefree however, so if you’re looking for sci-fi weapons to work with ranges other than Games Workshop’s I’d say give them a try.

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2. Review: Pig Iron Kolony Rebel Heads
3. Review: Black Scorpion Tombstone Miniatures

I ordered two packs, and each came in a small baggie containing two copies of the white metal sprue you see in the above photo. In each pack you get twelve of the basic gas mask wearing heads, plus two each of the four ‘command’ style heads for a total of 20 heads per pack. Possibly ordering two packs was a bit of overkill, but they’re so cheap – working out at less than $1NZ per head it seemed a shame not to!

The heads are well cast with a reasonable amount of detail on them and I expect them to paint up well. There’s some fine mold lines to clean up, but sensibly no mold line crosses any face. Scale wise the heads are a touch smaller than related plastic 40k heads from Games Workshop. This second photo shows two Pig Iron heads compared to plastic GW Cadian and Catachan heads.

Personally I find the Pig Iron heads to be an acceptable match to the GW plastics. In fact I intend to use these metal heads to convert up a Necromunda Scavvie warband from various GW WHFB and 40k plastics. I think it’s a nice touch that the heads are fairly bare around the back (most of them simply have a strap) as it gives you options for converting on helmets or hoods. For my Necro scavvies I do intend to add tattered green stuff hoods, which I should be able to do without having to cut anything down.

Here’s another shot just to show you the head scale on a GW Cadian and Catachan bodies. I’ve left the arms off so the head/torso ratio is obvious and, given that we’re dealing with slightly oddly scaled 28mm sculptures, the heads looks fine. If anything the slightly smaller heads actually make the over-sized GW figures look more realistically proportioned in my opinion.

So in summary I’d happily recommend Pig Irons sci-fi head ranges to any 28mm converter or sculptor out there. They’re excellent quality and the price is perfectly acceptable given the quantity of heads in each pack. On a related note I’d also happily order from Scrap Dragon again too, in fact my receipt came with a 5% discount coupon code of my next order, which is a excellent way to guarantee return custom!

Related posts:

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2. Review: Hasslefree Sci-Fi Weapons