Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The base just makes it!


Well, my package arrived from Dragon Forge on Saturday morning and Jeff Hall handed me some magnets on Saturday afternoon, so I got to put a little bit of work into the Stalk Tank on Sunday and Monday evening. Below you can see a bit of a walk-around of the beast on its new home.






I tried to get the legs to hold up the body by themselves (using the rare earth magnets) but although they stayed connected to the body, they allowed the body to spin around too much. I guess the abdomen section is just too heavy. I had to find a different solution.

Enter some fencing wire from Home Depot. I cut off a few lengths, bent them into shape, drilled holes in the base, and slid the limbless body onto the new support wires, as you can see in the shot below. These wires, while still kind of obvious, are no where near as obtrusive as the pipe in the previous Stalk Tank post. This arrangement also helps with the packing/transport of the Stalk Tank, which was a good chunk of the ultimate goal for this base.


Speaking of the base, here are a couple of shots of it, all ready to be primed and painted. Used on the base are the following "ingredients":
• Fencing wire
• Cities of Death building sprues
• Apoxie Sculpt from Aves Studios
• Thin rolls of green stuff
• The fine crushed slate from GW's Urban Basing Kit
• A few pieces of Imperial Guard equipment
• and most importantly, a 150mm round base from Dragon Forge



Jeff at Dragon Forge has just recently added 80mm, 120mm (CD-sized), and 150mm round, blank bases to his range. They can be found in the Sculpting Supplies section of his site. I picked up a handful of the 150mm bases (for future Stalk Tanks) and one of the 120mm bases, for who knows what in the future!


More to come soon.

11 comments:

  1. That is one amazing scratch build. I'll be sitting on the edge of my seat until it's painted.

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  2. Dave,

    Nice work over there. Congrats on the baby BTW.

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  3. wow dave, simply just wow

    can you build me one?
    or six?

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  4. Depending on how much support the end of that needs, hiding the support wire in some rubble (Eisenhorn loves holding stuff up since that is about all the old man is good for these days...) would be a bit less obtrusive than giant pieces of concrete rebar.

    If they didn't hang over the side, the excrement pipes could have some sludge hiding the support wire.

    Are those Dragonforge bases slab-sided or do they have a bevel to match 25/40/60s?

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  5. I mean, wow! This is art! This is just simply great stuff! I love how the model does a balancing act on top of the rubble. It gives me the feeling the tank is completely overpowering it's environment with malice.
    Cheers
    Mike at SCW

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  6. Looks super Dave..glad the 150 worked out well for you.

    The bases have a bevel on them to match my other bases.

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  7. When I read some of the passages of sabbat martyr etc, this is what i see in my mind. It really is a perfect representation of the malice of a stalk tank.

    I'm going to have to build one of these now, just a bit bigger, like a flat crab in Necropolis :)

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  8. Thanks guys

    @ Fiend, yeah, the concrete rebar idea is a bit clunky so I might add a few trailing cables from the abdomen to "disguise" it a bit more.

    @ Earl, make sure we get to see your flatcrab!

    Cheers
    Dave

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  9. Nice work with the base dave, totally makes it look menacing. Pretty sure my guard would poo at the sight of it. Can"t wait to see it painted!

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