A surprise from Blight Wheel!

Last week I received a surprise package from Blight Wheel Miniatures (a cool European outfit that I've mentioned a few times before). Laurent had sent me a copy of his brand new (currently-titled) Military Truck - a six-wheeled flatbed transporter that is based very much on the conversion I did many years ago. It was also sculpted by another friend of mine, which is very cool. I haven't had a chance to put it together (the painted version above is from the Blight Wheel blog post, here).

Laurent also sent me a couple of surprise pieces (seen below). Two sprues with torsos - all ten torsos in rough and ready armor plates with various icons of allegiance attached.

And a sprue of five heads on various helmets and mempo masks, with optional horns.

I couldn't resit putting at least one guy together, combining a head and torso from the batch with a set of arms and legs from Victoria Miniatures. Without the arms (above) to see the breastplate.

And with the arms to see it all ready to go.

He's finished off with a backpack and rebreather hose from Dragon Forge Design - I sculpted those backpacks!

I hope you like the potential of these kits - get out there and support your favorite manufacturers of cool stuff : )

The wait is over!

Here are two jpegs that contain the plans for the Troop Transport Truck.

It has taken a while to get them to you because we had to refine them a bit and then my travel schedule conflicted wildly with Thomas's so these were delayed in getting to you.

On each sheet is a 1" square that will hopefully help you with printing these out at the right size. You can check back here and here to get the first two parts of the truck-building tutorial. There will be a third part, basically about detailing the truck and other things you can do with it.

So, I hope it was worth the wait. Remember we used 1mm plasticard to build the "after-market" parts, so don't try and do it with anything thinner or thicker without the proper compensation. If you build one, please take pictures and send them through to me (email address in my profile). Hopefully Thomas and I can put together a gallery and post it on our blogs.

Enjoy the truck, I'm back to my vacation on the beach at the Outer Banks of North Carolina!

Cheers

Dave

Troop Transport Truck Tutorial - Part Two

Ok, here we go with Part Two of the Troop Transport Truck Tutorial - the Front End and Cab.

Below you can see a pic of all the parts for the Front End and Cab. There are 31 pieces and many of the fiddly strange shapes (boooooo!).

Once all the pieces are cleaned up, the next step is to glue the guide piece to the "inside" of the grille and bumper bar structure. This piece will assist in the placement of the hood pieces later.

This is the next step, gluing the grille facade to the other side of the structure.

Then I started to glue the five hood pieces to the structure, using the handy guide as...well...a guide. The way to go here is glue one side first, then work your way around until all are glued in place.

The hood structure can now be glued in place. The top of the hood butts up against the front of the cab of the Ork trukk.

The next step is to glue the facade panels onto the front of the cab.

For some added bulk and extra detailing we've added another panel to the bumper bar, that glues on directly over the Ork trukk framework.

Another guide piece is glued in place on the side of the engine housing. Hopefully you can make out the angled piece there. This will help in the next step...

...glueing the fender pieces on. You'll also noticed that I skipped ahead to glueing on the side panels of the cab, this isn't because I wanted to cut out vital steps, but for some reason all of the shots between these two step were blurry as hell. Not sure why, but I'm sorry for the inconvenience. In addition to the side panels I've also added the rear cab panel. This is glued directly to the truck bed.

Thomas is a big fan of the guide pieces (as I've mentioned before), and I think I might be a convert too. In this picture you can see the guide piece at the back of the cab. Very helpful!

Another panel added, to form the side of the driver's cab.

And finally, the top and front of the driver's tiny cab have been added.

This brings me to the end of Part Two - The Front End and Cab. Next time around will be the Detailing (my favorite part). In a recent post somewhere I promised to show my "foolproof" methods for clean plasticard work in this post. I've taken the photos, I just need to get them posted. I'll do that in my next post, a separate Plasticard Tutorial.

Troop Transport Truck Tutorial - Part One

Finally, I get a chance to post Part One of the Troop Transport Truck Tutorial. Thank you for your patience. Who would've thought that having a baby around the house would take up so much time. Not that I mind, of course. If you get the opportunity, I highly recommend it!

Anyway, onto the show.

I've decided to put this tutorial together in three (possibly four) parts so that you can get as much detail out of it as you can. It's a bit of work, but for fans of the novels nothing is too good for your truck-riding Imperial Guard soldiers. This first part will cover the truck bed, the troop carrying capacity you'll be needing. I'm starting here to point out that most of the vehicular conversions I do are all a matter of assembling boxes of different shapes and sizes.

First off, here is a quick walk around of the truck, just to reacquaint you.

Here's a shot of the starting point for the truck. The humble Ork Trukk, stripped of (or not assembled with) all of the really Orky parts. These other parts can be used in other Orky vehicle conversions, or sold on to others to fund your next Ork Trukk purchase.

I've said before that my friend Thomas and I reverse engineered the first truck I made, and Thomas created the template you see below. It's a bit tough to make it all out, but there are 64 pieces on this sheet, all laser-cut from 1mm thick plasticard (or sheet styrene). We both like working in this thickness. It is easy to score and snap, yet can give great strength to a build, even with a single layer. Also, when you double up panels, it is easier to do any calculations that might be required.

At the end of the tutorial process I'll post a PDF or something that'll allow you to cut out your own pieces and make trucks of your own.

The next step was to punch out all the pieces for the truck bed. You can see them below. On either side of the bed pieces are the bench seat pieces, we'll come back to those soon.

The base and three sides of the bed are all two pieces. These pieces are glued together to ensure some solidity for the finished piece and provide a comforting heft to the model.

Here are those pieces glued together. Hopefully you can make out that some of the pieces are slightly smaller than the others they've been glued to, this is to help with the strength and integrity of the bonds we are soon to create. You'll also see two holes in the base, these will be face down in the final assembly, ready to receive the posts for the rear step.

The plate at the front has a 2mm overlap on the bottom and 1 mm overlaps on the sides. The first gluing step is to bond the front plate with the base. Don't forget to clean off any excess polystyrene glue with a quick wipe with a paper towel.

On the subject of polystyrene glue, I use Testors (not Tamiya, my mistake) Model Masters glue. It comes with a very handy metal "dispensing tube" that helps you get the glue exactly where you want it. Even when gluing one-handed because you're taking a photo for a blog ; )

Here you can see the slight overlaps on the sides that will add strength to the finished piece. You may be asking why the finished piece needs so much strength? It really is for those "just in case" moments. I know quite a few gamers with what we really should call "butter fingers"!

Here's a shot with all three sides attached. Nothing particularly special, but it's starting to look like a box right?

One of the cool things about collaborating on a project is that you get all sorts of cool ideas that you may never have thought of on your own. One of the ideas that Thomas threw in was the two pieces you see added to the bed below. Simple, I know, but very handy indeed. "What are they for?" I hear you ask. Well they're designed to ensure that the rest of the bench seat "box" goes in the right place. Same place every time. Just the thing for mass production (of a sort).

Once Thomas's helpful guides were in place I could add the next step, the end of the bench seat.

And then the side of the bench seat.

And finally, the top of the bench seat. Of course it is very easy to build the seat on the other side at the same time.

The final stage for the truck bed is to attach it to the truck frame. There are four points on the truck frame that stand proud. Trim the rivets from these points and slap on some glue. For this truck the front end of the bed should be aligned with the point where the rising frame meets the horizontal. Hopefully you can spot it in the picture below.

So there you go, Part One of the Troop Transport Truck Tutorial. Next time around we'll cover the hood, fenders, and cab of the truck. Should be fun!