Speedy Delivery!

The postman dropped off something interesting the other day:

more to come as I experiment with these...

Rustoleum Plastic Primer

In the previous post, when I primed my Heavy Warjack kit I was trying out a new primer - Rustoleum Plastic Primer:

I usually use Duplicolor primer - I finally ran out for the first time since I moved last year, and wasn't sure where to buy it in my new neighborhood.  However, there is an Autozone right around the corner from our new house - I stopped in to buy a taillight bulb, and they had a sale on primer, so I grabbed a few cans:

The good:  The primer has low odor, and the smell dissipates quickly.

The bad: this primer takes forever to cure.  I let it cure for four or five hours, at which time I had to move the parts of the model - even after that amount of time, touching the pieces left some fingerprints that I had to touch up later:

Overall, I'd have to say that if odor is a huge factor for you, then it might be worth a look - but I'll be going back to the Duplicolor primer once I run out of this.

Priming Over Magnets

In my previous post, I had pics of how I added magnets to the Khador Heavy Warjack kit.  Next, I had to find a way to primer the model without completely covering the magnets - while they are neodymium magnets and are very powerful, they're small, and a few coats of primer / paint / clearcoat over them will greatly diminish their effectiveness.

Luckily, I found a solution in the toy section of my local drugstore:

Silly Putty!  (Note: in the past, I've had good results using poster tack, but the store actually didn't have any.  I've also bought Silly Putty at the dollar store before, so it might be cheaper if you want to stockpile it).

I probably don't need to explain the concept too deeply: you pull off tiny bits of the Silly Putty (work it for a bit to get it soft) and press it over the magnets:

After that, you can prime the model as usual:

After the primer dries, you can pick off the Silly Putty:

After the primer had dried, I roughed in my basecoat color (Vallejo Model Air Fire Red) around the magnets:

Since I plan to paint the model using zenital airbrushing, I'll have to paint the model with the magnetized bits attached - to make this easier, I went ahead and basecoated the backsides of the magentized bits:

Since I was using the Model Air paints, it took 3 or 4 coast to get adequate coverage with a brush.

Next, I gave the backs of the pieces a coat of brush-on Citadel 'Ardcoat:

...I wish the reason for this was some cool technical tip, but the truth of the matter is that I needed to transport the model unassembled, and I wanted to protect the pieces from getting chipped up in the box:

...the backs will be sprayed with matte varnish once finished.  The process of covering the magnets with Silly Putty will be repeated when the model is airbrushed.

Fire Sale!

...so after sorting through the ridiculous amount of wargaming stuff I've accumulated over the past few years (and there's still a large box of Forge World stuff unaccounted for somewhere in the garage), I've decided to clean house a bit, and hopefully help fund construction of the gaming lair (also known as finishing the basement).  If you're so inclined, check out my Ebay auctions.  There's a lot of Fantasy Orcs & Goblins, but also some Tau, Tyranids, Hordes, & other assorted stuff!

Magnetizing the Khador Heavy Warjack Kit

...a while ago I bought the Khador Heavy Warjack kit - This is a single kit that allows you to build a Demolisher, Devastator, or a Spriggan. I didn't want to limit myself, so I decided to magnetize the interchangeable components, so I could use whichever one I wanted.  As this was the first model I've built in a loooong time, I was a bit rusty, and it took me a while - I didn't document the entire process, but here's the highlights:

The interchangeable parts for the warjack are the weapon arms, shoulder pads, heads, and the armored shroud covering the head.  The basic process for all the bits is the same - drill a hole slightly bigger than the magnet as deep as possible in each side, fill the hole with a tiny bit of superglue and Green Stuff, press the magnets into the hole, and remove the excess.  You have to make sure the poles of the magnets are aligned properly.

Magnetizing the shoulder pad

The middle part of the arms of this model were really weak and kept flexing - I built them up with several layers of Citadel's Liquid Green Stuff, and will file them into shape when it cures.

Magnetizing the front carapace

Filing excess Green Stuff after it has cured

Drilled out the barrels of the cannons on the Spriggan shouldpads

Mostly finished.  Since the head is almost completely concealed by the armored carapace, I opted to just use a single head, since magnetizing it would be awfully fidgety, and they're so small that they'd be waaay too easy to lose

...and that's about it for the build.  Next I have to find a way to prime it without covering up the magnets...

Ten Years Gone

As I mentioned earlier, I had very little spending money during our trip to GenCon this year, and I wound up not even going into the dealer's room.  It was a bit of a bummer not coming home with any swag, but a few days after I got back this arrived:

...that softened the blow a little.  More details as work progresses...

GenCon 2013 Recap

... so the wife, Funderhammer, & I have returned from GenCon 2013.  It was an abbreviated trip this year, as we didn't get there until Friday evening.  Here's what went down:

Friday

We left town a bit after noon.  The drive through Ohio & Indiana was as exciting as it sounds, so we found ways to amuse ourselves:

The road to #GenCon pic.twitter.com/0qN7o907Ag
— The LeadHead (@TheLeadHead) August 16, 2013

The road to the road to #Gencon with @TheLeadHead pic.twitter.com/PDhDp1mUSw
— Funderhammer (@funderhammer) August 16, 2013

@TheLeadHead & @funderhammer these guys are idiots #gencon pic.twitter.com/gw1LyAmdoT
— sarah roethele (@sroethele) August 16, 2013

We rolled into town a little before 4PM and made our way to the hotel.  Things went a little sideways here, as they didn't have any rooms with two beds, which is what we booked - judging by some other conversations I overheard at the front desk, the hotel was not on top of things this year.  On top of that, they didn't even have any rooms that were big enough to put a roll-away bed in without violating fire code, and ignored my not-so-subtle hints to give us one anyway, and look the other way.  We finally settled on almost 50% off the rate of the room, and enough extra blankets & comforters to try to make a reasonably comfortable bed on the floor.  When we got to the room, there was actually a small sofa in there, so it wasn't a total snafu.

The wife & I got changed and headed to dinner - it's become a GenCon tradition that we go out to Ruth's Chris for dinner when we're in Indy:

...as usual, the food was outstanding.  After we walked back to the hotel and relaxed for a bit, we decided to take a walk - the Red Bull Indianapolis GP is at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway the same weekend as GenCon, and the bikers were out in full force:

...after checking out all the bikes for a while, we headed back to the hotel room to get some sleep.

Saturday

I was up early on Saturday to take some classes - the first one being "Intro to Sculpting Miniatures With Polymer Clay", with Tom Mason.  This was interesting because while I've taken sculpting classes before, I've only ever used Green Stuff or ProCreate putty for sculpting, both of which cure when exposed to air - Tom taught us to build a layer of Green Stuff over an armature, and then do the actual sculpting with Fimo:

The advantage to this approach is that the Fimo doesn't cure until you bake it, so it remains workable pretty much indefinitely.  I'll definitely be picking up some to play with in the near future.

My next class was "Liber Metallica: Painting "True" Metallics Truthily", with Dave Pauwels.  A few minutes after this class started it became obvious that this was a "lecture" -type class as opposed to a "hands-on" class, which I normally dread, but I must say that Dave had a great lecture worked out with plenty of interaction from the rest of the class, and I learned a lot.  The gist of this class was how to get a look similar to "non-metallic metals", while actually using metallic paints.  I have to say I was impressed with the results - ever since NMM was declared the new hotness in the painting world a few years ago, I have to admit I haven't always cared for the look - it looks great in photographs, when taken under controlled lighting and from a very specific angle, but doesn't always look so great in person, on the table.  This method gives a very similar effect that looks great from all angles.

After the class, I ventured out into the convention center, and got my first look at the cosplayers:

EXTERMINATE!!!

After fighting my way through the crowd, I met up with the wife and we had a surprisingly good lunch at The Hard Rock Cafe:

I thought it was weird that they had a whole room dedicated to Michael Jackson, until I remembered that he was from Indiana

While we were eating lunch, my wife showed me some pictures she took - when I was in class, she took the opportunity to explore downtown Indianapolis and check out some of the sights:

After lunch, we headed back to the room for a bit - we actually had a few board games scheduled for the evening, but blew them off to spend the evening hanging out at the pool.  After we finished, we met back up with Funderhammer for a few drinks at the hotel bar.  My wife headed off to bed, and Funderhammer & I headed to an event that he talked me into: "Dub That Hentai!", hosted by Cosplay Deviants. (website somewhat nsfw).  If you don't know what "Hentai" is, do yourself a favor and don't Google it.  Suffice it to say, the Japanese absolutely do not hold to the Western stereotype that animation is "for kids".  Despite the overall, um, wrongness of the whole event, it was actually pretty hilarious - the host would grab volunteers out of the audience, who were then given microphones and had to improvise dialogue over a scene that had the soundtrack removed.   After the scene was over, the audience would vote (by applause) on which volunteer did the best job, and they would get a prize.  The whole event was helped along by a cash bar (it seemed that most of the participants had pre-gamed the event pretty heavily, too).

Sunday

Sunday morning came, and I had one early class - "Terrain Workshops" with David Dresch.  I've actually taken this class several times before, and while it's pretty pricey for a convention class, you almost always come away with a really nice piece of terrain.  David basically hauls out everything you could ever want access to while building terrain - pre-cut hardboard, styrofoam, hot wire cutters, every type of flock/ballast/static grass you can think of, glue, gallon bags full of pre-cast Hirst Arts building blocks, etc.  He gives you a quick overview of some techniques, then lets you go crazy building stuff for the rest of the class.  I've got two or three other pieces of terrain from his workshops in the past, and this class gave me a good start on another one - I'll post pics as soon as it's completed.

After the class I headed back to the hotel - our plan was to load up the car, then make a lap of the dealer room before departing.  After waiting an hour-and-a-half for a bellhop to bring a cart to our room, we got fed up and carried all of our stuff downstairs ourselves and loaded up the car.  At this point I was pretty grumpy at the hotel staff and just wanted to be home, so we decided to forego the dealer room (I didn't really have much spare cash at this point, anyway).  We stopped at one of our favorite restaurants, The Rathskeller on our way out of town for lunch, then hot the road - another Gencon in the bag!

GenCon!

Funderhammer, the wife & I are off to GenCon 2013!  Look for a complete recap upon our return, and follow my Twitter feed for up-to-the-minute updates!

The Blessings of Papa Nurgle

I'm a gadget freak - tablets, smartphones, handheld gaming systems, GPS's, you name it, I've probably got two of 'em.  As such, it's usually easier just to buy a bunch of extra charging cables & adapters and leave them where I need them (in the bedroom, at work, in the car, at my painting desk, etc) than to remember to take one with me.  The good part of this is that you can usually get spare cables & USB adapters on eBay for pennies (as long as you're willing to wait for them to get here on a slow boat from China).  The bad part?  They're pretty flimsy - so  I've taken to patching them up several times before calling it quits.  I recently patched up a cable for my tablet with some red "gasket maker" silicone I had laying around:

Good Lord, that looks digusting - I've never had a desire to build a Chaos army before, but I know what I'm using if I do...

League Night #3

The Privateer Press Machinations League rolls on - I missed week #2, and week #3 didn't look promising when I pulled in to the game store - it appeared to be deserted when I pulled in (I'm guessing because of the terrible heat wave we're having here, and the A/C in the game store isn't fantastic).  Luckily after a bit some people started showing up, and Funderhammer and I decided to play a 25-point game (with league play, you get more points for playing a new opponent, playing a new faction, playing at a point level you haven't played at yet, etc).  It had actually been quite a while since we had played each other, and I had a few new models I wanted to try (my Torch warjack and my Great Bears).

Picking a list

Setting Up

Overall, it was a fun game - ironically, I picked almost all of my ranged units in my Khador force, while Funderhammer picked an almost entirely melee Retribution list.  The aforementioned Great Bears charged into combat and were quickly outnumbered:

Lonely Great Bear is Lonely

Surprisingly one model survived the first round of combat, and went on to take out two of the opposing unit before being wiped out.

Happily the Torch did great - after getting locked up in melee the entire game the last time I tried to use him, he got to do everything I wanted him to this time.  In the end it came down to whether I wanted to run The Butcher in for an assassination run on his caster, or try to get his caster with the Torch's spray template.  The Butcher was getting dinged by feedback every round, so I took the free strikes and was able to get his caster under my template - with The Butcher's feat and a focus boost, Torch did D4 damage and came away with the win!