The Scrots of The Terra Damnata 3: More Scrot Tanks!

After a mammoth session casting up track links, it was time to try putting one of my new Scrot Tanks (grot tanks) together.  I haven't shown you the chassis yet, mostly because it really doesn't photograph well in either it's plasticard master or resin cast form, but here goes.

As you can see, I added a casting gate to the master and a couple of flow channels to assist with the casting process: essentially, the casting gate is where you tip the resin in, the bulk of it helps to add a little pressure which in theory forces the resin into all the little details of the mould, but with it being such a small mould I'm not certain it really helps much.  The one channel is there to let the resin into the mould, the other lets the air out of the mould, it also lets you know when the mould is full.

So, leap forward a few days and I have a fully assembled Scrot Tank, ready for a lick of paint or two.

As always, the photos aren't great, daylight here in the UK is at a minimum at the moment, and I wasn't really up for getting the light tent set up, so I apologise for the poor image quality of this post.  It's worth pointing out that I didn't apply the rivets to the master model of the chassis, I was pretty confident that my moulding and casting skills/equipment wouldn't replicate them well enough. So rather than having to remove botched ones and replace them, I just applied them to the cast instead.  There are quite a few little air bubbles in the treads, but they'll eventually be covered up by weathering and mud, so I'm not too worried about them right now. The same goes for the unsightly mould-line along the lower side of the chassis, some carefully applied mud spatter should cover that little issue.

The Scrots of The Terra Damnata 2: More Scrot Tanks!

Rumours of my death haven't been greatly exaggerated, mainly because I haven't heard any rumours of my death.  Although the blog has been quiet, I have been making progress behind the scenes.
A while ago, I managed to snag myself three Forge World grot tank turrets from eBay for a bargain price, which put me in the unfortunate situation of having two grotzooka turrets and a twin-linked rokkit launcha turret and nothing to mount them on.  My first thought was to order another four grot tanks from Forge World, but this would still leave me with the wrong numbers in my turret to tank ratio (however, it would give me another four of the awesome little buggers to play with), after a while I decided to scratchbuild the rest of the tanks to give me something usable.  Remembering that I had a batch of polyurethane resin and silicone slowly expiring in my shed and a degree partially in mould making and casting (although, this degree was attained over ten years ago now, and I haven't really practised my skills between now and then) I decided to mould and cast as much of the tanks as I could.
A few weeks of slowly building the masters for the tank chassis and the treads, mould making and casting, and I nearly have enough bits to cobble together the first tank.  To give you a little peak at the progress so far, here's a shot of some treads, fresh out of the mould and uncleaned- next to some Games Workshop treads for scale, and the original sculpts.

The resin itself is a pretty unphotogenic off-white, but hopefully you can make out the details (and bubbles) well enough.  Each tread is a separate cast and there are seven different ones, which should be enough to not get too repetitive.  By my best guess, I'll probably need 70 treads per tank, so I need to double what you see above, but that shouldn't cause any problems really.

Anyway, back to the casting and scratchbuilding- some sort of bogie mount is next in line I think.