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.

Welcome to Senex Puerilis: The Scrots of The Terra Damnata...

I've been following other people's blogs and reading them obsessively for a few years now, many times I've thought to myself that I should start a blog of my own to encourage me to get more modelling done and finish projects that I've started.  The obvious thing to do? Start writing Senex Puerilis of course!

About this time last year I started what I thought at the time would be a small Warhammer 40,000 project, a little allied force for my main army which would take a month or so to build.  Drawing inspiration from everyone's favourite nomadic droid dealers- the Jawa, I settled upon a force of robotic orks, cobbled together from the scrap and wreckages that litter the periphery of the Terra Damnata.  Not content with just a few clunky robots i knew i had to have some tanks too to add a bit of fire power and mobility, and maybe even a few larger robotic constructions further down the line.  I mulled it over for a while, and came up with a concept that would work and a set of official rules which would match the models so i didn't have the less than enviable task of writing up an army list that everyone thought was fair and balance.  The rules would come from Imperial Armour volume 8, and with some careful unit selection i was able to ensure that no green flesh would be visible within this 'ork' dread mob list.

 

 And thus was born the start of my Scrot army.  Over the next 3 or 4 months i slowly built up a full squad of 10 robotic orks (ok, so full squad is a bit of an over statement, i went for the bare minimum legal size unit) along with a full squadron of 6 Scrot Tanks, The Boss Scrot and his dogsbody assistants- the Lesser Scrots.

 

 

Admittedly, none of these are the best photographs ever but they serve to illustrate the ideas and army in question.  The models themselves are a real mixture of bits- Kromlech, Forgeworld, Games Workshop and a whole heap of scratchbuilt elements too.  All 3 of the Lesser Scrots were completely scratch built from plasticard, and large parts of the Scrot Tanks were scratch built too.

 

 In terms of in-game use, the Boss Scrot is a Painboss with cybork body, boss pole, powerklaw and 3 grot orderlies.  He leads a squad of Spannaboyz who also have cybork bodies, and they are backed up by a squadron or Grot Tanks.  This makes it all very easy for opponents to keep track of and it's a relatively beefy little force.
Since getting to this stage i've suffered a little bit of robot burn-out, but they will get more additions as and when the motivation sets in...