Tormentor Titan update 3

So I was hoping to get this posted before I left, but some last minute issues with the assembly, and airbrush problems left me with more to do than I had time.

"Wow, What is it?" - most common phrase to refer to the titan

Still, I managed to get it assembled, and at least a basic colour set put down.  The guns still need alot of colour, but it gives a general idea of the look of the model.  So my logistical problem came when I realized that he was going to be too big for carry on, and too big for any of the containers I had.

19" titan + 15"x12"x9" container = problems.

I get a "We'll be back" roll, right?

So with a little help, I managed to split him right where the torso meets the leg plates, then recessed a 1/2" rare earth magnet in each side.  Double win, he travels a big safer and now he pivots nicely at the waist for improved effect.

Preying Mantis Style

The guns we mounted on pins, that slide down through the tubing of the arm that slides into the torso, so they hold the blades up in place.  The head has a nail with a 1/4" nail recessed into it, with another 1/2" magnet on the neck area of the torso to hold it on.  A couple of the leg blades came off on transport home, but you can still get the idea.

Standing Tall

A very last minute addition, as in throw the bits in and finishing upon arrival, were the eye gems.  I had originally cast these to be glued to the body, but realized they'd look better in the eyes.  They may have to be pulled and re-slotted after a bit of work, but the concept is wonderful.

Here's looking at you.

So that is how the build finally shaped up.  When I got down to Welland, I stopped and had a quick visit with Kris from Riders of the Cosmic Serpent & MiniWarGaming.  After a quick inspection and ensuing titan battle, he convinced me that an Eldar Phantom Titan would be a better choice, and more aesthetically fitting, than being a Chaos Reaver.  Since the model was quite a bit bigger than I expected, equal at the head/shoulder, and not quite as high on the back fins, it wasn't a hard stretch.

So off I went to Apocalypticon with an extra 1000 points because of that decision, bringing me to just over 9500 points, and it was a decision that I would not be displeased with.

Apocalypticon 2012

So my plan was to get a couple updates done last week, but I ran into some building and equipment issues trying to get my army ready for Apocalypticon.  I hope to get some pics up of the mostly complete titan, it got quite a bit of "what is that" attention.  I'll also get a pic of the the scratch built Raven, it was much harder to spot, but got equally as much attention.  Because it was one of the last things to be completed, it was only primed black, and didn't get the mounting done.  But the priming made it look very much like an unprimed resin model, so alot of people thought it may be a Forgeworld piece.

The game was a blast, and should be the content of posts for a little while to come.

Tormentor Titan update 2

Just a quick update on the titan.

I added the jump jets, and protective plating, I built the guns that were supposed to be Splinter Cannons on my home brew datasheet.  The arms are to the point of complete, I'm contemplating how/if I want to make them removable.  It has sort of taken a back burner the past week because of my newest delivery. . .

So at this point, the plan is to hit Apocalypticon in Hamilton in just under a month with approx. 7500-8000 points in tow.  Hopefully I have more soon.

Tormentor Titan update

With 2 updates in a week I've obviously gotten more done on the titan.  Legs are greenstuffed and connected to the torso, upper torso is done except weapons, back fins are on and arms are in the production phase, you can see the mock-up put on with blue tac in the pics below.  I figure it's also a nice change from the current uproar of 6th washing across the interwebs.

Tormentor head on

After I got everything together I thought the legs were a little large at first, but after it's all together they've grown on me.  One of the problems I ran into is balance and that the legs are just connected with styrene tubing and seem a little flimsy.  I believe the model could hold its weight just standing on the shelf, but I expect it would seem breakage during table play.  So I've currently put him on a small plywood base, with a 1/2" tube propping up the model(about a 1/2" off the ground currently); the plan is to replace the tube with a clear acrylic rod.

Side profile

I'm going to go back and add some additional tubing to represent hydraulics where the lower legs meet the upper legs, and possibly where the upper leg meets the torso.  The lower part of the torso still needs to be detailed with protective plates and jump jets in between the legs. I'm probably putting some sort of belt piece as well to divide the torso.

The plan for the should mounts are to make them look slightly like the new heat lances, I found some nice mechanical pencils that have a similar shape so it should make it easy to convert up.  The CCW currently is a foam board mock up.  The plan for this is probably going to be a single piece of styrene sheet for the whole shape, and then build up with smaller shapes of styrene sandwiching the main blade.

Titan update

So the I've finished the 4 legs, gotten them cleaned up and prepped to remold the tips of the legs after putting some solid pins in there.  I found the leg tips were pretty flimsy, and sparse, so I cut them back far enough to pin in the pins.  Most of the spiked fins were also pretty deformed or flimsy, so I removed most of them, I'm thinking I may just remove them all and either put individual bits on all the legs, or cast the fins by themselves.

Four legs, pinned and ready for Green stuff

While resin was curing and in between leg cleanup, I moved on to the torso piece, and upper legs.  I had originally decided that I was going to use a ball type joint on the upper leg to connect to the torso as well.  I expected to cast and mold that as well, but as I was looking a little closer at the Forgeworld Eldar titans I noticed they usually used a flat connection.  So I picked up some 7/16" Evergreen tubing and I'm just going to connect using the tubes cut to size.  The torso had holes pre-drilled to fit the ball joints, so I just expanded them slightly so the tubing will fit.

Torso with a small mistake

I had used a series of PVC pike connectors to build the torso, it is a larger 1" piece, with a smaller connector fit inside, and half of a third smaller connector within the second one.  You can see the second connector with the leg holes, and you can see the third connector through the holes, and the small stop piece at the bottom.  This gave a nice little tapering effect towards the bottom, I just needed to expand the top a bit so I could make it resemble the Kabalite Warrior torso.  So as I was cleaning up, I found an old Tylenol bottle that was the right size, I had to expand the opening, and then slipped it on the top of the PVC connector.  This gave me a nice thickness for the torso, as well as a flat top with a slight indent to attach the head at a later point.  A short set of 1/2" tubing was added to either side of the medicine bottle to give the torso the width I wanted from shoulder to shoulder.  Now it was ready to be built up and get some definition going.

The first though was going to be heat and mold styrene around the frame until I got the shape I wanted, and then add detail to it until it was passable.  But since the gaming table doubles as the work area and is shared by my girlfriend and her daughter there are often lots of odds and ends kicking around for inspiration.  So the kid was working on trying to build items with the intent of going larger and larger to an eventual cosplay outfit.  One of the materials that she was using extensively was the sheets of flexible craft foam.  I was moving it out of the way and noticed how it flexed nicely, was of a decent thickness, and was easy to work with, so I asked to borrow a couple sheets.

Torso back with spinal plates

The torso plates were laid down from bottom up using the foam, because of the natural stepping nature of the frame I didn't have to do all the way to the top each time.  The one problem I had, is I got a little too anxious with foam and started forming the torso before I remembered that each band was supposed to taper up in the center where the hole was.  Still, the foam has worked great, it's given me a nice light frame that has been easy to work with.  The only real problem I've had is some shaping problems with edges, and stray bits and bobs can leave impressions in the foam.  After the torso was built, I cut away a section down the middle of the back and inserted the layered spinal plates, and guards on either side of that.  I think it came out quite nicely.

So the next step is going to be building the back fins, and deciding on what I want to do with the torso piece.  I had originally thought of casting the torso as well, but I realize that it may be too heavy to sit properly on the legs once everything is assembled.  So I've been throwing around a couple of ideas.  The other problem is how to prepare the foam for detail and paint.  I should be able to use a glue/water mixture to seal it like a foam terrain piece, or maybe even a sealer, but one of the things I've noticed when I get some resin spill over onto any newspaper is it soaks in and hardens almost like a fibreglass (which it should since it is basically the same product); so I may mix up some resin, and paint it onto the foam to harden it.  This may also be revisited for the flyer build as well.

On a seperate note, I may be moving soon, and I've heard there is a decent sized Apocalypse game being planned for the middle of this month, so I may try and hurry this to a standing frame with temporary weapons to try out.  As far as the MiniWarGaming Apocalypticon event, as I expected, they don't want to sent a precedent of having to manage house built rules, so if I get it built and am able to attend it will likely proxy as a Chaos Reaver.

A little more success, and some hope.

So I did some work to put together a slightly better rig to hold my leg molds, a pair of leftover pressboard shelves cut to size with a series of clamps along the out edges.  With that done, I mixed up another batch of resin, and set to work trying again.

This time the leg came out much better, and overall the part came out looking more like I expected.  The sharp edge of the leg was a little dull and jagged, this is in part because this is where the split for the mold was made.Also, the blades along the outer side of the leg didn't get as much definition.  The blades were very much expected, I didn't put in the proper venting for them when I made the mold.  I figured I could always just add those pieces on later if I needed, with the number of extra bits in the Raider and Ravager kit I should have enough to finish one titan at the very least.

Titan Leg V2

The bottom tip of the leg saw a little air get captured, so it resulted in a bit of deformity; no big loss though, because one of the things I had wanted to try was putting a metal rod into the leg when I was pouring the resin so there was a little more rigid structure for the titan to stand on, I can insert the rod where the deformity is and the green stuff over top.

The next leg is in the block curing now, I had did a little more research and it was suggested that putting talc powder on the inside of the mold helped the resin reach all the nooks and crannies, so that is the experiment this time, hopefully it will help show an improved result.

If I can get 3 more legs of the above quality, then I'll play with adding the rod for the next 4.  But first, time to get the body finished and get some more silicone rubber to cast the part.  I'd say to expect more updates, but I'm sure we all know I'm lazy and they may be not come soon.

Work has begun.

I'm still working on the flyer, mostly trying to figure out how to get the nice rounded organic feel to a lot of it without leaving it to the symmetry of my sculpting skills(since they don't much exist).  So I started doing some more scratch work on another project I've wanted to try.

The Tormentor Titan

The one thing that bothers about playing Dark Eldar, is as you scale up, there isn't really anything to use.  Apocalypse formations are limited, specialty units are virtually non-existent, and the few Forgeworld offerings are more 40K bolt-ons than Apocalypse vehicles.

So I did some digging into the dark corners of the internet to find out about where the army stands in Epic.  There isn't really anything in the official Epic rules for Dark Eldar, but there is a community who put together rules to expand the game and include Dark Eldar, along with other "lesser races" in the form of the Epic Raiders fandex.  So obviously the cover is as far as I needed to look to know I wanted the Dark Eldar Tormentor Titan.

I've played around with some rules ideas to guide what I want to build, but I'm going to keep those to myself until the project is done and I can fit them to the model.  I've finished the leg model, and have an idea on how it's attaching to the body assembly, so I picked up some Mold Max 30 silicon rubber to cast the part.  I hadn't used the product before, but I liked it being a mix by weight product which made it more exact with the use of a kitchen scale.  I built a mold box, and set the leg into clay, along with some bolts for alignment keys, and cast the first half of the mold, planning on doing a 2 part mold.  There wasn't any real problems, everything went smoothly.  I hit the local Michael's and got some mold release, removed the clay, and hit the part and mold with some mold release.  I then poured the second half of the mold.

Problems occurred!  The mold release either didn't properly cover, or reacted with the silicon mold compound, there was no release between the mold halves, I had a part encased in a block of silicon rubber.  So I went about splitting the block and getting to the part.  I managed to extract it and was basically left with a split mold.  From reading I knew this wasn't going to be as durable or reusable as a 2 part mold, but I figured I'd give it a try.  Now usually I'm using much smaller molds, and often they are placed snuggly into boxes of some sort, but this mold was a bit larger, so I tried using some boards held tight with some elastics and straps.  Once I started pouring the resin, it was obvious these weren't tight enough, because resin seeped out the sides and bottom.  I tightened things as much as I could and finished pouring the mold.

It didn't turn out terribly, I got a lot of flashing and bubbled edges because of the seepage, but it could be salvageable.  I noticed that the mold itself has a couple of major bubbles on the one side, likely the second half, but they should be fixable, the biggest issue with this cast is that the top ball joint and edge of the leg only had the resin harden on the mold while some of the resin seeped out, making them hollow.

Bubbles in the mold

Rough edges because of seepage

I'm going to build up a proper box that I can place the mold in and tight more uniformly and try again.  The goal is to get 4 good legs out of the mold, and then see if I can manage 4 more.  As was pointed out to me, if I'm going to spend the time and money to cast and mold one, I may as well do 2.  So hopefully over the next little while I can refine my process and get the 4-8 legs I need and move onto finishing the body assembly.