Now that we’ve assembled a passable Caisson, we can move on to the main body of the scratch build. To start with we need to make sure it can hold the weight of the model. While on the human scale, the main model is light, on the scale of the styrene we’re working with, it has a bit of heft. So the basic chassis is going to be a ladder frame of the thicker box tube. As I measure it out to fit the appropriate width of the model, I make a discovery – I cannot cut the box tube squarely. Every slice has a deviation from perpendicular, and there is a variation in length. Not huge, but enough that they will not all have that great of a contact surface on both ends if the ladder frame is assembled hollow. I found this out when the ladder frame fell apart. So Plan B – I take the ladder frame and assemble it on a sheet of plasticard, gluing it to the flat surface. Once glued down, I take a pair of scissors and cut the ladder framed section off the main card. The particular sheet I used was the same one I’d taken the Caisson parts from, so there was a notch already cut into the board. It was also thin enough to cut with regular scissors and not fail catastrophically. I then took little scraps of plasticard sheeting and reinforced the joints on the side facing away from the sheet.
Hand crafted by trial and error
The platform is now very sturdy and will serve as a proper base for the remainder of our work. But it’s ugly, you might say, and I’d agree with you. It is also the underside. People will not be getting a good look at the kludged face of it. They will be seeing the perfectly uniform sheet that we glued the box tubing to. The next step is to position the ‘bearings’. They’re not real bearings, they’re just short sections of box tubing through which the axles will run. But they do fill the important role of attaching the platform to the axles, and thus the wheels. When I first set about planning this, I realized that the slope would be defined by the front and rear wheels, and the middle wheels will be a bit tricky. So I positioned the bearings for the front and rear axles and began brainstorming. I’d initially envisioned short posts which would hold the middle bearings at the proper level below the plane of the platform. This idea got torpedoed by the inability to get precise lengths on the box tubing.
After going through a couple of possible ideas in my head, I decided that the best move would be one which did not depend upon my precision to keep the middle wheels on the proper level. I was inspired by a leaf spring. With the flexibility of plasticard sheeting (or at least the flexibility of the thickness I was using), I could have the bearing for the middle wheels float, and the weight of the model would hold them against the surface underneath. I could have made independent suspensions for two bearings on the middle axle, but I was worried about the strength of such a structure. I had a panel of a good enough width, and a length of box tubing long enough to make a suitable bearing along that width, so I affixed one spring to the front end of the platform and under the front bearings, thus holding the middle axle at whatever height was appropriate for the surface the model rested upon.
There was much rejoicing.
Yay.
Testing our new suspension
The rejoicing stopped as I turned my attention to the question of keeping the wheels on the axles. Initially, I rejected the idea of gluing them in place. On the Caisson, I’d capped the axle with bitz large enough to prevent the wheels from sliding off. I had no more of them, so I started looking for alternatives. Inspiration struck as I spied by collection of skulls. Not real skulls, mind, but plastic ones for decorating miniatures in Grimdark. So far I’d only used one, and I’d paid good money for them. And the Ork skulls looked just the right size to act as hubcaps. So I started futzing about with the correct angle to trim the end of the axles to get enough plastic to plastic contact to make sure the skullcaps don’t fall off. When I realized I’d trimmed an axle too short, I asked myself why I was going to such trouble to avoid gluing the wheels in place.
The answer was simple – I didn’t want to work with superglue.
The alignment looks good.
Whining aside, I realized that the simplest way to get the look I wanted was to glue the axle into the wheel and glue the skullcap on the hub. Then I could adjust alignment by simply nudging the skull while the glue was still wet. So, I got out my superglue, cut the axles to the proper length, and affixed the wheels and caps on one end of the axles. Then it was simply a matter of sliding the axles into the proper bearings and gluing the wheels on the other end. I waited until the wheels were dry before attaching the other set of skulls. That way I only needed to worry about lining them up, and not that I was going to dislodge the alignment of the wheel as I did. Why persist with the skullcaps when their purpose was no longer relevant. Two reasons – one, I had grown attached to the visual; two – I’d already cut them from the sprue and cleaned up the attachment points. I could have thrown them in the Bitz box, but there was scant little decoration on this wagon chassis as it was.
Decorative touches
Speaking of decoration, at some point I took the flag from the chariot kit, extended the flagpole, and attached it to the back of the chassis. I also attached a not-so-random towhook under the back end. This towhook is for the Caisson. While all of this was going on, I was also spray-priming the animals and the Caisson. It had gotten up to forty out, and I wanted to take advantage of the warm weather. The assembly of the main chassis took so long that the sun had set before I was spraying that component. Luckily, my spray area is indoors, and I had light to see by. Unluckily, I had an open window sending all my warm indoor air into the cold outdoor air.
Well, the kit containing the animals arrived. It was made by the same folks who made the main model, but is an older kit for their fantasy line. It’s supposed to make a chariot that can be pulled by either horses or lions. Since our IFV model is far, far larger than the chariot, we’re going to use both horses and lions. They did recruit the aid of a traveling circus after all.
Ragnmar: “Um, won’t the lions eat the horses?”
Dorian: “We just put the horses in front. That way the lions motivate the horses and the horses motivate the lions.”
Circus Lady: “I told you earlier, they’ve all been lobotomized, and had override chips implanted. The controller is built into the handle of my whip.”
Dorian: “Sure, spoil the fun.”
Ragnmar: “You’re a dick, Dorian.”
Don’t Worry, They’ll be Fine
The chariot kit also has a heap of bitz that will be perfect for adding character to other pieces. My army in the actual game has a lion’s head ensign, so it won’t be hard to find homes for the lion-themed decorations from the chariot. Lets clip all of the animals off the chariot sprue and assemble them. I specifically picked the chariot because the animal were posed to be pulling, and had an attachment point on their harnesses where a simple loop shackle could be fitted. We will eventually attach our chains to these shackles, but we’ve got to get them made first. The base model had the animals attached to a yoke, but has only one yoke in the set. To provide consistency, I want all four to be attached by a similar system.
My first idea was to drill into the attachment point and fit these staples. The loops of the staples proved to be too wide for the model as built. I’d made the mistake of buying the staples before I had the chariot model, and guessed wrong. When I tried to squeeze it narrower to fit the model, I started to realize it was going to be a good deal of work to get it to fit. Not only that, but in the end, it was going to be rather ugly and not fit properly. Oh well, $1 lost. Not really, since the staples are still perfectly serviceable in their original function.
An alternative came along when my first shipment of plasticard pieces arrived and it turned out I’d ordered the wrong size. I’d been buying axles for the main carriage, and these pieces of tubing are way too narrow for that role. But, if I can bend them into a hundred an eighty degree turn, they would fit almost perfectly as shackles for the chains to attach to.
So now we get to our first piece on working with plasticard. What is plasticard? In short, it’s high density polystyrene. Yes, the same material they make styrafoam from, only without the foamy airspace. I have straight tubes of the stuff and I need to bend it. Best way to do that is to apply heat. We’ve ventured into something I’ve never actually done before, but I’m too far down the rabbit hole to stop now. So, the first source of heat I tried is hot water. I took my Japanese kettle, set it to boiling, filled a coffee cup with hot water and rested a plasticard tube in it. I got a gentle bend in the part of the tube in the water after quite a few minutes of waiting. This did not make me happy, as I needed a rather severe bend, and I’m an impatient sort. So I dumped the now cooled water into my brush-washing bin and went to get my hairdryer.
My hairdryer has never been used on hair. I got it when I first needed to put plastic up to the windows on my house. It has only ever been used on plastic, and today would be no different. Now, if you do the math, there is probably more energy trapped in that cup of hot water than I’ll be getting out of the hair dryer. But the problem was, it wasn’t conducting into the polystyrene, but evaporating away with the steam. The hot air moving past it at high rate of speed will transfer more of its heat into the polystyrene than the water did. One thing to note with as thin a work piece as I’ve got here – the airflow out of your standard consumer hair dryer is not even in temperature. There are hot spots directly downwind of the heating elements. These hot spots are what we are looking for, as they will render the plasticard the most malleable. There may be some trial and error involved in finding these spots, but in the end, I got a loop. With the air of pliers and a mandrel, I was able to refine one of those bends into a shackle shape. Some trimming and cleanup later, and it glued neatly to the attachment point on the first horse. That’s a second benefit of switching from metal to plasticard – we can glue it and paint it using the same glue and paint as the rest of the model. The day is saved, we can now get our draft animals modeled. Sadly, as always happens, I get the technique perfected on the last shackle I need to make.
A lot of frustrating time went into this.
They will need a base, as they were not balanced to stand without being attached to the rest of their original kit. I can get some bases from the game store when I pick up sheet plasticard for something else I plan to do. Fast Forward a Week, and we have a plethora of plasticard options. Except there’s still a problem. I underestimated the diameter of the plasticard tube yet again. On the bright side, the new tubing is of the perfect diameter to serve as an axle for the wheels. So, I’m going to adjust my mental plan for the design. Not by much, mind you, but I had originally planned the MDF axles that came with the wheels and pinning them to the tubing, which would have required tubing wide enough for the axle to fit inside. Did I just say MDF? Yes. When wheels I got are Medium Density Fiberboard. While I can’t glue them to the polystyrene using plastic glue, I can paint them using the same paints.
I’m going to be perfectly honest. Scratch-build is new ground for me. So I’m going to start with a proof of concept and put together a caisson. Since there are multiple definitions of ‘caisson’, lets be clear – I’m talking about the two-wheeled cart for hauling ammunition. The wheels came in packs of four, and I only needed six for the main build. So I have a pair free for this proof of concept. I also have in my bitz collection a great many ammo boxes and fuel cans. As such can build the caisson and heap it with appropriate cargo without any additional investment. Is this a part of the main kitbash? Well, yes, it’s simply going to be towed behind the vehicle.
Right now our Circus lady is curing, we’re waiting for parts for the animals and wheels, and we need to start getting the main body assembled. Since this is not a tutorial on assembling the kit, I am going to skip any steps that are just “follow the instructions”. So we will focus on deviations from the instructions. The first thing where we’re going to deviate on the main kit is with some magnets. Magnetizing components allows for rapidly changing them out, and is often applied to weapons options. We won’t be magnetizing the weapons. We will be using magnets however. The key to magnetizing is pre-planning. Where do we want to be able to attach and detach other components at will? Two places. We want to be able to swap bases between the diorama and a scratch built flying base. We also want to be able to attach and detach the Circus lady at will. So we need two sets of magnets.
The first one is rather easy to place. Using the already magnetized base from the other model, I can hold the magnet in place until I affix it properly. How do you affix these internal magnets? There’s glue, but I had leftover Green Stuff, and with those channels in the floor, it will hold pretty darn well. Plus, being on the bottom of the model, it won’t be in as much danger of shifting due to gravity. So that one was the easy one. The other place we want to magnetize is the left headlight assembly. We want our Circus lady to be able to stand on the corner of the vehicle and motivate her beasts to haul. Initially I planned a line of three small magnets with the same polarity so we can have a few options as to where she stands. There was just one problem with this – when you get two magnets close to each other, they tend to act of their own accord. After a lot of frustrated fussing, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do it at the present time. So I cut down to the two magnets on the ends, which were far enough apart that I was able to get them into the notches I cut in the back of the headlight assembly. Once I had glue in, I promptly entombed them in Green Stuff – I was not going to do that all over again.
Some assembly required
The magnets on the outside are there simply to help hold the inside magnets in place while the Green Stuff cures, and to remind me that there are magnets in there. Oh, and ensure polarity of the interior magnets. I know that once the interior magnets got entombed, there wasn’t much chance of them shifting, but I really don’t want to fight with the fiddly little magnets any more. So, we go back to textbook assembly until we get to the turret. Thankfully, I already decreed we were not magnetizing weapons, so that is out. So what am I doing to the turret? First off, I’m going to drill out the bore of the machine gun. No one will notice if you leave the bore the solid slug of plastic that it comes out of the box as, but that little added touch of detail helps. I don’t do it to every weapon, or even most weapons, but when I’m already going to all of this effort, I’m going to drill out the bore of the projectile weapons.
The second point of deviation is that we’re going to leave the turret as three subassemblies. The gunner, the pintle mount and the turret proper. Why? Because there are a lot of tight corners in there and trying to prime, let alone paint, all of those nooks and crannies is asking for trouble. So we’re going to paint them separately and press-fit them together. This requires not gluing the layers to each other. The second thing we’re going to do is to swap out the arms on the gunner. We need a pose that says “Drive me closer, I want to hit them with my sword.” And to do that, we need to give the guy a sword. So it’s back to the Bitz Box. Swapping out weapons arms is easy, right? Well if all you want to do is make sure he’s holding the weapon, sure. But we want him posed properly for the meme-reference. So we need to take a saw to some arms. For the left arm, we have a chainsword that’s just a hand, so we can just find an arm pointed in the proper direction and take off whatever’s in its hand. Too many of the arms are posed to hold something close in to the torso, which is the opposite of what we want. For the right arm, the pistol I want to give him has the wrong type of shoulder pad, so I have to swap it to an arm that is compatible with the correct ones.
So we apply a little saw to the arms and do some more part surgery. Why didn’t I use the saw before? Because the female parts were not as bulky, and wouldn’t deform as much from clippers where they were more than the knife could handle. The saw is slow, but it does less damage to the surrounding part and can cut through an arbitrarily thick block of plastic. Once cut apart, we reassemble the parts we want and we have one enthusiastic gunner who can’t wait to get into melee range. Nevermind the fact that he’s sitting behind a minigun…
So what’s next? Well, we need some parts to be delivered, and we need to look at what’s wrong with our Circus Lady’s backside.
That didn’t work out exactly as intended.
So what happened was that gravity caused the green stuff to slump against the front loincloth. And the upper part is still a mess. So lets cover the rump with a pistol from the Bitz Box. Yes, the pistols are gratuitously oversized. But with ammo packs, the holster hides most of the worst errors. We also have to attach a magnet to the heel of that boot. So far I’ve been using thin plastic glue. (Thin being a measure of viscosity.) But plastic glue works by chemically reacting with the plastic to cause the pieces to fuse to each other. It does not work so well with metal. So as I cut a notch from the heel of the foot to fit the magnet, I had to find the cyanoacrylate, more commonly called Superglue. I hate superglue. It sticks to anything but itself. So I end up having to hold the pieces in place for far too long before it sets and pray I didn’t get any on my fingers. If I did, I would get glued to the piece while waiting. This is more than a little annoying.
We’ve got a ways to go.
Almost as annoying as getting glued to the piece is realizing I don’t have magnets small enough to hide in the foot. So what am I going to do about this oversized lump of metal in her heel? I’m still thinking about that. So what is there to do now? We need to wait for the pieces I ordered online, but that doesn’t mean work has to stop. What can I do while waiting? I can paint. My preference is for spray primers and to paint light on dark. There are a few simple techniques to ensure a good primer coat that doesn’t wipe out details. First off is to remember that you can always add more primer, but taking it off will be difficult to impossible. Especially around the fine details. So short bursts in gentle sweeps will do well. You need about sixteen to twenty inches of separation from the spray nozzle to the piece in order to have the best dispersal of pigment. Don’t try to get the whole piece in one pass. Coast from one direction, so you have a dry face for the model to rest on. Let that layer dry and spray the other side. Repeat from as many directions as needed to remove pale spots and get a uniform coat. A bright penlight will help provide alternative lighting to check whether or not a given pale spot is the underlying plastic or reflections.
Oh, and whatever you do, make sure you spray prime in a well-ventilated area. Most sprays use hydrocarbon-based accelerants that will cause issues if you breathe too much. Plus the pigment, which you don’t want in your sinuses. No matter where you work, there will be droplets of pigment that float long enough to dry and form colored dust. You will begin to notice this if you use the same spot long enough. It can be wiped up, unlike a direct spay that will stick to whatever it hits. Last tip, put a backdrop behind the piece to catch as much of that loose pigment as you can. A simple cardboard box will suffice, provided it’s big enough.
Wherein we apply the base coat.
Right now we’re priming in eight pieces, three layers of the turret, the Circus lady, three weapons mounts, and the main chassis. This will allow the structure to have more posability, and allow us to paint it properly. If you notice the walker in the back, the one on the left, it’s not just there to look pretty, it’s a color reference for the vehicle. So we start with some base coats. The primer counts as our first base coat, because there are large areas of the model that will stay black. On our Circus Lady and the gunner, we have one model that has a lot of exposed skin and one completely encased in armor. His coat will be more uniform, mostly dark red. The base coat for the skin and hair will be leather brown, and while we’re painting it, we’ll paint the holster and ammo pouches. We need to be careful not to paint over her shirt. That one gets based in dark purple, the loincloth in pale gray and the metal in a lead hue.
A time-consuming, but vital step
While I could leave that as her skin tone, I’m not going to. These intermediate layers do two things – one they reduce the number of layers required to cover a pure black base, and it subtly influences the character of the final color layered on top. Most of the brown will be covered up, except for the holster and ammo pouches. Though the red is the final color of the gunner’s armor. Since I’m basing the Circus Lady’s armor, I’ll hit the metallic parts of the main chassis and weapons. Because there are so many “metal” components across my collection, this particular silver hue is one of my most commonly used pigments. There are two painting techniques I have to discuss when applying these patches. First is what is typically thought of when mentioning ‘painting’. That is evenly applying pigment to coat the area. This is used for things like gun barrels and antennae. The second is drybrushing. Drybrushing is the use of a limited amount of pigment (the ‘dry’ brush) to scrape over the prominent details of the model. This gets useful for grates, vents and simulating wear on mechanical components.
There are some people who would advise diluting your pigment. I have only once ran into a time when I needed to add water to paint – after a pot had all but dried out and needed to be restored to working order. This is because I find diluted pigment doesn’t cover well, and refuses to stay where I put it. You will typically get this bad advice online when you gloop it on. More appropriate advice would be to use less paint. As with primer, you can always put more on, but taking it off is not so easy.
So we start layering on other colors. With a few details, the “very undone” look of freshly primed pops to something looking closer to completed. For this reason, I try to pick primers that represent as much of the base color as I can. This is not always practical, and for individual characters I will just suck it up and paint it all, such as with the Circus Lady miniature here.
This story starts with a Christmas sale at the friendly neighborhood gaming store. While browsing, I managed to talk myself into spending money on the newfangled infantry fighting vehicle model for the latest dose of plastic crack from my favorite dealer. This was not the best purchase, because I was none too excited when I got home. But I’d bought it, so I took the shrink wrap off the box, opened it up and got out the instructions. Skimming through them, I found a spot where there were no part numbers. Mistaking this for a misprint, I went searching through the sprues for parts of the right shape to be the pieces involved in the operation in question.
That’s when I started to suspect something was wrong. None of the sprues in the box had the right parts, and the missing pieces were rather important. To be specific, they formed the stand that allowed the model to appear to hover (if you ignore the fact that you can still see the stand). Box art showed these pieces to be clear, and online unboxing videos showed a sprue of clear plastic with the two parts I did not have. Now I was a bit miffed. This wasn’t like some optional component I could choose to omit, so I needed to find a solution. Well, my first thought were the bitz merchants online who routinely part out kits. Then I realized, “This is a manufacturer’s mistake, I should start with customer service.”
I sent them an e-mail, then sent them another one when an auto-reply said I should provide more information (like the model number). Then a few days later I get a message telling me a replacement had been dispatched. I thought, “Great, I’ll have my stand, and I’ll be back in business.” A few details began to creep into my consciousness. First was fairly innocuous, the $0 order put in my account history linked back to the full kit. Well, that could be explained by the website not having product pages for individual sprues. Then there was the FedEx shipping weight – two pounds. And box dimensions too big for the tiny clear sprue I was expecting. I began to suspect they had not sent me a replacement sprue, but a replacement kit.
And I was proven right when the box arrived. A whole, still shrink-wrapped kit. My initial reaction was “Why would they do that? All I needed was a sprue.” But some logic began to tell me why it happened this way. Let’s look at it from a business process perspective. You are a company that produces plastic model kits on injection-molded sprues. You have hundreds of products, each product contains anywhere from one to a dozen sprues. Are you going to maintain a warehouse of every possible replacement sprue you might need to send out? Not if your quality control is any good. You’d be paying for warehousing and staff while hanging on to a lot of unsold inventory ‘just in case’. What about grabbing a sprue from the factory? Well, not all of the products are actively being pressed at any given time. There might not be any for that replacement part lying around. Plus you’d disrupt the finely tuned processes. And forget retooling a machine to mold a one-off. That would just be absurdly expensive. But, you do have a worldwide distribution network which is already tuned to pick and ship completed kit boxes on-demand. The marginal cost drops to the box plus shipping. That is far lower than the alternatives, and faster as it is not a deviation from routine for the supply chain.
The Sprue
Long story short, I got a complete kit from customer service to replace my incomplete kit, and they don’t want the incomplete kit back. So what am I to do with the incomplete kit? It’s almost the whole thing, just missing a stand. I could be boring and rig up a stand, it’s going to be obscured by the vehicle body anyway.
But then I’d be living down to my Glib reputation.
Instead I decided to be funny. We have this oversized, high-tech IFV for power-armored super soldiers. What does it do when the lift systems break down on a low-tech backwater? A conversation between the fictitious driver and the resident mechanic came to mind.
Ragnmar: “The Grav systems won’t grav and the turbines won’t turb.”
Dorian: “That’s not technically-”
Ragnmar: “I don’t need to be technically accurate, I need to be moving towards the front. I’m stuck in this circus!” *gestures wildly at the tents around them*
Dorian: “While it may be a colorful local encampment-”
Ragnmar: “No, it literally is a circus. They have trained lions and everything.”
Dorian: “Normally I’d get a transport in here and put you back in reserve. But our ships left the system to-”
Ragnmar: “Skip to what you’re actually going to do.”
Dorian: “Do you need to be back at full capacity, or just moving again?”
Ragnmar: “Just get me moving again.”
Dorian: “Excuse me, circus lady, I’m going to need your help…”
And so I thought of the super-advanced grav-IFV up on wheels being pulled into combat by circus animals. That, of course, is not something the kit is designed to do. So now we’re firmly into what is affectionately known as “Kitbashing”. To give a dry definition, at its most basic, kitbashing is the act of customizing the appearance of a model by using parts from outside the kit from which it is normally made. Sometimes, this is as simple as swapping out heads on infantry. Other times, it gets complicated to the point where the original model is unrecognizable. We’re aiming for in between, with an amusing scene that is still somewhat complicated in terms of the customizations, but still recognizable as the original model.
So, what do we need?
We have the unassembled base kit without stand. We need wheels, circus animals, some thing to attach them to the main body, and the circus lady. I’ve also decided that I want this scene to be modular, that is, if I want to deploy the model to the tabletop, I can detach it from the scenery, drop it on a jury-rigged stand and run it alongside the complete version. So, the wheels should be attached to a chassis, but not the vehicle’s chassis proper. This frame is one more thing for the list.
Now to accomplish this we need to look for parts. The chassis to hold the wheels is going to be new construction. New construction? Yes, there is a material commonly called ‘plasticard’. It is the not the same plastic as the average model, but sold in sheets, bars, tubes, etc. It is one of the vital tools in the arsenal of anyone looking to do more than just swap parts. Being plastic, you don’t need any special paints or tools to work with it versus the normal kits, and it supplements the more expensive detailed moldings. For something like a chassis between some wheels, tube and beam plasticard is ideal. It spends most of its time unseen, and even if seen, will look the part it’s trying to play.
An easy way to attach the animals to the vehicle is by using actual chain. Craft store chains in ‘hematite’ color are easy to come by and of the right scale to fit in with the model. They’re metal, but we don’t need to paint them or anything, since they’re already in the right color. We will need to cut them to length, so I’ll have to make a note to find my wire cutters. So, now we need to source some animals. Preferably ones that are posed like they’re pulling something. I spent a lot of time on this one. And I found the perfect solution. It’s an older kit, but it’s a fantasy chariot that is supplied with both horses and lions as options for draft animals. I’m not sure yet if I want to use the wheels from the chariot kit, they’re kind of small. The wheels are important given their juxtaposition to the high-tech main body. They also need to look like they’d be able to hold the weight. After a while, I decided to order some from the internet and save the chariot wheels for another day.
Now we come to our Circus Lady. There are two things this part must do. First, it must not look like I just grabbed a basic soldier and gave it a whip. Second, it must still look like it belongs to the same faction. The whip is vital, as the stagecoach driver, she’ll be using it to direct the animals pulling the whole thing. But all the whips I have belong to a different faction. We’ll call them BDSM Elves, since that’s a non-trademark infringing way of getting the point across. I can’t use a whole model from the BDSM Elves because, well, that wouldn’t be able to pass for the faction the IFV belongs to.
I’m somewhat surprised that I got fifteen hundred words into an article about kitbashing before I mention the concept of the Bitz Box. It’s really as simple as it sounds. Most kits have more options than can be used on any given model, so there are bits left over. These get thrown into a box in case they can be used later. The base model for our Circus Lady will be built around the sorceress body that came with a dragon rider kit. She was the option I didn’t use when assembling it. However, she does have a whip arm and is built to the same scale and proportions as the models of a sect within my main faction. Since I have a lot of bitz not used to make these other girls, I can mix and match until the Circus Lady fits in with the proper faction.
My Bitz Box
Picking through my Bitz Box for these silent sister pieces, I find a minor problem. The whip hand is a left hand – and so are all of the good hands for the silent sisters. A ‘bad’ hand in this case is a hand gripping something I don’t want in the finished piece. I do have some pointy silent sister hands, and a right handlebar hand from… lets call it ‘cyborg cavalry’. That’s close enough. While this right hand on the handlebar is not a perfect fit aesthetically, it is to the correct scale, and more importantly, it is easy to make the whip fit. We just need to conduct a little part surgery and we can make a right arm. Joining the whip to handle is the easy part. Next we need to take one of the ‘bad’ hands and separate the forearm so we can graft that forearm onto the cyborg cavalry hand. Shaving of the right slivers of plastic, and we can hide the fact that the hand doesn’t fit.
Since the sorceress model was designed to be seated, we need to adjust the legs. In fact, lets take this armored leg with a loincloth and use that to make her stand. In a nice bit of fortuitousness, the curve of the waist chain on the sorceress matched the curve of the top of the armor on the loincloth leg. So it was easy to trim down the torso and glue it in place. The sculpt almost looked like it was meant to be. Fitting in the right leg was less cooperative. I grabbed the completed version of the kit (the one that gets to have its stand) to use as a measuring device for her pose. Now, you may have noticed that some of these pieces are black and the rest are gray. This is not because they were molded from black plastic. No, this was because the sorceress is an old model. One I bought when I still primed on the sprue. This technique did not work out so well, because it resulted in weak joints and models that broke more often than I liked. To glue these pieces into the kitbash, I have been carefully shaving off the primer to expose a clean plastic surface that the plastic glue can react with.
Making a Lady
Since I only have two sorceress torsos and multiple silent sister heads, I do the more drastic trimming to the head and give it a profile more like the one made for this torso. While the sorceress as delivered had a backside to make HM happy, it doesn’t take much to notice that our Circus lady doesn’t have a backside to speak of. And so we come to Green Stuff? What is Green Stuff? It is… green. Actually it is two-party epoxy putty that very often comes with one component tinged blue and one yellow. This gives an easy indicator of when they’ve been properly mixed because it turns green. It is also sold in other colors, but “Green Stuff” is widely recognized as the generic term for the material. While still freshly mixed it is somewhat adhesive and quite malleable. It is used both to fill gaps and to sculpt components. After about a day or so, it will have hardened up and can be sanded, cut or painted. My thought was we should sculpt ourselves a back half to the loincloth. I overestimated my skill as a sculptor. Still, I filled the gap, and have something hanging down there. We’ll let it cure and see what there is to work with.
Gluteoplasty Not included.
Next step – we start assembly on the main vehicle.
