Build Guide: Mantic Forge Fathers Hailstorm Cannon

 Mantic's Forge Father range is shaping up rather nicely, with some visually and stylistically distinct models and units. One of these is their optionally-mobile artillery piece, the Hailstorm cannon. Its a tracked quad-gun, with a pilot who looks half like he's aiming the barrels, and half like he's riding the thing. It also perhaps owes a little to Alien's space jockey in its styling.

I recently got one as part of the Fate of the Forge Star bundle and found, in common with other mantic products, it does not come with a build guide. Its not overly complicated to put together, but, just in case you're having trouble figuring yours out, here's my guide. This is going to be largely pictorial.  As I said, the model isn't complicated, but sometimes it can be useful to see which way up things are supposed to go or which order its best to glue some parts together in.

 

The two halves of the barrels go together as seen above. Don't glue them together yet though - they need to be mounted on the main body of the gun first.

This side-view shows you the arrangement of the two shield pieces on the gun. I found it was best to glue the bottom shield to the body first, then stick the barrels on, then stick the top shield onto that piece. There's a hole in the top of the barrel section for the top shield to fit in to.

The gun barrel tips can be stuck on to the ends of the barrels once they are glued to the main body. There is only one correct alignment for them so, if they don't seem to fit right when you dry fit them, rotate them and try again.

Those ammo drums can be fitted on after the shields, but it might be easier to do it beforehand. Its not a model-breaker if you leave them till last though.

The pilot went on last on my gun. In retrospect it might have been better to glue his gun and holster on before putting him on the machine. Finally I stuck on the rear ammo drums and the tracks. The tracks also only go on one way.

From the Mantic forums, I hear some of these models turn up at people's houses pretty warped. I'm not sure which parts in particular tend to get bent, but if you get one like that its pretty easy to fix with hot water. You'll often see boiling water recommended. This might be necessary for thicker pieces, but I have used hot water straight from the tap to reshape restic in the past. The point is, a little bendage is really not that big a deal and very simple to rectify.

Feel free to ask any questions if you are building a Hailstorm cannon or indeed any Forge Father models. Later on I will be putting up some pictures of my Steel Warriors.

Wargames Terrain: Oil Barrels

In ascending order of awesomeness, here are some awesome things to look at:

• A gaming table full of models fighting each other
• A gaming table full of painted models fighting each other
• A gaming table full of painted models fighting each other in and around painted scenery and objectives.

This week I decided to challenge myself a little bit and paint something I don't normally do: scenery. GW added exploding fuel dumps as an optional extra to the latest version of 40k. I have had a small piece of barrel-filled scenery sitting on the shelf for months now, plus I came home with another set from Games Day (free! From GW!), so I decided to paint those suckers up and make some. obstacles/objectives for wargames.

First up, the set of barrels and jerry cans from the GW batttlefield scenery kit. You only get three barrels and two cans in the set, which is barely enough to make one fuel dump. Its representative of a fuel dump, is probably as generously as its possible to describe the piece. But with 6th ed. rules you can hide behind them, I guess, and thus make them explode. So hey ho.

On the other hand, these are the barrels GW gave me fore free(!) at Games Day this year. Now thats more like it. A proper collection of potentially explosive containers. They also gave me some tinfoil (!) and half-heartedly told me I could paint it as camo netting. I binned that though as I had a better idea - see below.

First the paints used and techniques. This all comes from Forge World's Model Masterclass Volume 1 - a great primer on advanced modeling and painting.

I sprayed the cans with Desert Yellow first. GW don't make this paint any more, of course, because it was great, so you'll need to find your own alternative. It doesn't really matter too much what you choose as the base as you'll be weathering the *&%$ out of it later on. But I recommend a khaki or olive colour for verisimilitude.

I then sponged on Charadon Granite to get the chipping, concentrating on raised edges and the top and bottoms of the barrels as this is where the worst wear would occur. And that is a hard sentence to say or type.If you can't get Charadon Granite, look for a dark grey, almost black to sponge on instead.

 To pick out the details I used a mix of black and brown oil paints, thinned with thinners, gently pushed into the corners and crevices. The nature of the thinners causes the mix to flow along these lines, so mixing it up in the first place is probably the hardest part of this job.

I then made up some rust with the brown oil paint. some thinners, and some rust weathering powder. I flicked this onto the drums just by stroking my finger along the bristles of an old brush that was loaded with the rust mix. You get a nice splattering pattern this way, which you can then soften up by spraying on more thinners.

I used thinned brown ink as 'oil' and dribbled it around the seams of the barrels and on the flooring around them. This is definitely a no-smoking area. Lots of oil and dirt lying around. These cans are meant to be used and reused.

To make the larger stack of barrels a proper source of cover and concealment, I wanted to add some camo netting that would look a bit more convincing than painted tinfoil. I'm not saying you can't paint tinfoil to look awesome. Just that I can't. So, using another technique from Model Masterclass, I raided my First Aid box for a bit of bandage. I soaked this in watered down PVA glue, wrung it out, then draped it over the barrels.

The next morning the bandage had dried almost completely stiff. I first glued on several strips of thin masking tape. then painted it all with watered-down Graveyard Earth and lots of it. The bandage naturally soaks up the paint, I may have wrung too much of the glue out, and requires lots of coverage. I finished it off with a drybrush of Kommando Khaki, and hey presto, a camoflaged fueld dump.

 I'm very pleased with how the barrels came out, perhaps less so with the camo netting. I wonder if there is some way to paint the fabric before gluing it and setting it in place.

For now, I have two nicely painted bits of scenery to go on the table :) Next up - the ammo canisters.

Building Guide: Project Pandora - Veer-myn

One of the drawbacks to getting older is its often harder to get what you actually want for your birthday. At my age you are basically doomed to socks and other woolen goods unless you really really stamp your foot down and insist on toy soldiers. This year I got my wish. First present up: Project Pandora: Grim Cargo by Mantic.

This is a dungeon crawler, set in Mantic's Warpath universe and includes 10 Corporation Marines and 10 Veer-myn - ratmen. In spaaaace! I'm thinking of converting my marines up into zombie troopers, so here's a quick look at building the Veer-myn.

Here's all the parts you get for ratmen. The important points to note are:

• There are 8 bodies, four each of two types, that are tail-less. These are the bodies for the grunt troopers.
• There are two bodies with tails - these are your boss and the heavy weapons trooper.
• The boss and the heavy trooper's heads are in the little baggie, along with some more tails and the boss's weapons.
• The guns for the troopers come with hands as part of the cast. They look almost identical but there are two types. Ones with cloth on the fists and ones with studded plates. Separate them out.

Most of the parts for the grunts are interchangeable. The weapons, however, are not. The hands that have cloth wrappings belong to the bodies with cloth rags and cowls - the top set in the above picture. The studded hands go with the bodies that appear all armoured up - the bottom set in the picture.

When gluing your arms on the bodies, make sure to account for the extended jawlines the models will have. These guns cannot really be glued raised in a firing position. The models pretty much have to carry them low down, as if they're running with them. 

Top row: piggies. Bottom row: er, other ones

When it comes to heads, the ones that have gas masks on - piggies, as I like to think of them, generally go better on the cowled/ragged bodies. Conversely, the unmasked heads generally fit the armoured bodies best. You can mix them, as I have, for a bit of variety, just be aware this may lead to some gaps appearing around the necks. Nothing you can't, at the worst, fill with greenstuff though.

Tails you glues. Thankyou very much.

As with the guns, there are two sets of very similar looking tails. These are probably best described as a 'long' selection and four 'short' ones. The long tails are designed to fit into the backsides of the armoured bodies. So, of course, the shorter tails are supposed to go into a little hole below the right knee of the cowled models. I have found you can, again, mix them up for some variety in your models. Fitting the long tails on the cowled models is definitely the trickier job though. It will certainly require some trimming of the tail tabs to make them fit and may also require some greenstuff to get the piece looking really right though.

The above pic shows you the boss parts to attach to one of your tailed bodies. Nice and simple, although why the guy is carrying a gas cannister on his back, I don't know. Can't be very ergonomical when it comes to crawling along ducts. But hey ho. Its the future.

 And here are the parts for the heavy chem thrower rat. The pipe that runs from the tanks on his back to the grip was cast way out of line, but a few seconds under a hot tap put enough bendiness back into it, it was easily fixed.

Here's a nice blurry picture of my Veer-myn boss, whose name I have forgotten, all ready for washing and painting.

And here's the heavy weapon rat.


Once you have sorted out the heads and weapons and so on, these models are all really easy to put together. They are all sprueless, which speeds things up a lot, so apart from a few bits of trimming and a couple of mould lines being taken off, they're quick to do. One of the weapon sections was bent a fair bit, but, as with the aforementioned piping, this was easily fixed with a bit of hot water.

Project Pandora was basically put together on the cheap, as a way of getting Mantic mini's into people's hands quickly, without them having to commit to a whole Warpath army. As such its a pretty good advert for the quality of Mantic's models. I'm not sure choosing not to include a build guide for them was the right choice though as new gamers are possibly just as likely to swear never to buy another game without pre-assembled figures as to choose to invest heavily in Mantic toys. For gamers with a little more experience though, Project Pandora's Veer-myn fit well with Mantic's aim of producing high quality miniatures at very affordable prices.

Review/Build of Scibor Celtic Warriors

I have been running two Rune Priests in my Wolves army recently but using other models as proxies. GW do do a reasonable 'official' model and it wouldn't be too hard to scratch build one from spares. But Scibor also do some pretty awesome looking resin models...

Here's a few pictures and some tips on assembling Celtic Warrior and Celtic Warrior #2
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 Here's what you get in the clamshell for Warrior 2. A nice scenic base, the body is one cast, and the right arm comes in three parts.

 Its not entirely compatible with GW's range of parts and models. The Scbior figures come with this rotary fan backpack, for example.

 All it took was trimming about a millimeter off the fan with a craft knife though, and a stock marine pack fits on quite neatly.

 The arm glues together quite easily too. Its important to have an idea of orientation before going to glue though. There are no guide marks like you might get on a Privateer Press model.

 Moving on to Warrior. This guy comes in four parts - the base, the body, and a sprue each for the arms. You might want to keep the arms separate until the glue is dry though as, again, there is no guide or mark to identify otherwise which shoulder pad goes with which shoulder.

 Is it a coincidence that the rifle the model carries is the weakest part of the whole sculpt? Well, maybe, maybe not, but its coming off. I chose to cut around the hanging talisman and then through the wrist to remove the gun.

  

Then a fist with a pistol was glued on to the stump.

The small number of parts and generally high quality of the casts made building and converting the Scibor models to GW style was really really quick and easy. The whole process took about half an hour. There are a few things to look out for though.

I was generally very impressed with the quality of the minis. Once the parts were carved off their sprues there was very little trimming to be done of excess flash. Zero mold-lines. And there were almost no bubbles. Warrior 2 was in fact free of them. Warrior did have a few little holes though. One on his right thumb, one on the haft of his axe and one on the underside of the butt of the same axe. I have used glue to fill them rather than greenstuff as they were all quite small and inconspicuous.

Aside from that, it is very important to use a sharp knife and lots of care when removing parts from the blocks of resin. The shoulder pads in particular are very firmly attached to the sprues. The thick resin was quite hard to cut through. This then means lots of force which means a greater risk of over-cutting both the model's parts and your own. Frankly I'm lucky not to have cut my thumb open last night.

In summary then, the two Scibor models I built and converted last night were of very high quality. Converting them to Space Wolf models is about as simple as it could be. The casts are great quality - both artistically and in production. These models will be a great addition to my Space Wolf army. Some care is need when cutting parts though.

I have added a few purity seals and nicknacks to the models and primed them. Later on I'll post some pictures of the painting.