The tanks keep rolling in...

Yesterday I finished the Hellhammer Super Heavy tank that will support the Walpurgian infantry when taking back the fallen cities of the Empire of Man from heretics, alien scum or even the ruinous powers.
The Hellhammer is part of the four tanks big Super Heavy Tank division, consisting of one Hellhammer, two Baneblades an one Shadowsword. In the future I might increase the numbers as I love the many different versions of the Super Hevy tanks. Right now they are all sold out from Games Worksop online, so it will be interesting to see if they will be replaced with new boxes or if they will be brought back. Games Workshop is about to release something they call "Chapter Approved" and in here they have new rules for Apocalypse games so they might plan to release new boxes for the Super Heavies.

Today I've finished the command Leman Russ tank from the Tech box, along with the first Tech-priest Engineseer of the army. I will need some more of those but they will need a little conversion as there are only two different models in the range."Luckily" I had an accident and broke off the Servo-skull on the backpack, so I will have to fin another one to use. I hardly ever use them on my minis, so I am sure I can scatter up a few if I get enough time to search. I think that will help a lot towards making them look like individuals.

I have started my Shadowsword build, and I have found that the tracks are especially tricky to build. This is because the front and back drive sprocket either mis-alligns, twists or just don't glue on straight. This happens even though you have a pin that goes in to the sprockets that can only be placed one special way. Luckily I have delt with parts like that before so I have found ways to get arund it, and on the Hellhammer it led to some cutting on the back of the tracks, while on the Shadowsword I glued the back sprocet on after I had glued the tracks to it.

In between doing this I have also started to work on the fluff for my army. I decided a long time ago that they are from the planet Walpurga, named after Saint Walpurga. The people there are called Walpurgians, so the army is the Walpurgian something. I will give the different units special names, and nicknames, and find my commanders for the army. High command are named after Generals from the American Civil War, but other officers and named characters get their names from all over.

Super Heavy mayhem...

I have finished building the first Stompa -  at least as much as I can assemble before priming. There are a few hatches and armor-panels that needs to be glued on after priming and some initial painting. Hopefully there will be nice weather for priming this weekend, so that I can get it done and start the paintjob.

I have been to my storage room and brought home two cardboard boxes full of models.
For the Orks I have brought home sets of all sizes. Tuesday I assembled a Painboy (no converting on him), and I also have a Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun that I plan to build this weekend. There are two resin figures (don't remember what figures right now) that I will assemble in the near future.
Among the sets I have brought home are also two boxes of Burnas/Lootas, and right now I'm leaning towards assembling one box of each as I like both units and plan to have them both represented in my army. With these units there are several possibilities of converting and making the Orks look special, so I will take a little time building them and use parts from other sets I will also see if I have to paint them in stages or if I can assemble them fully and then prime and paint.
I will also built the five Nobs from the Stormclaw set, and the three Killa Kans that came in the same box. I have brought home one more box of Killa Kans, so I have six Kans that need to be assembled from scratch. I also have tree Kans that are partially painted and assembled from earlier that will be worked on along with these.
The Orks will also get some more heavy support, as the second Stompa is home. This one I plan to build with a heavy flamer instead of the sword, so I am looking into ways of building that. One idea is to use the flamer of an Imperial Knight (brought one of those home as well), but I have to see what is possible.  I would like to add a belly-gun on this Stompa, and I have a Baneblade cannon barrel for this purpose, I just need to think of a way to glue it to the Stompa so it doesn't fall off. This should be possible, as I can do almost what I want inside of it as long as I manage to glue it together in the end. To make it stand out a bit more from the first one, I also hope to include parts that will be left over from my first Gorkanaut/Morkanaut (need to decide what version to build first) and rokkitz and bombz from a flyer set that I plan to build as a Dakka jet. This will help to modify the shoota on the other arm of the Stompa so that too looks different from the first one.

Right now I am assembling a Super Heavy tank for my Imperial Guard (Astra Militarum) army. It came in a huge boxed set (and I do mean HUGE) called "Hammer of Cadia". This box is one of the largest I have seen from Games Workshop in size, and is about the same size as the Relicos Militarum scenery box (that I also have and look forward to building in the future).
The box includes one Super Heavy tank that can be assembled either as a Baneblade or a Hellhammer (I'm building the Hellhammer version). There are also three Leman Russ Battletanks and three Hellhounds in the box.

Right now I am trying to decide if I should have flamers or bolters in the side sponsons og the Hellhound. I am leaning towards flamers as I've read somewhere on a Wiki that the ideal configuration for city fighting is flamers, but I do like to use the bolters because of their look. 

I have two more boxes of Super Heavy Tanks, and one is going to be my second Baneblade, and the other will be a Shadowsword with it's fearsome Volcano cannon (range 120").
If I can motivate myself, I plan to build all three Super Heavy tanks in the near future.
I also have a "Leman Russ Tech-command" box that I brought home. This is a special box that came out at about the same time as the "Hammer of Cadia", containing a Leman Russ Battletank, a "command upgrade sprue" and a Tech priest Enginseer. I should probably build this quite soon, as all the new tanks will need someone to tend to their Machine Spirits.

All the Super Heavy tanks comes with one spare officer on foot, so for the Super Heavies I assemble now that means three officers. They wear the longcoat of the Cadians, and I plan to make one of them into a female officer. Not sure if I will use a head from the Daemonettes as I did with my other two female soldiers or if I should go for a Necrumunda House Escher head (if they are compatible).

Ork update

This weekend I have continued to work on my Stompa.
It took some time getting the glue to set on some of the larger parts, so I couldn't do as much as I had wanted, but I think I will get the rest done this afternoon if nothing very important comes up at short notice.
What remains is gluing on two poles to the shoulders and back of the Stompa, the big scull on the belly, and a lot of metal struts around the bottom part.
There will be five pieces that will not be glued on until after I have primed and done a little bit of detail painting.
Two armor panels in the back are partly covering up a driveshaft of some sort, and I would like to paint the pipes and the other parts that will be partly visible behind the panels before I glue them on.
Also there are three armored viewports on the belly of the Stompa where there are Grot heads visible behind them. I will paint those heads green after the entire Stompa is primed, and then glue the hatches on. The five parts will be primed with Imperial Primer, and then painted up along with the rest of the Stompa. When everything is painted up I will glue on the Grots that came with the Stompa on good locations where they can add to the narrative of the model.

I used some liquid greenstuff on the Stompa on Saturday to cover the cracks between the panels that were not supposed to be there, and I think that helped the overall look of the model. When it is primed it will hardly be visible that something has been done to it, and if something should be visible then it can be explained with sloppy or hasty work from the Orks and Grots...

While the Stompa is being worked on and dealt with, I have also started on some other Orks for the army. When I went through my inventory to get the Stompa, I found a boxed set called Sanctus Reach - Stormclaw. In contains the Ork boss Grukk Faceripper (I had built him already), five Nobs, a Runtherder with ten Grots and three Killa Kans
Facing them in combat is several Space Marines from the Space Wolves chapter. After inspecting the Space Wolf Marines, I have decided that it will be too much work to tun them in to Gatekeepers, so I will give them away or trade them to someone who collects this chapter, and concentrate on keeping my Space Marine army to consist of Ultramarines and Dark Angels blended quite seamlessly together.
I have also added some Horus Heresy 30K Space Marines in to my army, as this works well with the fluff saying that the Gatekeepers have been in the outer reaches of the galaxy for a long time, so they naturally have lots of older wargear that they take care of and still use. I will have a few units dressed in Mark IV power armor, and some old style terminators, along with the Marines that came in the Horus Heresy Betrayal at Calth boxed set (that I have two of ). The Idea with the Betrayal at Calth boxes is to paint one box up as Gatekeepers and the other as my Chaos Space Maines - Knights of Oblivion.

But for now I will paint Orks, and along with the Stromclaw box and the Stompa, I will try to paint up some of the Ork models that I have started to work on but not finished. That is a unit of three Killa Kans, a Mek gun (don't remember what version I made it as) with five Grot crew, and some of the old War Trukks that will serve as Warbuggies or small trucks in the army. Three of them are mobile rocket launcers for my Grot rokkits, and I will try and see if I can replace the Ork drivers with Grots to better serve my loose idea for Armies on Parade 2018.

Something huge is comming...

This afternoon I started on my biggest build in Warhammer 40K so far (not counting scenery).

A long time ago, while Apoclypse was still something people played, I bought several Ork Stompas(yes I did write several, I think I have 3), and I've finally brought one home from my storage to build and paint. I also bought several Super Heavy tanks for my Imperial Guard army to make sure the Orks had someone to fight, and just one has been built and painted so far. But the Super heavies are a future project, now back to the Stompa...

So far I have built the body, feet and head, and some poles and chimneys that will be attached when the arms are built and fitted to the torso.

I can truly say that this is one of the worst building instructions I have ever seen, and that says a lot when it comes to Games Workshop. They have never been that great making instructions (weird really as they are so good at making miniatures of all sizes), but in all fairness the instructions have become a lot better in the later years. With the Stompa you only get one drawing of what to attach, and some of the parts you only see from behind so you have to look through the sprues and choose the parts that looks right. All the parts have numbers on the sprues, but no numbers are included in the instructions.

I plan to build this Stompa following the instructions all the way. When I start the second one, I will start to do some modifications so that not two Stompas look alike. 

This Stompa have horns on the head, and because of that I have decided it needs to have the name of a bull. Since the Ork army is named after movie characters or actors, I felt it was right that the vehicles and walkers got the same attention. So this Stompa will be named Ferdi-naan after Ferdinand the bull. Now Ferdinand was a very kind and peaceful bull that just wanted to sit under a tree and smell the flowers, but that is part of the pun. Originally I was thinking of calling it Raging Grox after the boxing movie Raging Bull with Robert De Niro, but I will leave that for a Gorkanaut (or Morkanaut) at a later time using the horns from the second Stompa. Not sure what I will do with that head yet, but if I have the pieces I might add some rockets or something. 

I am adding a scull on the belly of the Stompa, as this is a possibility, and it's going to be painted white and rusty. Because of this, the Stompa Ferdi-naan has gotten a nickname, and that is of course Da Pun-isha after The Punisher, and it will be painted mostly in black with some metal and rust plates and maybe one or two different colored plates here and there to make it more orky.