Reinforcements for The Gatekeepers

I haven't been working on my miniatures for quite a while. One of the reasons is that I have been working a lot with my Lego collection (as you can see if you visit my Lego blog).

Last weekend I just got a little Warhammer 40K kick, and started the assembly of two Rhino-based vehicles for my Gatekeepers. I know I should have finished my Imperial Guard minis and done the wash on my Space Marine scouts, but I just felt the need to do some real building for a change.
I plan to do the washing of the scouts and some more painting on the Imperial Guard while waiting for the paint to dry between colors and layers on the new vehicles.

The first vehicle is a Vindicator, complete with Siege shield. I might have been a little bit too smart for my own good, as I assembled all that could be assembled seprarately so that I could multitask and paint the parts at the same time and just add them together. This might not have been the best idea for the Storm shield, as I now face a small challenge of getting the shield attached to the siege tank without breaking anything. But I recon it should work with a little patience and a healthy dose of swearwords.
I decided to go for the rocket launcher solution instead of the twin bolters on the trurret, and at precent the rocket launcher seems a little bit wobbly. But I guess this will improve a bit after I have done the painting, and even if it doesn't it will still look good and that is always my main concern.
The only thing missing on this miniature is to add the stormshield to the vehicle, add some extra parts like a radar, smoke launcers and things like that (all is assembled, redy to glue on).
I decided not to add these parts until the stormshield is on, in case I will have to use some mild force to get this done. Wouldn't like to break small pieces that stick out from the body of the vehicle after all...

The second vehicle is the Whirlwind, with the missile solution with six missiles. This is a clean build so far, and no big mistakes on my end.
I haven't gotten so much work done on this as on the Vindicator, but it is comming along nicely. The body is assembled, the main weapon system is mostly assembled, only thing missing is to add the weapon itself to the base by glueing on a little piece on the top. The trick is to do this without spilling too much glue, but I have done this with so many other parts that it should work for this one as well...
Then I have to assemble the front, as done on any other Rhino-based vehicle (except the Vindicator).
Then comes the extras like smoke chargers, searchlight and so on. 

I will wait with the extras untill the same parts are glued to the Vindicator, to make sure I don't loose some parts or glue the wrong parts to the wrong model in a whiff of confucion...

Both vehicles have gotten their interior painted, even if I doubt that there would be much room inside these vehicles for transport. The back compatment would probably be filled with missiles or shells, and technical equipment. But I decided to go with it just to make it uniform and nice.

After Games Workshop changed the names and colors on their entire paint range, I'm having some troubles finding the right paint to match my army. But since I haven't painted many vehicles yet, I have decided to use a new color on them (they will have one color, and that will be Kantor Blue), and just take it from there. I still need to find the correct colors for my troops though..

Nothing good happens fast

The title is the name of a slow jazz tune, and I think it suits my situation fine for the moment.
I haven't done any painting since the last blog was written, and I had such high hopes for 2013 as a year to get a lot of stuff painted... 

Still in two days time there is February 1st, so it is plenty of time left to fix this.
At least after fixing up my hobby room I find it easier to see what I have to paint...
I still have a few things to do, as I need to get all my sheet music down in to the archive cabinets, and I need to get the last Expedit and the glass cabinets that go inside them. Unfortionately the cabinets are sold out from IKEA for the moment (and I expect that will be the case for quite awhile as they seem to be popular), so I can not get ecverything done exactly as I like them. But as the finances are a little low at the moement as well, that might work out fine.
As I get the sheet music in the archive cabinets, I get to tidy up more of the room and release floor space, and this makes it easier to get a heater going so it gets comfortable to sit down there and work. Hopefully that will increase my speed a little as I have so many miniatures I would like to see finished.
As usual I have already started to think about future projects, even though I have told myself time after time that I need to finish one project at the time. After all, that is one of the reasons my work table is full of unfinished miniatures, and the reason I decided to do a fantasy project and a 40K project every second time.

Cleaned the hobby room

I've just finished working several hours in the basement, in my hobby room. Everything was flowing over, too much had been stuffed in to the room and forgotten about. Not any more!
I removed my old desk (kept the work table though), and added two archive cabinets for my sheet music that has threatened to take over the room for a long time.
This also gives me the top of the cabinets to use for storage, and I managed to store all my large Warhammer FB and 40K boxes there. Plenty of things to sink my claws in to at a later time. 3 towers (4 if I add the ruined tower), 1 large building (with its own tower), two Apocalypse tanks (Baneblade and Shadowsword boxes), lots of tanks and some artillery for my Imperial Guard, two Marine Flyers, one giant spider for my Goblin army and a Thundertusk (or its counterpart) for my Ogres. I also found two Games workshop plastic bags with lots of Ogre sets in them, enough to make a small but hard hitting army with cavalry, heavy gunners, normal troops, butchers, special characters and the little fellas following (gonna go mad converting some of them for sure).
The cleaning also revealed some Sisters of Battle that has been standing unattended for way too long, along with several units of Space Marines (both fast attack and regular troops). As for the Imperial Guard units, I found four Ogryns (one hardhead and three regulars), one old metal Cadian command squad (the metal one with the regular five troops along with one wounded trooper) that I plan to use as my platoon or regiment command,  and the elite Cadian squad with the sergeant that will be my version of Sergeant Bastonne. Oh, and not to forget at least two squads of Ratling snipers, that also will serve with the Imperial Guard regiment I'm putting together.

Up until now I have had two Detolf display cabinets from IKEA. These cabinets are great for all purposes of showing miniatures off except for one thing... They have so few shelves. They have four shelves for each cabinet and no way of adding more shelves without getting special cut glass and some Gyro Gearloose solutions.
The Detolf cabinets will have to be replaced with Expedit cabinets with glass doors. Instead of eight high shelves I will get thirteen not that high shelves that can be split in to twenty six shelves for regular miniatures or a little less for higher minis.I have measured out that the low shelves will take a giant,and hopefully they will also take the Baneblade tank.

Got my packet from GW yesterday

Yesterday I got a packet from Games Workshop, containing my new Witch Hunter (to replace the one who manged to loose his sword from the livingroom table) and I also included a Captain of The Empire with hammer & pistol (I sort of wish I hadn't done that but more about why later).

I plan on using this captain as one of the leaders of the militia guarding the town that can be built with my WHFB scenery (towers, a scary mantion, a chapel or two, and so on).
The Captain will have a diverse group to command, with peasant men-at-arms and bowmen from Bretonnia, fightling alongside Empire Handgunners, State troops and Greatswords.
He might also have the command over a few engineers, specialists, war machines and cannons.

Another commander will have command over the cavalry. At the moment, this commander looks like it will be a leader based on the Kurt Helborg miniature as I really like the look of that.
At the moment the knights consist of two un-assembled boxes of Bretonnian knights, but they may be joined by some Empire knights later on.
This is a project that will come to life over some time, as the first thing I plan to do with it is to build the scenery, and only when that has gone on for a while will I start to work on the troops. The only exceptions being the two Witch Hunters and the Captain.

As mentioned earlier in the post I promised to come back to why I wish I didn't add the Captain to my shopping list.
The reason is something called a tax-free limit. The cost of the minis was 230 Norwegian Kroners (NOK), and I was sure the tax-free limit for goods ordered from outside of Norway was 250 NOK.
It wasn't! The Limit was 200 NOK, so I had to pay a toll fee of 125 NOK, and then an extra WAT-tax on top of that so the total came to 189 NOK in addition to the 230 I had paid for the miniatures.
Next time I will buy my minis as collect at store, no doubt about that!

Happy New Year

Best wishes for the new year!

I will not take a pledge for 2013 as I rarely seem to keep it, but I will certainly try my best to get more miniatures painted than ever before. I will try to paint up a lot of what I already have on my shelves and don't just buy new stuff and paint. I have several sets for all my armies on the shelves (also a lot of Fantasy scenery), so I don't really need to buy much new unless there are some new models that might be nice to use for my existing armies.

I ended 2012 by receiving several minis bought on Ebay.

The most lovely stuff I received was 9 heavy weapon teams for my Imperial Guard army. 3 teams was Cadian and 6 was Catachan. It appears they have been painted before, then basecoated black again. But either the paint has been stripped first, or they have been assembled and put on bases and then everything has been basecoated but never painted. I knew they might have been previously painted before I bought them, so that came as no supprise. The supprise was instead that they had all their ritch details intact.

I plan on having black rocks as a base for both Space marine and Imperial Guard, so black rubble on the bases suits me fine.

The teams are all mounted as two soldiers and one heavy weapon one one base, just as I like to have them (I also guess that this is the best way according to the rules).

3 Catachan teams are armed with mortars, and the remaining teams are all armed with missile launchers. They also have some extra bits and bobs glued to their bases, some of the Catachan units have trees or plants, and this is nice as it gives a jungle feel. I plan to use my Catachan troops as terrain specialists anyway, so this will fit my fluff nicely.

I will have to add some ammo pouches and grenades and other equipment to some of the teams, as they are pretty basic, but I have plenty of that stuff in my bitz box, so that will work out well. One of the teams has a Space Marine helmet, a backpack and a bolter added to their base as decor, and I will see what I will do with that. The helmet can have been destroyed and tossed away so the Marine could regain his sight and continue to fight, but I know of no marine that leaves his backpack or his bolter, so I might have to use some greenstuff to change a little on that base.

Also, some of the teams with missile launchers seem to have spare mortar ammunition on their bases, and I'll see what I'll do with that. It isn't really wrong, but it do look  just a little out of place.

I also got a team of Assault Marines (5 minis) and these have been stripped of their original paint and then basecoated black. There are 3 with boltgun and chainsword, one with a meltagun and powerfist, and one with two chainswords. Not sure about the legality of the two chainswords, so if I don't find that the rules allow this I will have to see if I should chop one arm or just one hand off and replace the one sword with a boltgun. Hope I can find it to be legal though, as it looks mighty cool. 

Two of the Marines are beakies, and I really love those helmets. 1 Marine also has a studded shoulder guard that usually came with the beakies according to pictures of the different generations of armor at Forge World.

I also bought a Tactical squad (10 minis) and a Devastator squad (10 minis), but here I was a little disappointed. The Devastator squad has 4 Devastators, and the rest are just regular tactical marines. The leader of the squad is wielding an axe that probably is supposed to be a power axe, but it looks like it is taken from Warhammer Fantasy and looks a bit Chaos to me. Still, if I paint him up right, I am sure he can become a sergeant in one of my tactical units.

Most of these marines appear to be previously painted and then basecoated black, except for two of them that are blue and green. 

So basically what I am left with is a Devastator team of 4 Marines, missing a sergeant. It seems that these comes in boxes of 5 with some spare equipment, so I will take one Marine from another box (or maybe I have enough body parts in the bitz box to assemble one from there) and use spare parts from the Devastator squad boxed set that I already have to make them a sergeant.

Then I have 15 Tactical Marines, including 2 typical sergeant types, that can be completed with 5 more regular Marines to make two 10 man squads. I know Games Workshop sells both a squad and a team version of these, so if I should need it I can always buy 5 troops to make them in to 20 in total. But I am sure I have so many Marines already, that I either have such a box on the shelves, or have built Marines from spare parts before to make up the remaining 5.