Band of the hand

I love my Tau army but I have had this issue since I first saw them, the retractable hands on the Crisis suits and GW not selling a decent looking one that didn't require me to do a ton of modifications to make it work. I have tried Space Marine powerfist and Necron hands but neither worked. Next I tried The Farsight model. But it only comes with one, metal, left hand and it is a $35 model. This will never work.

Thank you Ban Dai for making Gundam models in all different scales. I picked up a bunch of different models and after some trial and error I found a scale that worked. Even better both right and left and open and closed. The scale that worked is from their Fighting Action Kit series. This group is very simple with only about a 1/3rd the parts count of then normall 1/144 kits. Even then none of the normal detail is lost. The kits are also cheap. The ones I purchased were $6.50 each. With the number of usable parts in each kit being pretty high I think it is a very good deal. As my first pass over the kits I able to use the hands, weapons, backpacks, shoulder guards, heads and leg jets.

The only downside is most of the parts are single sided so I will have to do a little sculpting but no worries.

So next time you see these parts that will be on my Appleseed Landmates. Eventually I will call them done and get to cranking out the final design.

Pallets and Barrels

I am working on a group of terrain projects for a warehouse/storage yard. This is the first little piece for it. The pallet was originally going to be wooden but then I thought about it and realized that I need to make allot of these. Doing a traditional wooden pallet involved cutting a bunch of small pieces of wood plus assembly. I simplified the design and when with a metal pallet. This way I could do a simple one-piece mold and cast as many as I need.

The barrels are from a military kit that includes gas cans and pails. They are a little tall but with the compressed/stretched scale used in 40K this isn't that big of a deal. I may take a few and modify them to get a different look out of them.  

Purity Seal for the Emperor

For the Emperor

Every once and awhile I branch out into projects because they interest me and I have always wondered about the purity seals on Space Marine armor. Since I kicked off a side project to build a full sized bolter and plasma pistol I figured it was time to model up some seals to go with. These are resin instead of wax and the first batch of them will be going out to a new friend from the 40K Radio Freebootaz forum.

The build of these pushed me into trying a few new things. First I did a little sculpting to get the skull and scroll banner but was stuck when it came to coming up with a convincing wax pool. First I tried using sulfur free clay. It too about 20 tries to get a good looking sample and even then it still looked wrong to me. Then I got an idea, why simulate wax when you can use real wax. A Zippo and a candle later and it was done in 5 minutes. I used a plastic bottle cap to create the impression for the skull and scroll.

It took about a month to actually make the mold. I really wish life would slow down a little so I can get out and get supplies more often. Anyway here are the picts.