Building the Tau Riptide battlesuit pt. 2

Continuing with building the Riptide battlesuit. Last time I left if hanging with tack puty just to be able to use it in my game, where it performed well, not amazingly well but good enough for the first time.

Anyway, what's left is to magnetize and finalize the pose of the model. Personally I don't like the GW pose, its too kneeling, although it would have been way easier to use that.

Image taken from Games Workshop's website.

I wanted a more dynamic pose, more in the style of Gundam or Macross mechas, although the big gun doesn't help with that. So I cut all the "locator pins" on the legs and re-posed them, as well as the arms.

In the picture below the Riptide is protecting itself with the shield and getting ready to counter with the heavy burst cannon.

Menacing pose, I think.

I drilled 3mm holes on top of the thrusters to put matching magnets and use them as hard points for the weapons and support systems. As you see, the plasma guns go on the shield arm, I think that balances the model a little. All weapons have 3x1mm round magnets glued on them, so I have a magnet-to-magnet hold.

Another thing I did was to add extra mech details, not that the model lacks detail but I wanted to improve the sense of scale. Some time ago I bought some detail sprues from a japanese online store and these go really well with Tau. In case you want to know the address : http://www.hlj.com.

Compared with the lowly firewarrior and the feared Crisis battlesuit.

Now its ready to be painted in separate parts. The main guns are also magnetized, which was tricky due to the weight, I used a 4x1.5 magnet on the arm and one on the gun. The arms and shield will be glued after painting the model.

Stay tunned for when this guy gets painted!

Building the Tau Riptide battlesuit pt. 1

I got my new Tau kits on saturday and had arranged a game for sunday so I wanted to build at least something from the new kits. I went for the Riptide of course.

The thing is gigantic, it was possible to imagine the size of the thing only by looking at the weapons on the sprue.

Size comparison to a Fire Warrior.

The legs have some sort of stabilyzing fin which should be posable. It doesn't hold the possition so I bulked it up with super glue.

Leg fin.

It will hold its position after making the joint thicker.

The torso has some nice detail and has a very "mecha" feel to it, it's awesome!

My game was on sunday so I had to wait to properly build the whole thing ( I hadn't decided on the final pose). I put some major parts together with the help of tack putty (blue-tack but white) for the game.

The Riptide almost killed himself by using the Nova generator but it was a factor in the game. I took the Ion Accelerator weapon and tried to Nova charge it pretty much every turn. In retrospective I think that it probably wasn't worth doing it every time since the normal "overcharge" of the Ion accelerator is already really good with Str 8 AP2 large blast!! ... and "gets hot", which took another wound.

Barely holding itself together but ready for some gameplay.

I'll put some extra time after the game in order to finish the model, magnetize the weapons and add some extra details.

Tau inbound!!!

I just got my order on the new Tau codex and model kits. I haven't opened them yet but at least I can say that the Riptide suit's box is huge.

You may notice that I didn't get the new flyer. The model didn't impress me at all, it looks more like a piranha on a flying base, plus, the rules for the model aren't that good either.

I'll build as much as possible this afternoon!

The walk of the Reaver Titan pt 1

So I got myself a Forgeworld Reaver Titan for my 30th birthday, I thought it was a good way to handle the 30s crisis. I thought this thing would be easy to build, after all is just a bigger miniature, right?

The thing has been stored in my closet over a year and I thought that I will finally start working on it. This has me very excited and wanted to share my experience, maybe this will help others about to start such a project.

Fist thing is cleaning up the mould flash of all pieces, as well as making an inventory of all miscast pieces. I contacted Forgeworld regarding all bad parts and they were really helpful and sent me replacements, it took about a month to get the pieces.

Huron Blackheart at "The Fang 2011"

This is my version of Huron Blackheart, an awesome model with it's menacing striding pose. I painted this for a painting competition at the Stockholm GW store, this is obviously for the 40k single category.

I chose to paint Huron because I wanted to do a Finecast model for the first time. Finecast was new by the time and I had not yet experienced the horrors of it. With this model I was lucky as it barely had some bubbles and in places that didn't present any trouble.

I think I placed fourth, the winner being a highly detailed Castellan Crowe on a huge base :)

Hello World;

I finally decided to start blogging. After spending countless hours reading someone else's blogs I feel like it is time to start sharing as well. In the blogs I follow I have found many inspiring works, tips, and found out that other people have experiences similar to mine.

My background? I was introduced to the hobby with Warhammer 40k in 2001, when the Tau codex was released. I was then living in Mexico, and had to rely on a single game store to get my minis and paints. I didn't know what to start with so I picked a cool model, a chaos terminator, and started to paint it. The only technique I used was drybrush and looking back it turned out horrible, but I was satisfied and thought these models were the coolest thing ever.

My first real army was Tau, I couldn't resist those battlesuits. I collected them since 2001, but didn't play a game of 40k until 2009 when I was already living in Sweden. I have to say that I am really happy to live in Stockholm when it comes to 40k.

Well, that's it for now. What about showing some of my models then...

2010 - Part of my Tau army, at this point I had already played a game of 40k.

  

For the greater good!

These are from a WIP Mephiston. I don't play Blood Angels but I liked the model.

2010 - Photography is something I have to improve :)

 

I painted the freehand on his cloak with metallic paint to give the effect of gliter.