Centurion Mecha

[Deadmeat30]

these coming up for sale? my oh my, i do like!!

[mangozac]

It sure will - not for a few months when I get it finished though

[Deadmeat30]

I'ld best start saving, lol. Do you create smaller scale mechs?

[mangozac]

No I haven't yet done anything on a smaller scale. 28mm and 1/35th are certainly the most fun scales for mecho IMO.

[virusoverload]

How much do you think youll be selling.these for?

[Anvils Hammer]

damn that looks sexy as hell Mango!

Where will you be selling them? Need a UK distributor?

AH

[mangozac]

@Virus: It's a bit early to tell, but likely between $100 to $150.

@AH: I can't believe you only noticed this! I won't be doing production casting myself so when I get closer to completion I'll start shopping around for caster/distributors

[virusoverload]

cool i might have to save up and spend some more money on this oh so sweet but addictive hobby.

[Anvils Hammer]

[mangozac]

Finished height will probably be in the order of 6-7 inches. What demands a high price though is the number of parts and corresponding level of pose-ability. Broken into pieces there will be no problem fitting any of the parts into any standard 10L pressure pot

[Anvils Hammer]

yeah but im lazy So im just going to assemble the master and a release a patented "one pose only" mech, will save you a fortune and araldite is pretty easy to remove from masters with an angle grinder...


On a serious note, lots of small peices is much easier to cast! Rows of parts on a sprue is easy.. fitting a large part in a mold is a bitch!

My mech will be scaled about 3 inches high, but the torso will be the largest part and the only one peice, the rest, like yours, will be fully posable.

AH

[mangozac]

Hey you buy single piece figures, why not single piece mecha?

The pose-ability isn't the only thing that ups the part count; things like pistons and fancy details that need to be a separate part for moulding really blow it out a bit. But yeah at least the small bits are dead simple to cast!

[mangozac]

Well I thought it's about time I posted an update

If I'm honest I kind of wore myself out a bit over the first few weeks stuck back into this project, so progress has slowed to a more subdued pace. This is probably mainly due to me having a heap of other stuff going on, such as spending the last weekend catching up with mates on the Gold Coast.

Anyway I've been working on what is best described as the waist/spine piece. The arrangement of the pelvis and groin armour means that the waist connection needs to be offset to the rear of the mecha. This allows the waist to rotate without fouling on the groin armour. I decided to incorporate a ball joint that will form the "spine" and allow the torso to bend and tilt. Similar to the hip ball joints the spine will have a pair of pistons on the front. Of course much of this will be covered with armour plates on the actual model!

This is the waist piece:

The area below the ball will have a heap of recessed hex bolt heads. There will also be some triangular braces added. I actually screwed it up and had the piece at too steep an angle so have just tonight hacked it off and reset to a shallower angle. I'll fill all of the gaps with some Milliput after I post this

And just to show what's going on here's a pic of it mounted to the pelvis:


Plenty more cool ideas for the torso design are milling around in my head so I'm feeling confident about my "design as I build" approach!

[mangozac]

I had a comment over on WAU that the offset spine piece looked too weak to support the weight of the torso. I had considered that the design might not be perfect but decided that I would need to get the part closer to finished before I could decide. So I started on one of the pair of pistons (the other will be a cast duplicate) that will mount in front of the "spine" ball joint. You can see that the bulk this adds, along with the bracing underneath the ball gives IMO the impression of adequate strength:



Disclaimer: with the ball socket located where it is in the pic the piston will be about 60% extended, not completely compressed like it is there.

Having the pose-able spine will really help in creating dynamic poses in the final model.

[mangozac]

OK I've got a quick update for tonight. The problem with regards to updating at the moment is that I've been doing little bits of work on lots of different pieces, working out how the torso is going to go together. My sculptor is going to have the naked figure done in a weeks time, at which point it will be moulded and duplicated. He will continue sculpting over the top of a resin cast and I will use a cast for proportioning the cockpit. Since the cockpit design will largely affect the torso layout I've got to wait until that is done before the torso can really come together.

Anyway I've been doing some more work on the waist, as you can see in the first pic. I'm really happy with how it's coming along and am actually considering not covering it up with the amount of armour panels I had originally planned!



This next pic is a heavily WIP shot of some of the other torso parts. In the background is the very basic form of the reactor, which will hang diagonally downwards from the rear of the waist. I'm not happy with that slotted disc in the middle so will be doing a lot more refinement there. The area between the two styrene panels will be filled with putty to bulk it up. Lots of hoses and technical looking bits will also be added.



In the foreground are the beginnings of the two cylinders that will make the shoulder arm/weapons mounts. Obviously still pretty bland at this stage - again lots of detailing to do

That's it for now. I guess I'll continue work on the reactor, and make a start on the vents which will mount on the front of the torso (as per the sketch Xeones did)...