Hi guys, been busy with Real Life stuff, but wanted to post a quick update on a project I’ve been slowly working on in between other projects. It’s my take on an Imperial Exorcist Grand Cruiser. I don’t like the official Imperial GC model so I felt compelled to make my own from a Chaos cruiser I had, mashed up with some Imperial launch bays and a custom prow.

I’ve just got the one pic for now, and don’t hold your breath for fast progress!

Oh, and ignore the fin underneath the prow. It’s just a placeholder for a more aptly shaped fin…

Well it’s all done – the Spear Prows are complete and I started fitting the casts to some cruisers:

They turned out quite nicely and I feel give a bit more of a regal feel to the Admech cruiser design. As you can see the Admech cruiser has been primed grey so the next step is to do some painting – I’ll likely go for a grey and red scheme along similar lines as the official GW pics…

With this project out of the way it’s time to move on to the next one; and of course it’s another BFG related project!

Yeah I know, GW bashing is the cool thing to do. But I love their models and as a modeller only (rather than a gamer or model hoarder with a 5 second attention span) their periodic price rises don’t really have any effect on me. Until today.

You see I go through a lot of small flying bases. I should clarify that by a lot I mean I went through a bag of 32 over a couple of years. I must have bought that bag in 2009 and recently I discovered that I had run out, so I went onto the GW online store to buy some more. Surprise surprise they have changed things. You now buy them in a pack of 5 for AU$7.00. That’s $1.40 a pop. Not exactly cheap and more than I would expect to pay for two uncomplicated clear styrene shapes, but in the scheme of things it’s not going to break the bank.

But hang on, I paid AU$13.00 for a bag of 32 just two years ago. That’s a much more sensible $0.4062 each.

Now it doesn’t take an engineering degree to do the maths and calculate that there has been a 344% increase in the price of a single flying base. That is just insane. It annoys me even more that GW still list the pack of 32 on their website as out of stock.

Based on that I refuse to pay their stupid $7.00 for a pack of 5 and instead will design and cast my own flying bases. I’m certain it won’t be any more economical (but hell it won’t be any less economical either!) but it lets me make a stand (no pun intended), however insignificant it may be. Stay tuned for progress as I design it!

The now out of production BFG Imperial freighters are in my opinion some of the most characterful ships available for Battlefleet Gothic. Don’t ask me why; I just feel that they are! I recently picked some up and since there’s only really two base models, I decided to make a third one: a fuel transport. Yes, I am aware that Heavy Fuel Transports are available from Forge World, however they are a bit bigger and I just didn’t like the look of them. Or maybe I’m just a hobby masochist – I wanted to do a conversion!

So I moulded one of the stock transports, made a resin copy and then proceeded to chop out the centre section. After a little bit of cleanup it was ready to have a fuel tank installed. The main tank was made from a piece of styrene tube which had its ends capped with 1mm styrene sheet. I used my lathe to turn it into a perfect cylinder before chamfering the ends. The ribs were added using some thin styrene strip and the details along the bottom from small diameter styrene rod.

I had planned to either cut or pressmould the aquilas from something like a Space Marine bolter but since I’ve long since cleaned out any such marine stuff I had I couldn’t actually find any! I could have scabbed some of a friend but I wanted to get the project finished this weekend, so I sculpted them myself. It would have been nicer to sculpt one and then pressmould a duplicate from it, but alas that would also have taken more time so the two aquilas (one on each side) are slightly different in size.

All in all it turned out very nicely indeed. I’ll cast up a couple more and then all I need is to actually get some games of BFG that use transports in!

Some more quick snaps for tonight, as things are still pretty crazy busy for me at the moment. I finally got the Spear Prows completed and cast up, these pictures are of the first casts. When I get a chance I’ll set up the Admech cruiser properly and actually glue a prow in place, and then give it a prime so that the final result is a little easier to visualise. I’ll mount one to a standard Imperial cruiser too to show how it looks.

Here’s the pics – sorry for the crappy quality. Stay tuned for more!