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!

Since becoming more familiar with the Ramilies kit I’ve reached the conclusion that I won’t ever be buying from Forge World again. Seriously I would be embarrassed to sell a model that arrived this generally terrible. I love the look of the Ramilies model and was so excited for it to arrive, but what I have been supplied with is absolute crap. Although I already phoned to arrange replacements for the parts most badly damaged in transit, I find the rest of the model less than acceptable. The problem is that I’m convinced it’s a mould issue, so don’t feel like a replacement could be any better.

Like I said, it seems like the moulds are just plain incorrect, perhaps to do with the pour sprues. See the picture:

This is the back of one of the four quadrants connected to a pier (pier on the left). This will butt up to an identically assembled pier-quadrant pair, and the same another two times to make up the bulk of the model.

See on the left side of the pier the step along the bottom of the side? See how the quadrant has a similar mating groove where it meets the left side of the pier? Well the side of the quadrant facing the camera doesn’t really have such a groove. It has a slight indentation, but nothing even close to what is required. I can get the pieces to align, but that means twisting things so that all four assemblies then won’t fit together. All four quadrants have the exact same problem.

I’m getting angry talking about it so I’ll stop now. Bottom line: don’t buy anything from Forge World. Seriously with the amount of cleaning up and repair required it would be quicker for me to scratchbuild and cast my own! I guess I’ll wait until the replacement centre towers come in before I have another go at assembly.

I’m sure many people will be surprised to hear that I have only just now made my first ever Forge World purchase! I picked up a Grey Knights Strike Cruiser (for a project I’m doing with Vaaish) plus a Ramilies Star Fort (I’ve always loved the model). Yesterday I was very excited to have a package arrive with my new purchases:

One of the things I noticed is that there are no decent pictures of the Ramilies online (that I ever found anyway), so that is one thing I want to rectify, by providing not only plenty of pictures of the assembled model, but also pictures of parts “on sprue”. Today I’ll be doing the latter.

All up the model consists of 14 parts. I’ve taken photos of all of the parts still attached to the sprues and casting gates to give the best idea of how it arrives. It’s also good for learning spruing techniques for ones own casting. In addition, I have drawn green lines to show the border between the part and the sprue.

PARTS PICTURES

I’ll start with the pier. There are four of these pieces which make up the four corners of the Ramilies.

Next up we have the launch bays/quadrant module. Again there is one for each side; four in total:

And now the upper and lower spires. That’s not what the piece of paper that comes with the kit calls them, but I don’t have it handy right now and can’t remember the proper name! I forgot to do the sprue borderline on this shot, but I think it’s pretty obvious that the giant block on the rear are sprues. Note the peg poking out of the lower spire – this is the stand which inserts into a flying base.

Finally we have the galleries. These sit above the innermost sections of the piers and butt up against the top spire, thus there are four of them:

PROBLEMS
C’mon, this is a FW kit. It would seem that it takes a large amount of luck to acquire a kit in perfect condition even from the factory. Although at this stage all of the parts seem nice and square (all parts are pretty thick and solid so it would be surprising if they weren’t), there is a bit of a problem: many of the little spindly bits have broken off.

In my opinion one of the drawcards of the Imperial BFG models is their highly detailed nature and having such a unique design. “Cathedrals in Space”. Part of this design aesthetic is lots of little spindly bits atop arches and buttresses and along battlements. The Ramilies is no exception and in addition has many lance turrets dotted around it which are actually cast onto the launch bay quadrants (rather than separate pose-able pieces). Despite the box that it came in being filled with a lot of bubble wrap, the parts themselves (some relatively heavy) were all just thrown into a bag and able to knock against each other. And knock they did – by the time the package arrived there were quite a few tiny parts that had broken off and gone missing.

Here’s some shots (missing parts circled in green):

Now I did find a few of the missing bits floating around in the bag, and generally would be happy enough to just glue them back on (so some spots of the model would still be missing bits. Only those really closely inspecting would notice). However for the money I paid for this kit having detail parts missing on the main spire is unacceptable, so I will be calling Forge World today to arrange replacements. I would like them to replace 3 of the 4 galleries too, but we’ll see what they say.

So despite the broken parts I can start assembly of the main body and will begin removing the sprues soon. Very much looking forward to it going together! Stay tuned for more progress.

Well I’ve been busy this past month working on a commission job: a pair of Inquisitorial Black Ships. The Inquisitorial Black Ship is a fast, heavily armed cruiser used by Inquisitorial forces as a base of operations and transport for applying Imperial justice throughout the galaxy.

The client approached me wanting two identical models made so I made the decision to base it off the standard plastic Imperial Cruiser kit and add resin conversion parts. The resin parts were originally scratchbuilt in styrene and then cast to make enough parts for the two ships.

I’ll no doubt end up doing more Battlefleet Gothic stuff again in the near future – the same client already has ideas for more stuff he’d like commissioned!

Just a quick update to share pictures of the Zeus Light Cruiser as painted by good Resin Addict friend Vaaish. His beautiful paint work has for me personally provided a fantastic end to the project which overall has turned out quite well. Now I need to pull my finger out and paint some of my own (perhaps after I finish my little side project)!

By the way, Vaaish has a great little tutorial on how he paints his BFG ships over on the Two Lands Creative blog.

Well after four months of work I have finally completed my latest project: the Zeus Light Cruiser for use in Battlefleet Gothic. This project was inspired by the lack of a model to represent the Voss light cruiser variants (Endeavour, Endurance and Defiant) and following some encouragement from some BFG fans I decided to take it on. The resulting design is a multi-part resin kit that can be used to represent any Imperial light cruiser pattern.

A massive thanks goes out to Vaaish who, in addition to giving a lot of persuasion for me to start the project in the first place, provided some amazing concept art and constant top quality feedback. He’ll be painting up a couple of casts and I’ll be sure to share pictures of them here when he’s done!

So here are some pictures of the process, including concept art, work in progress shots and final pictures of the resulting resin casts configured as two options. Resin Addict forum members can see the entire project log here.

Whilst I’m very happy with how the project turned out, I’m also glad to see the end of it! I’m now looking forward to getting back to some 28mm modelling and my Tau mecha project.

If you have any questions drop me a line on mangozac at resin addict dot com

Well despite his hectic schedule of late, Mark (Warhound) has finally managed to get me the final pictures of his painted SAW kit. I’ve cleaned them all up and now present them for your enjoyment. He has done a great job with the weathering and the white/orange colour scheme has really grown on me!

Check out the amazing job Vaaish has done painting up a pair of Zeus Prows for his Armageddon class Battlecruisers. Fantastic work!

Armageddon class Battlecruiser painted by Vaaish

You can see more pictures in the Resin Addict Forum

One of my other modelling interests is Battlefleet Gothic – I just love the space ship designs (much as I love most designs 40k)! So having a decent sized Imperial fleet of my own, I of course have an Apocalypse Battleship.

The Apocalypse is an ancient design hailing from the Voss Forge World, as evidenced by its distinctively shaped prow design. What I wanted to represent in my fleet is a number of cruisers constructed at the “Zeus” shipyards, so I set about designing my own custom prow that shared many of the design elements that makes the Voss prow so awesome.

So here are a couple of pics of the Zeus prow development process. I began the project quite a while ago (before I had developed my scratchbuilding skills as far as they are today) and it started off with a styrene frame, over which the armour plating and details were sculpted in greenstuff:

The project got put on hold for a while until recently when I made a mould of the prow and cast a few copies in resin. Seeing them in grey resin I could see a lot about the design that I wasn’t too keen on, so I decided to update it and came up with this:

At this stage I decided to bite the bullet and do three versions on the one sprue (for maximum casting efficiency): two with torpedo tubes and one with a Nova cannon. It would be easier to fill in torpedo tubes not used rather than the other way around 😉

Finally I had some results I was happy with! So I produced a new mould and began casting my new prows:

The next step is to get painting! Much against the advice of Vaaish I’m thinking of doing a striped pattern…