"Da Boss Killa" Looted Wagon

Okay, so this is the second to last of the catch-up posts. Work on The Project has started, but I'll wait with posting, so that I've a decent amount of material to show. For now, the looted wagon. My first finished vehicle and also quite the conversion, took over a year to finish due to being a testbed for all things conversion related, bunch of direction changes, breaks, lack of motivation and so on.

It's pretty much just your regular looted wagon: get an imperial vehicle, take it apart, reassemble with lots of plasticard and stuff, add a turret or two, rough it up, etc. However, while I did have a rough idea at the beginning, I did not know how much it was going to evolve as the work went on. The name "Boss Killa" comes from a few of my first 40k games where I've fielded it in a very unfinished state. In most of those 500 pts battles it ended up being the last one standing. In two it came under attack by the enemy HQs, the first time by a Chaos Lord on a steed of Slaanesh, which got blown to bits by a lucky rokkit hit after the boomgun shell went wide. The second time it became the target of Saint Celestine who had already used her revive to tank up a boomgun shell which would otherwise have decimated a squad of sisters. Her flamers did nothing to the mighty AV11 and she was subsequently greeted with a boomgun to the face.

It started as a somewhat beaten up Rhino I got for cheap enough and pretty much kept growing as I kept on going with it. It looked somewhat like that, except less disassembled.

I took it apart as much as I could, one of the side panels was glued a tad too well. First of all it was made longer, then I started on a turret. With a boomgun, since that was before 6ed codex came out.

Then I decided to use wider, orky tracks. As you can see, the raised part under the turret didn't exist yet. The front plate got its rough shape and a lot of general tinkering was going on.

Then I got crazy and decided to model the interior. And so I did.

This in turn did mean I had to paint the interior before continuing work or I wouldn't be able to do so afterwards. Which meant I had to wait until I got all my painting stuff, as this was about the time I painted my first five orkz, making the interior the second thing I've painted, hence it being somewhat lackluster.

With the interior painted the work went on. At some point I was inspired by the FW Repressor and decided I want a similar plow for my tank. Also, the track links were made quite some time prior to that and I would cast a bunch every now and then. One of the treads was magnetized for immobilized results, cause at this point I might've as well gone all the way.

There'a a bit of a fast forward skip with the pictures here, to the point where the tank was pretty much done bar all the details and rivets. I might've been lazy with taking photos, or just felt I wanted to show more progress at once. The turret ring section was raised, whole new turret was built with all the guns and wotsits, exhausts were modified, some vents were added and all that.

And here it is with all the modelling stuff finished, ready for priming. If I recall correctly, 525 rivets were slapped on the whole thing, along with some greenstuff welds, sometimes used as a handy gap filler, mostly on the frontal plate.

It was then primed and ended up waiting until the nob bikerz were finished to be painted together. To begin with, the whole tank was painted metal in preparation for the hairspray chipping technique.

After applying hairpray (not generously enough in some places as it was about to turn out) the tank got a coat of the actual colours as well as some glyphs, symbols and checkers.

Which were then all scrubbed away with a toothbrush and warm water. As mentioned, in a few places there was not enough hairspray and paint either wouldn't come off or would along with what was supposed to stay, sometimes including primer. Oh well, learning experiences and all that.

All the remaining colours and details were then picked out and finished in preparation for the next stage, weathering. One that I'm pretty sure I've overdone due to it being my first time with pigments and oil washes and whatnot and also being in a rush to finish it for a model festival, which meant I did all the weathering in a single night.

First the whole tank was varnished to prevent white spirits damaging the existing paint job. Then it received an oil wash over the whole thing, which was later cleaned up and left in the recesses. afterwards I went on applying paints mixed with pigments around the rivets and dragging them down with a brush loaded with white spirit to get a a streaking effect going on. Black pigment was applied on gun barrels and exhausts and I went on experimenting with application methods here and there, as I mentioned overdoing it in a few places. I do want to fix the tracks, exhausts and a few other things at some point.

Here it is though, the finished tank. A lot of stuff is removable or magnetized for ease of transport and in case I feel like adding to it in the future, meaning the whole thing breaks down into pieces as seen in this picture.

Whew, that was quite a long post and a ton of pictures for you to go through, hope you enjoyed though! Thanks for reading and see you next time!