The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Wheelguard-gob in place

After a couple failed attempts, I ended up with a wheel guard I'm reasonably happy with that helps make a 'face' with the styrene around the gun barrels. The whole front end was basically modified from my original concept, but I think it's alright. Until a few days ago, the bike was looking far too 'clean' and smooth to be an ork bike. All the stuff up front helps break that up, though I will have to do some retooling arond the back area to make sure it's proper orky.

 

I still need to flesh out the handlebar area so that the gun looks better - by building up behind it with all sorts of worky dials and stuff for the driver to see, I should be able to make it look decent. I hope.

Toothy gunshield

This probably looks strange, but bear with me for a little while and I think I can integrate it a bit better.

 

I saw a Black Orc drum from fantasy that looked like this and I figured it looked good, so maybe I'd try and cover the worky bitz up with something similar and not worry about the gun's mechanism at all. I will admit it looks a bit strange, but combined with a front wheel guard and enough gubbins (dials, gauges, etc) up by the handlebar area, it'll look okay. The tops of the forks are going to be extended for some long-ish handlebars. Maybe not apehangers, but somewhere in between.

Dakka? Dakka!

So now that I've finished off my Big Boss project, I wanted to come back and work on this bike a bit more. First thing I decided to do was ditch the front wheel, as it looked too weedy compared to the back, and all of the new plastic ork bikers seem to have a larger front wheel than rear. I assume this is for crashing into enemies with. I grabbed a trukk tire, and with a bit of fiddling, remade the front end. The wider tire gave me more room between the forks to work with, and I discovered I could fit a pair of dakkaguns betwen the front forks, over the wheel. I didn't like how they looked at their original length, so I copied the design my big boss had on his fist-gunz and shortened them down. I figure four stubby barrels like that, with a bit of work, can easily represent Wazdakka's fancy 4-shot gun.

 

Obviously, any mold lines will be taken care of. The guns need a fair bit of work on them to be properly integrated into the bike. I think I'm going to cut off the vents where the spent shells are ejected from the side, and move them to the underneath, so that it would spit the shells down behind the front tire. It also needs an ammo feed, though I am not sure how or where I'm going to put that yet. I may want to put two ammo drums further up the forks with a belt of bullets feeding into either side.

They look a bit clunky so far because they've not been properly integrated - that's the next step. Hopefully, after the addition of extra bitz up on the forks and handlebars, it'll look reasonably placed.

Exhaustive exhaust pipes

Added a back rest behind the seat and I did a whole nother batch of exhaust pipes on the other side. The exhaust pipes are absolutely absurd in number, and they've done a decent job in bulking the bike out a bit more. I don't there'll be any doubt as to whether or not this is the boss's bike by the time I'm done.

 

Probably going to do the front wheel guard next, and I need to put a sleeping roll behind the backrest..

And then, of course, there's the guns...

Still, I think the 'waz' part is done.

More motor work

Spent a little time working on the exhausts. There's going to need to be at least two more on this side of the bike, and then five on the other side. Only fitting for a boss's bike.

 

Bring out… the comfy chair!

Working away at the bike a little more. Added the basic seat to the bike, a little bit to the engine area upfront, and a pair of foot rests for the eventual warboss rider.

 

The engine area might look a little sparse right now, but the red dots on the image indicate where I plan on putting exhaust pipes leading from the bike, which will help fill up that area. I need to do some minor detailing to the area behind the foot pegs, and then I may as well go ahead and start making the pipes themselves, since I'll have to also attach them to the rear of the bike in the areas they run along.

Little steps, anyhow.

Worky bits that make things go

Okay! It's looking a tiny bit more bikish - I've emulated the design of the belt on the plastic ork warbikes to add a mechanism that looks like it conveys power to the rear wheel. It needs a fair bit more detailing, but that's not happening tonight, I think.

 

I have to fill in the empty area above the engine bitz, obviously, but that'll come in good time.

Vroom and doom!

I've tried to work on the bike a bit more, digging through my Trukk kit parts to try and find suitable bits to flesh out the underside of the boss's bike.

Still a work in progress. The part between the bottom of the engine and the gas tank (with the round vertical cylinder at the front) is not glued in place yet, but I think it fits the spot fairly well. I'm just trying to sort out where the foot pegs should go - they'll probably be built further out from the bike around that general area. It's important to bear in mind that the seat will get some greenstuff 'padding' eventually, which will fill the space up and help lift the boss up from the ground, so the foot pegs would probably have to be right below the gas tank.

Anyway, still a work in progress. Looking at it, I don't think I've built the front forks and wheel in such a fashion that I could add a blocky wheel guard like in my original sketch, so I may redesign the wheel guard to a degree. I think it needs one so the wheel does not look so visibly tiny.

Extra angles

I approximated a way of joining the front forks to the tank area, so I went ahead and attached the two pieces. I think I'm going to leave it at this point for tonight and pick back up on it for tomorrow. I need to widen the underneath of the bike's 'frame' and definitely fill in some of the dead space below with more worky engine-type bitz, but I'll come back and look at it fresh tomorrow after I'm done with an apocalypse game.

 

Considering ripping that 'intake' thing off from the bottom and working on that area fresh again. I don't like the intake I made much, and I think it's going to end up obstructing a lot of the stuff I want to add. We'll see.

Front forks

I've been working on front forks to get a general gist of size:

And a standard warbike for scale:

You can see it's slightly larger, and by the time we factor in the extra length from a wheel guard and exhausts it should be notably bigger than your standard warbike.

The big pain is figuring out how to properly attach the forks to the frame around the tank area. The stock warbikes don't give any consideration to actually turning the forks - it's just one straight piece of plastic. I'll probably end up doing the same, to be completely honest.