The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Deathroller 101… sort of.

I love the Forgeworld Deathroller, but it's a pricy piece of kit and I kind've wanted to challenge myself with making one. I've never built one before, and the curved surfaces are hell to make, but I think what I've produced so far is reasonably good. I documented my process so that you guys might have some idea what went on in the hours I had free today.

I started with a medicine bottle of appropriate size and dimensions to create the massive deathroller I wanted. I also obtained 'cake shapers' from a craft store near me, JoAnns, when they were having their going out of business sale. I have no idea what these things are actually supposed to be used for, but to me they look like they would make mighty fine roller plating.

This saved me the massive headache of trying to heat and bend the styrene to armor-plate the deathroller, or using brute force like rubber bands to try and keep it stuck down - I've tried stuff like that in the past and it always tends to peel up at the edges.

I figured I'd make three evenly spaced armor strips on the roller, with a wider gap on the sides of the middle plate strip so that I could put spikes around the roller like the forgeworld design has. The first thing I had to do was set up my mitre box so that I could get straight and similarly-sized strips of curved plastic.

I put a pair of clamps onto the mitre box to make sure I would get strips of styrene of identical widths for the plating.

I cut a number of strips up and started fitting them onto the bottle. The outer strips were much easier to line up than the middle one - I could just stand the bottle up flush against my worksurface to make sure the plates were glued on evenly. I think I did decently well, though.

I marked off dots for where I wanted to put some rivets, and stuck the plastic rod I have around into holes I drilled out with a pin vice, then snipped the excess rod. I also whipped out a sheet of thick styrene and a heavy-duty knife and started cutting the little 'teeth' I needed for the roller - after about an hour of hacking and gluing, I had a basic deathroller!

I only put the spiked teeth around the front 1/3 or so of the deathroller, as the rest will be concealed by the tank itself - no sense troubling myself over detailing stuff nobody will see.

Here's what it looks like 'fitted' (positioned) onto the baneblade:

I understand this isn't exactly a proper tutorial on building the roller - after all, it requires some fairly specific pieces (cake shapers?) and is not too thorough, but I'm trying to properly document the creation of this thing, so there you go.

The roller's not actually done yet - I need to cut a styrene disc out to cap the open end of the medicine bottle off, add some more details to the large flat curved plates, and add some details to the sides where it will connect onto the tank. Still, not bad for today's free time.