The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

This. Is. My. BOOMWAGON!

So!

About... I'll guess, maybe, two weeks ago, I was poking around The Waaagh's forums, and I saw that a friend of mine named Stuart was selling a looted wagon. The wagon had originally been made by another Waaagh forumer, named MTD, and Stuart had picked it up off him a while back, but was looking to downsize his own ork force.

I figured having a looted wagon wouldn't hurt, and I did like the general shape of the tank, so Stuart and I haggled for a bit, and not long after, a tank shows up on my doorstep.

This is what it looked like around the time I bought it; these pictures were taken by Stuart.

No offense to whoever painted the thing, but I really do not like the patchwork squares ork camo scheme. Fortunately, I had the foresight to make my giant jar of stripping solution, well, giant, in case I ever needed to toss something like a whole tank in there. So, into the Warp it went, where it had a nice, relaxing soak in Simple Green overnight.

I pulled the tank out, and started scrubbing the paint off, only to find that I couldn't quite defeat the patchwork patterns. The areas of color on the tank came off easily enough, but the black primer seems to have been masked from these areas, and bonded really well to the plastic, so I can't get it off very easily. I resolved instead to just leave it looking a little patchwork in the hopes that one good coat of primer overtop the whole thing'll fix it all right up.

With that addressed, I had to make a couple modifications to the tank to suit my liking. Pictures first!

 

I popped off the top hatch, and added my own version with a grot tank commander sticking out, since the model needed some character. The head on the grot is one of the ones from Micro Art Studio. I can tell any of you thinking about buying these heads that they are a nice product, but they do not fit on the current grot plastics - the heads are too big for that. I had some fantasy goblin plastics, though, and since those guys are a wee bit bigger, you can get away with sticking one of these big melons on them without too much in the way of consequences. I gave him a sword just for the whole 'Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!' memetic effect.

I tinkered just a little bit with the back end by drilling some holes out of one of the exhausts and turning it into a cowling for a bigger exhaust pipe. I also wrapped the end of the boomgun barrel in chain, and put a cow(?) skull overtop, since I thought it was a nice touch. Glyph plates were added sparingly in places where I thought they'd help provide a bit of interest.

Truthfully, there's not a ton to do to this thing - it's a reasonably well-made, orky looking tank, and Boomwagons don't need much in the way of extra wargear or ornamentation. I was considering putting Rokkit Launchers on the thing, since they are able to take two additional ones, but someone pointed out to me that I'd basically never get to fire them since you can't fire other guns along with ordnance weapons, and in the event I can't fire the ordnance weapon (because of, say, the Don't Touch Dat! rule) I probably still won't be able to get much use out of the guns.

The only thing I'm really considering adding to this thing, still, is a banner somewhere around the back end. Not a vertical one, but something like a wavy flag behind where the commanding grot is.

I think I may give salt weathering a go on this thing - I bought it mainly because I thought a good paint job'd turn the model right around, and it seems to present a good number of surfaces for me to experiment with.