Tag Archives: oldhammer

Steel Guard Razorback ‘Peace Is Tyranny’

16 Tuesday Sep 2025

Posted by in Space Marines

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With this wee fella another landmark is complete – I have worked my way through a pile of broken old vehicles, repairing, restoring, and returning them to life. I have no idea if Razorbacks are legal in 10th edition – the last time I played a game was 8th ffs (if you’re in South Wales and want to play a game of 40k, any edition, and don’t mind that I am a complete novice and that we have to take some infection control precautions, I would be up for a game, drop me a message). But in 8th Razorbacks were a thing, even if no-one ever played them. One opponent was so amazed by my antique models he called all his friends over to examine these weird things! He tabled me in 3 moves with his Dark Angels and was terribly embarrassed about it, but really it was an experience and style of playing mismatch. I had very little, and he was a tournament player. No shade to the guy, as long as he’s enjoying himself, there are no wrong ways to play as long as you’re not cheating or being a shitty opponent. I think I enjoyed the game more than he did though, it was no challenge for him to table me and he wouldn’t have learned anything along the way. I learned a lot and had fun and saw some cool models and got to show off my minis from a time when the grim far future seemed so very far away.

Oh yeah, so this Razorback has been converted a bit. It started life as a Looted Rhino, rebuilt and orkified. I prised off the most orky bits, but kept the basic frame as the previous owner had left it. I thought it looked quite good and different, whilst still being acceptably Imperiumy. The Razorback turret was all in one piece in my bitz box, fit into the hole in the roof, and looked alright. A bit of filling and plasticard, a couple of bits of copper wire, and pow! All that was left was to paint it. This one is painted as a first company support vehicle. I named it ‘Peace Is Tyranny’ because I have been thinking about Megatron a lot today! Enjoy!

Chaos Warlord Titan of the Legio Audax

08 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by in epic, Finished Work

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The title says it all really. This Warlord was kicking around in my pile of potential and I thought I had better paint it up. Picking a colourscheme randomly from lexicanum’s list of traitor titan legions (it had to be a traitor because, well, it is a traitor, just look at it). I think this is the third old Warlord I’ve painted. One of the most fun things about painting things in different scales IMO is that you can use the bases to tell stories in ways that are much harder in 28/32mm. So here we have a brave knight facing off against some nasty plaguebearers… My favourite bit about this was adding the whipping tentacle coming out of one of its weapon mounts. I tried to make it look fleshy!

Rhino Restoration: Death Guard transport

04 Thursday Sep 2025

Posted by in Chaos, Finished Work

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This is it! We’re getting close now. Yes, I’ve nearly cleared a backlog of restoration projects. With this rhino there is only one more oldhammer vehicle sitting in parts in the small wooden trunk that hides my shame. Once a variety of badly converted Ork vehicles, these have gradually become, well, other badly converted Ork vehicles, a chaos warshrine, and another Death Guard rhino! No more will I buy damaged rhinos and pile them up waiting for inspiration to strike! Actually I probably will, although the price of damaged rhinos these days is incredible. I maybe should have just sold all these and called it a day. But that isn’t the oldhammer way! So you may remember I did some Death Guard last year and included a rhino. That was fun, so I did another! I used lots of glazes and layers of browns and greens and filth and rust. This was kind of necessary – the previous paint job didn’t want to come off in places, and the plastic was affected by the paint remover in others. All very Nurgly. Happy with my work here.

Inquisitorial Sisters of Battle army

17 Saturday May 2025

Posted by in Inquisitors, Sisters of Battle

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I have often thought about a Sisters of Battle army. They’re delightfully gothique, and have some wonderful miniatures. I would have thought that the whole sexy goth nun thing was kind of a generational trope, maybe beardlings don’t really have that whole late night telly – Bizarre mag – plastic trousers cultural foolishness axis. Perhaps these days Sisters of Battle stand for nothing more or less than Ladies Who Purge The Heretic. So anyway, when Imperium magazine had some Sisters that seemed like a good time to jump in. I bought possibly too many, but they were bargainishous. So this is the first round of Sisters, to see how they feel. I think the future ones will be converted, possibly heavily to make them chaotic. Meanwhile these have been both fun and frustrating to paint. Fun, because I tried some new techniques, frustrating because there is SOOOO much kibble and detail on these guys that just don’t really fit with my painting style [skills].

My big thing with these guys was an attempt at pearlescent armour. I got it wrong, but next time will be better. I chose Wraithbone as my undercoat and Flayed One Flesh mixed with Irridescent Medium for the armour base coat. Next time I will use Pallid Wych Flesh and more Irridescent Medium and then glaze with pure medium over the top and see if that looks more like pearl. Or try another of the colour shift paints I bought a couple of years back – I used one on the Chaos Knight and liked it a lot. Either way this was an acceptable first attempt but you can’t tell really. No complaints though.

The Inquisitor was really an excuse to paint a mini I liked. This is Athera, The Blade Of The Matriarch, who is an Escher Gang character from Necromunda. A little digression about Necromunda. Necromunda is where so much of the cool shit is happening right now. Almost every mini released for Necromunda adds new colour and character to 40k. It’s all full of amazing levels of characterisation and drama – GW have taken the opportunity to zoom in on a single planet out of a million (or more) and fill it full of grotesqueries, monsters, and humans trying to survive in a psychotic fascist death machine. I could buy everything because its all amazing! And I don’t even have the boxed game! For no good reason. One day…

Finally, there are some female space soldiers from god knows where. Drew Williams, I think. I thought that these would fit in fill up some gaps as well as creating a new heavy weapons squad for a bit of long range oomph.

Fibrius Clustor, beloved of Nurgle, and his Begrimed Host

22 Tuesday Oct 2024

Posted by in Chaos, Finished Work

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I’ve been sitting on these for months waiting to have the time and energy to post. This horrible bunch are Fibrius Clustor and his warband. We’ve got Fibrius himself, which came from a Kickstarter, and is a lovely miniature. Fibrius could be a daemon prince, the magic using leader of a Plague Marine army, or a powerfully mutated human cultist well on the path to ascention. Then there is the big tube creature, from the same Kickstarter. These two are beautiful and were a joy to paint. Big Tube can be a Greater Daemon, a spawn, a daemon prince, or perhaps a Beast of Nurgle, depending on my feels. Up next we have some Oldhammer goodness, a Rhino and some original monopose plastic Plague Marines. The Rhino had already been converted towards Nurgle, I just tidied up the conversion a bit and repainted it. The Plague Marines are pretty limited but I made some conversions. In theory these are table legal in 10th edition, with a Plague Spitter and Plague Weapons modelled in addition to the missile launcher (Plague Launcher?) and flamer (Plague Flamer, i dunno). I think that they’ve come out alright considering how shonky the minis are. I hated them at the time because the Realm of Chaos branded Chaos Marines were so good and these are so basic. But they’re a step on the path that led us to where we are now, with amazing Plague Marines. The final bits of this warband I am not so happy with. Firstly, Newhammer Chaos Spawn, which were tricky to paint and unrewarding. In the end I did lots of layers of different shades to try and get a dusky bruised and rotting effect. This wasn’t especially successful. Finally a fansculpt Space Crusade style dreadnought. This was difficult to paint mostly because the sculpt is a bit of a stinker. It looked alright on screen but it doesn’t fit together well at all, and the detail is scrawled on with a point, and where it is sculpted on its pretty basic and has fingerprints in it and generally looks like a beginner’s piece. We all need to start somewhere, and I am happy to support enthusastic amateurs. It’s just hard to get a piece like that looking good, especially with my limited skills.

Until next time!

Battlemasters: Completion!

30 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by in Battlemasters, Empire Knights, Finished Work

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Yes, here we finish a project almost a decade in the making (and wait, have I been doing this blog for a decade… *checks* woah so I have!). Way back in 2015 I posted my first Battle Masters painted minis, a stand of Chaos Warriors. It was pretty basic. I wasn’t a very good painter (am still not going to win any awards but hey, you’ve got to have mediocrity to have excellence) and these are hard minis to paint well. Roll on nearly 10 years and I have finally finished painting the whole Battle Masters box. The last four stands are complete, and the armies are ready for battle! I will be taking photos of the armies laid out Ansell style sometime, but for now here are the final minis…. as I said before, these aren’t very easy minis to paint well. My biggest complaint regards the archers and crossbowmen – that the mold line runs down the middle of their faces, which are already poorly defined. Very hard to do anything there without losing all facial defination. The crossbowmen are sculpted so that where there should be a space between the bow and the body there is plastic, which is hard to paint in a way that hides it. The knights are a lot easier to paint in a way that flatters your painting skills just by adding some design to the barding. I was experimenting with different coloured undercoats on this lot, using paints from the various tiny pots of Airfix style paint. I then layered shades and contrast paints to see what I learned. I didn’t learn much but that’s part of learning! One final comment – I did pick up lots of BM Ogres as per that 2015 post, but never did anything with them! Might be about time to pull my finger out….

The dwarven pyramid

22 Tuesday Aug 2023

Posted by in Dwarfs, Finished Work

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In my parents’ generation it was apparently very common, at rock concerts and festivals and the like, for people to build human pyramids. A number of drunken individuals would attempt to clamber on top of each other and see how high it goes before everyone collapses in a pile of broken limbs. Fortunately my generation had far more access to drugs and so could entertain and injure themselves at festivals without resort to athletics. Perhaps this trifecta of dwarven heroes has taken influence from kids at a Warrant show?

Actually its probably more like Vitalstatistix from the Asterix comics…

Anyway, its the White Dwarf riding on a shield being carried by Gotrek and Bugman. In game terms, they were basically invincible!

Modelling Workshop: Rob Hooper’s Coaching Inn and Stables from White Dwarf 143

05 Wednesday Jul 2023

Posted by in Finished Work, terrain

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About eighteen months ago I read WD 143 and thought to myself how fun it would be to make the Coaching Inn, and so i did. And it took me the whole of the eighteen months! Admittedly I did a little bit here and a little bit there: some cutting one day, some glueing another. Little by little my Coaching Inn came together. I don’t know that Rob Hooper did any more of these Modelling Workshop articles, and I don’t know that the person who edited this article had any experience of writing or following modelling articles, because there were bits that were hard to follow. A lack of photos didn’t help. I mucked up a couple of bits by not having the right gear, and a couple of bits by being too slapdash in my measuring, and another bit by missing the instruction altogether. I learned a lot along the way, and have already started my next vintage WD modelling project. I really enjoyed this one and am proud of the outcome despite its imperfections. Next stop: Lustria!

Waaagh! Nikkaz – Grot Bandits

14 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by in Finished Work, gobbos, Orks, Uncategorized

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Three posts already this year, not bad going. I don’t feel like I’m getting more leisure time than I was, I still feel overwhelmed and unable to cope, but I’ve clearly been able to do a bit of painting and modelling so that’s something. There are so many things I want to do, so many projects and protests and archives and DIY and learning and books to read and hobby ideas but no time to do any of it.

So Waaagh! Nikkaz. Nikkaz obviously has ambition, ten grots is hardly a waagh! These goblin pirate miniatures are lovely, proper oldhammer-esque. I’ve thrown in a few properly oldhammer grots too and another Makari as I seem to have Makaris out the wazzoo! No Ghazghulls, mind, just Makaris. A nice fun little project, and now I’ve only got four more squads left until I’ve painted every squad in Freebooterz.

Genestealer Cult Land Train

28 Monday Nov 2022

Posted by in Finished Work, genestealer cults

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Oh my how busy I have been recently! Caring duties, union activities, an ongoing rat invasion that we just cannot seem to shift, buying and selling transformers on the internet to try and bring in some money, and of course firework season (in our house we call it canine nervous breakdown season). Eveything is fithy, many things are broken. The outside is moving inside via giant lurcher paws. What an Autumn! Instead of my usual three painting projects I am down to a single project, plus I am slowly working on the coaching inn from WD 143, and working through my giant tub of sprues to turn them into miniatures ready for painting or selling.

This is a land train that I picked up on Kickstarter a while back. It looked great on the internet but up close I wasn’t that impressed. The 3d printing grain was far too large, leading to smudged designs and a generally cheap look. The plastic didn’t stick properly with superglue, pva glue, plastic cement, or carpenter’s glue. Bits are always threatening to break off. In general I would not recommend it. But when I saw it I remembered a piece of art and some flash fiction from way back, about some raiders who attack a caravan and get a nasty chaos genestealer flavoured surprise. So I had to have it! Since this was made there is now an official Warhammer equivalent, the Cargo-8 Ridge Crawler. Though a Ridge Crawler and two carriages would be over 120 quid!