CNC Antenna Dishes

I seem to be on a bit of a kit building thing at the moment, here is another kit from CNC Workshop the double pack of Antenna Dishes. Fairly simple looking kit going by the sprues.





The build goes together fairly easilly after a lot of clean up sanding. Like the buggy the cut curves aren't as smooth as they could be and there are lots of notches for no particular reason all over the place that you have to sand and putty up. CNC really needs to crank down their laser power too cause the edges are very burnt. Anyway onto the build.



The base with the gearing is quite nice. You align the gears with the baseplate using toothpicks and predone holes. The arm joints also align using toothpicks, in this case I cut down the toothpicks and glued them in place which let me rotate the joints till I liked the arm pose and glued it in position.





The only way to really glue together the dish is clamp the ring to the arms, cause they don't quite line up.



It does look good once the glue dries.



Then attach to the arm.



And onto the 2nd dish.



You can see I changed out the lasercut cables at the back of the arm with some regular wire and bits of plastic tube but that's the extent of my blinging up on these. I really like them.













After taking most of the pics I decided to fill the gaps on the joints with the rings. Sanded back it's not so messy. I've primed them already too but still deciding how to paint them. Any suggestions?

Pre detailed plastic bases by Champ Industries

In the back of my mind for years now was some cool bases I always thought would go well with my Colonial Marines I'd seen a review from Dr Faust's Painting Clinic (remember him?) Of course my marines were in the back of the cupboard at the time... 

With the revival of my project with all the new vehicles and lovely Hasslefree guns got me thinking about how to base all the models. I was considering the rather nice Sulaco bases by Fenris Games but being resin it gets rather pricey. But I remembered to look up Champ Industries again and see what they had on offer. After a simple paypal transaction my order was off and a week and a bit later they arrived in Oz.

I ordered a big bag of 150 industrial bases which will see out all my marines, aliens, and probably any Infinity stuff I do in the near future. I also grabbed 30 of the urban bases for zombie survivors and stuff, though I think it would fit 40K stuff pretty well or Infinity.

Here are the 4 different Industrial designs. I flipped a row to let you see how the facing changes the look. 

Here are the 3 different Urban designs.

And with some minis blutacked on to see how they look, I think I invested pretty well in these. It's kind of surprising but apart from the occasional pre detailed base by GW no one else out there has made plastic pre done bases. The detail is very crisp and unlike resin bases you still have the void at the bottom of the base so they sit on the table really easily you can also use plastic glue to stick down plastic minis instead of pinning down with super glue. Dr Faust seemed to think you can get away with just super glueing down metal minis without pinning as well, I'll give it a try.

Chibi Dungeon Adventurers from Impact Miniatures

Yay another kickstarter has actually arrived. I was totally swayed when this went up with the idea of getting the characters from the classic D&D cartoon in chibi form so had to pledge.













My friend Andrew wanted the ponies... kinda wish I'd gotten one for myself now





well that's all of them. I also got the set of dice with the cartoon artwork on them of the characters and some resin bases which were included with the big models.

So what are they like... hmm the quality varies greatly across the range. It's obvious the D&D characters were the 1st sculpted and the initial sculpter didn't have any anime figures to use as reference because the faces just aren't right. The thief is the worse with her eyes stuck on her face instead of set in. It's going to take some surgery with the dremel to fix her somehow. The acrobat also looks weird but I'll leave her be I think. The later models in the range were 3D sculpted and the improvement in sharpness is very noticeable. The red Sonja looking lady with the head seperate from her tiny body shows that improvement off well. The ponies and big monsters are all also 3D sculpted.



I'm pretty sure initially the range was going to be metal but it changed over to resin probably about the same time they decided to make the big monsters really big. The castings are sharp but have a lot of bubble issues. It looks like they were all vac cast but bubbles obviously got trapped on the edges. Also some of the models must have been ripping the molds a bit going by my castings.





























Considering most of the bubbles are on the underside of the model you won't see most of them but I'll have a go at filling them anyway, I've seen far worse from GW.

I'll take some comparison photos later comparing these to Super Dungeon Explore characters as I clean them up.

Woo my Reaper BONES has finally shipped

I know nothing to see, just wanted to share I'm finally getting my figs. In other kickstarter news the Chibi Dungeon miniatures arrived from Impact Miniatures. I'll post up photos on the weekend and a review. Also working on some more CNC kits.

In new news have you heard Reaper is talking about another BONES wave 2 kickstarter.

Borderlands Buggy - CNC Buggy

You may have spotted the buggy in the background of my smartgunners photo and wondered what it is. I recently picked up the CNC Workshop pair of buggies lasercut kit.





The inspiration for the kit was rather obvious to me ;)



It's very unusual for a lasercut MDF kit. Every other kit I've built has been a slot together box of slots and sockets. This one was mostly layers and layers of shapes glued together and then trying to putty up the gaps and sand it it all smooth.  As you can see I put in a LOT of work puttying up gaps and sanding shapes into curves from the blockyness of the kit.



















So was it worth all the effort. On one hand hand my carpet is a mess after all that sanding :( but the final result is rather pleasing. I still need to add a heap of grab handles and the guns.











The question after finishing it is do I even want to build the 2nd buggy? I guess I'll decide after I paint this one and see the finished result.