Back To (Black) Battlemechs

I'm sure that's a reference to something. Anyway, today while at work I put together the Armiger Warglaive Knight Titan that I had the parts for. I also realised that the reason I can't find the torso element for the second one is because it was used as part of a conversion that P did where they took the legs off a Dunecrawler and the body and arms off an Armiger and put the two together. So I may do the reverse and stick the turret off a Dunecrawler onto the legs of an Armiger and Chaos-ify it. Or Ork-ify it. Who knows. I need a 100mm diameter base first either way.

This cheerful chap will end up in the colours of House MacLeod, my Imperial Knight House, and fight alongside the two Helverins I already have

After work I did a little bit of very simple stuff: first I undercoated the four 3D printed Firestarters I have for my Battletech mercenary outfit, MacLeod's Light Horse, and then I finished the bases on the four Light Horse mechs I've already got painted:

The lighting is poor so these look very much like silhouettes here but they are, in fact, four Firestarter variants: two -S2 and two -S3 machines, making the lance a formidable scouting and light strike asset

Taken in the light box. I tweaked the photo afterwards to enhance the details: this is pretty close to how they look in real life. The rear of each base has the mech type on it (a Stalker, Black Knight, and two Orions) rather than the specific variant designation (STK-3HM, BL-6-KNT, ONI-KMs) mainly because I haven't yet settled on exactly what designation to use for my custom machines...

Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can get the Firestarters done. I was supposed to be popping along to the proposed location of the Llangefni wargames and roleplaying club, but alas I have an appointment that clashes that I can't miss, so saying hello to those people will have to wait.

Who Needs Arms Anyway

Well, today I finished the organising of the garage - mostly - and it is now a usable space for 3D printing and storage. While doing so I dug up some partly-built stuff that P didn't want any more, so I put together a Chaos Knight Desecrator (I think - big ol' laser cannon, giant power claw thing, apparently that's a Desecrator) and am looking at a bunch of sprues that I think will produce an Armiger with melta cannon and chainsword. Maybe two of them if I can find some of the parts that appear to be missing. 

The workspace - on the left, armies and unfinished kits and unpainted models, on the right, boxes of sprues and scenery. In the middle, the washing station and Mars 2 Pro 3D printer, still in the little plastic bags that they came in

 

I made a bit of an error building this. I didn't realise that the arms won't fit on once the should plates have been attached, and so now in order to get the arms on I will need to cut away the attachment lugs on the torso and glue the arms in place. Mildly annoying but not the end of the world. I also attached a spare Mortifier onto the upper carapace for a bit of Evil Flair

I also put some bases on the painted mercenary battlemechs I did a while ago, although they do need flocking and the like. At the moment they're just bare black plastic:

It's a terrible photo but it doesn't really matter, these four mechs are now the proud owners of bases and a better photo will appear tomorrow after I've properly completed the bases with flock and infoplate details such as STK-MAC and so on

Actually a very productive day. I have a little list of stuff to get before I can get printing properly (not least of which is resin!) so I'll be ordering that once I've got a little more disposable income and then it'll be off to the races. Or at least the trial-and-error stuff before the races. 

Organising And Experimenting

Another day of no painting, but instead I did a lot of unpacking and rearranging and organising within the garage. Now all the Really Useful Boxes full of magnetised (and un-magnetised...) toy soldiers are safely in there, along with all the other things. They need to be sorted out and tidied away, of course, but by the end of tomorrow I should be able to set up the 3D printer and washing station, ready for ordering some resin and any other bits I need so that I can get printing by next weekend. Exciting stuff! I have also arranged a wargame with a local chap over in Bangor on the 29th, and there seems to be some movement towards the development of a local wargames club in Llangefni, which is a nearby town. So who knows; maybe soon I'll actually be able to get some games in again.

 

It's a lot more cluttered now, but it'll become tidier by the end of the day. The RUB towers will eventually expend even more to provide homes for armies like my Old World Tomb Kings, my Raptors Space Marines, my Iron Warriors, Orks, and so on. A project for the upcoming few months I think

I also found the lightbox that my partner P got me for my birthday last month, and I finally had time to get it out and have a play around with it. First impressions - a great little bit of kit! It's a 30cm cube with lots of backdrops out of the box and a pretty self-explanatory process to use it. I think it'll take a little effort to really get used to, but it's already producing some quite nice snaps just with my mobile phone's camera:

This is the Dire Wolf from my Falcon Guards Cluster Command Star, and you can see how crisp the photo is and the colours actually look much like they do in real life

The way the lighting illuminates the panelling and the details on the rear is really good too!

Ad-hoc mixed Star of light omni-mechs and Elementals

After playing around with the Falcon Guards, I dug out one of the oldest Games Workshop models from my collection - not in terms of date of manufacture, but in terms of its relationship to me and my time as a customer of GW and a painter, collector, and gamer of their stuff:

 

Battle Brother Major of the Ultramarines! Purchased for me by my Dad in late summer or early Autumn of 1996 from Games Workshop Oxford and painted by me with a mix of Humbrol Enamels (the blue and orange) and Citadel Acrylics (everything else)

Yes, the Chapter badge and Tactical marking are on the wrong shoulder pads, and I think the skull on the knee should actually be in the yellow circle on the greave...

The power pack has black vents, but I can't remember why now

I was nine, nearly 10, when I painted this model and the rest of the Tactical Squad that he came with. I'm not entirely sure where the rest of them are these days

And that's that for today - tomorrow, more organising, and maybe some painting. I found my various Blood Bowl teams today, and part of me is tempted to finally finish my High Elf / Pro Elf team, the Tor Sethain Thunderbolts, but I do have some Grots to paint too, so we'll see what I end up doing.

 

Sometimes You Just Need Some Googly Eyes

Well, after being too tired last night to do any painting, I sat down tonight and worked through the Falcon Guards 'mechs all the way through to finished. Or very nearly - the only thing I have left to do is come up with some names and ranks for the pilots; I may make them all Warriors but it's very tempting to make the Battle Cobra the mount of a Star Commander, because that at least seems like the sort of rank where a little individual flair might be given a pass. 

L-R: Night Gyr, Linebacker, Black Lanner, Battle Cobra and Arctic Cheetah - the Battle Cobra just had to get some googly eyes on it because it's such a brilliantly derpy little 'mech

Right side view, showing (some) of the Jade Falcon insignia, as well as the green panels that break up the camouflage pattern applied by the Falcon Guards

Rear view - the little red dot on the Linebacker is a small laser, while unique amongst my Jade Falcons so far is a non-Prime variant mech: the Battle Cobra again. The -H variant replaces the two extended range small lasers with heavy medium lasers, which gives it more punch

Left side view - again showing the way the green panelling breaks up the camouflage, and marks these 'mechs out as Jade Falcons

This brings my total number of painted Falcon Guards battlemechs up to somewhere around 20, which is two Binaries or a reinforced Trinary. I'm still planning on picking up the Alpha Strike box, which will give me five more Clan mechs - a Warhawk, a Timber Wolf, a Fire Moth, a Pouncer and a Nova - and then, when it releases, the new Battletech Aces box, which will add some more, like the Howler, Bane 3, and Summoner H. Not sure where they'll sit at that point, but I'll probably try and pick up at least one each of all the Clan Star sets that CGL make. And I do need more (lots more) Elementals too.

Painting Points:
Today: 5
This Week: 10
2025: 489

The Star League Must Die

Today I made some time to sit and get some more paint down on my Jade Falcons, and finish off the Big Scale Archer that I started a couple of days ago. It was nice to just relax and focus on doing some details for the Archer, and I flexed my freehand abilities a little bit with some checkerboard detailing, as you can see below. Annoyingly the photos turned out a little dark. I really need to find my light box, which is somewhere in the garage in a box...

Front view: the thigh plates have a black and white check marking and the mech's name - BATTLEAXE - while the LRM covers hold the Amaris Dragoon insignia and the mech number 

The gold banding on the arms, legs, and waist identify the division as one of the Imperial Divisions that took part in the Amaris Coup

Some subtle danger markings on the rear in white and, extremely hard to see, in black on the back of the calf armour

The arm-mounted medium lasers are useful, but the bulk of the firepower comes from the LRMs

Each of the battlefists has KILL written across them, because I couldn't resist a little nod to Rogue Trader style sloganeering

 After getting the ARC-2R finished, I got the camouflage pattern down on the Jade Falcons, and finished up with a nice overall Nuln Oil wash:

It's amazing how quickly the camouflage makes them look Falcon Guard-y

 So my second completed model in the new house, and it's another Battlemech. A little bit bigger than the last one though. Tomorrow I'm going to do some more work on the Jade Falcons, and maybe even get some details down like the canopies and weapons.

Painting Points:
Today: 5
This Week: 5
2025: 484 

 

Organising

Tonight I got carried away organising the garage and ran out of time to do any painting. On the plus side, the garage is that much closer to being able to be successfully used for storage of toy soldier related things and manufacturing of 3D prints, so that's always good. I also found a very useful cardboard box and spent a happy few minutes transferring all my paints from two boxes to one! This also had the useful side effect of freeing up a small Really Useful Box which I can use to put 3D printer related tools and things in to protect them.

I took a photo of my nicely and neatly arranged paints in their nice new box, but because of browser nonsense it's not going to be up tonight. Ah well. So it goes, so it goes...

 EDIT:

Here's the photo!

Look at them! All nicely organised in a snaking pattern starting in the top left with Abaddon Black (and then ending up in the chaos of washes and inks at the bottom)

Little And Big

 Just a short (and slightly silly) update today. P and I played a game of Mousetrap! after dinner today, which was great fun and very silly. I'd never played it before, but remember the adverts for it on Saturday morning TV from the mid 1990s. I suspect it may be more entertaining if played while slightly drunk...

The Rube Goldberg Mousetrap has been constructed!

 As is, of course, traditional, I lost. But it was a good laugh, so it was worth it. 

 Then I spent about an hour doing some painting of variously sized Battletech things:

This accidentally printed-far-too-large Archer ARC-2R is being painted up as an Amaris Dragoons machine, in the grey-and-gold scheme of the Imperial Divisions

 

 

The large Archer is going to be shipped off to my friend C along with four Ferrets in actual 1:285 scale, hopefully a little later this week. While waiting for various greys to dry, I also put down the first colour on my latest bunch of Jade Falcons:

The green is actually a lighter colour than it should be - Loren Forest instead of Castellan Green - but it doesn't matter because different paint supplies are available at different times in real life

Nothing completed today, but it was nice to sit and do some basic colour blocking and a little simple detailing on the factory-finish Amaris Archer.

 

Exploring The Surrounds

While I didn't do any actual modelling yesterday, I did make good headway on the project of turning the garage into a useable storage and workshop area; mostly by reassembling the second of two large IKEA bookshelves and starting the process of shoving about 2,000 books into them, freeing up floor space from many (many) banana boxes that had contained them previously. This will allow me - with a bit of reorganising - to not only make space for the 3D printer setup, but to store my various figures either in their long-term homes of Really Useful Boxes, or shorter term homes such as carboard boxes. 

Today, P, T (my son), and I went to Bangor to have a nose around before T had to get the train back to the Midlands. After a bit of excitement where we discovered that what seemed to be a road was, in fact, a dead end at the bottom of an extremely steep hill, involving a badly overheated clutch and a quick call to the fire brigade, we found the nearby Hobby Shop. No, that's actually what it's called - The Hobby Shop. It's currently most active on Facebook, but having had a look around it's not a bad little place at all. A good selection of paints, some board games, some Airfix, Tamiya, and the like, a bunch of Games Workshop stuff (Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Age of Sigmar, 40K, a little The Old World, a reasonable selection of Black Library), some Warlord Games stuff (almost all Bolt Action), Star Wars Legion, a range of CCGs and some various other things as well. I got some paints to replace some of the 30-odd that had been killed off by the summer heat earlier this year, and a bottle of Mig Ammo Extra Thin poly cement.

That poly cement came in handy for what I got up to when I got home, which was to put together a couple of Chaos Knight War Hounds. These are essentially the exact opposite of my loyalist Armiger Warglaives, but with a more aggressive loadout. While my Warglaives have nothing but autocannons, these Chaos machines have a mix of close combat weapons and chunky guns. I suspect these will, eventually, form a small allied contingent to go with a vaguely thought out Word Bearers force I want to get to oppose my Raptors/Argent Shroud/Paradisan Guard Imperial forces that are, by and large, intended for games of [current edition] 40K.

Here they are:

As I understand it these are (L) a Huntsman and (R) a Stalker. The Huntsman has a melta-cannon and a massive chainsword, with either a Havoc launcher or heavy stubber, while the Stalker has an avenger chain cannon and a huge power claw - again with either a Havoc launcher or a heavy stubber. I couldn't resist giving the bird faced Huntsman the little chaos bird-thing on its shoulder armour plate.

 For comparison's sake, here's the loyalist ones:

These are both Armiger Helverins, with autocannons and either heavy stubbers or meltas on their carapaces. Notably the pilot's cockpit isn't chained shut...

Also, if you go back a post, you'll also see the photo I took of my 3D printer workstation area. Currently it doesn't look like that at all, but hopefully within the month I'll be producing all sorts of silliness. Tomorrow I hope to do some painting after work, maybe get to use some of my new paints, that sort of thing.

 

Making Space

I didn't do any painting today, but I did manage to get a chunk of work done in the garage in terms of moving things around, and putting up furniture. T, my son, helped a lot - particularly by moving things from the garage to his room - and created a lot of space. So much space, in fact, that I managed to get my 3D printer out of the box for the first time since I bought it!

Soon - soon - I will be flailing around trying to make it work. I was going to put a picture up, but alas, my browser is being rubbish and I can't get the photo to myself to post, so that'll probably appear in an edit later. A small update, then, but an update nonetheless. 

EDIT (09/11/2025): 

AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAaaaaa...!

 

Croeso i Gymru

 So, yes, it has been almost exactly two months since I last updated anything on here. This is because in that time P and I moved house! We went about 180 miles north-west from where we were, and are now in Gogledd Cymru, or North Wales to you English speakers (as if I'm not, that is). There is a lot to be done still in terms of unpacking boxes and organising things - especially my toy soldiers, who are getting a home in the garage with a 3D printer to reinforce them - but I had enough time and brain space today to get the paints out and use them. I had that Stalker STK-3F from the batch of 3D prints my friend R had made for me which didn't get conscripted into the 1st Canopian Cuirassiers, so as noted in the last post I was using it to experiment with painting up a Lyran Guards machine. I will eventually pick up some transfers for the 6th Lyran Guards from Fighting Piranha Graphics but until then:

The business end - two large lasers, four medium lasers, two SRM-6 launchers and two LRM-10 launchers

Slab sided and blocky, the Stalker is not a subtle machine

The -3F is the most typical variant, in wide use among all the powers of the Inner Sphere

Dust, mud, and debris coat the lower legs of the mech as a result of wading and rough terrain

Once I have the 3D printer operational, I'll be having a go at making more mechs not only to finish the Canopians but also the Lyran Guards and my mercenaries. Meanwhile my Jade Falcon Gamma Galaxy Falcon Guards Cluster is going to be made from CGL plastics, because they started that way and I want to maintain consistency. Similarly any Inner Sphere CGL plastics I get will end up either as PDF machines, or in my Marik Militia or Justine's Grenadiers forces - although I may well repaint my Justine's Grenadiers as a different Capellan unit, because at the moment they look very similar to my Falcon Guards.

Painting Points:
Today: 1
This Week: 1
2025: 479