Lab of Absurd MADNESS: Converting trash & toys into minis & also minis into other minis possibly

I have five wrecking balls. I mainly ripped the “fixed -open hatch off of one.

So this is more prep and investigation than real hobby work.

I also photographed them with some gundam model weapons and DUST  weapons.
The rat/hamster is removable, so he’s no issue.

I photographed them together on the dirty clothes washer and on some dirty tile.
I also put them with some other unpainted miniatures to see how they’d look.

A Khurasan Planet K Scav-Raider with a heavy weapon

A Judge Dredd robot on a base, formerly part of their mongoose line but not sold by Rebel Minis

Hansa Nairoba, a Freeborn from Warlord’s Beyond the Gates of Antares line

A ganger with two guns from Warlord’s larger sized Strontium Dog line

An anthrompomorphic sci-fi dinosaur with a gun from Reaper Mini’s Chronoscope line.

Again, sorry for the dim light, filthy tile, dirty clothes washer, and dutch angle phone crap, and some of the poorly focused shots.

And a few more…

And that iffy nonsense is all I have for tonight. Yeah, taking bad phone pictures of semi-wrecked cheap toys on top of a filthy abused appliance in my garage. Now I need to buy some spray primer, some filler glue, and look for more crap to glue to other crap and get some styrene sheets to add nurnies with. Or greeblies. Whatever.

The sentry Bot is a very solid heavy well built chunk of vinyl and I only have three of them so I am not eager to get cutty until I have a sacrificial one that I won’t miss if he’s not going to be in shape to reassemble later.

I think for the time being, I might just do paint and glue-stuff on it rather than look into swapping out things by pulling or cutting them off. These cost me $17 ea  though I’ve seen them drop to $12. They have a triple cannon on one arm and gatling cannon on the other and two grenade or missile launchers on the back that have some big ammo drums.

I think with some teeth and machine gun barrels with cooling holes in them lengthening the arm guns this will look Orky and maybe I can find a crane arm with a saw somewhere. I could also maybe use it as a huge Ghar constuct for Beyond the Gates of Antares since they are into tripods and big single camera eyes on mechs.

Sorry about the dirty clothes-washing machine and dim light and the DUTCH ANGLES OMG as this footage is coming off a budget phone.

If I can find a couple more of these in the near future then I’ll slice one up a bit.

Bastion pop arrived today and I snipped the bird off and it fell off the dirty clotheswashing machine I was working on and is probably under the machine.

I pulled him apart and cut the “stowed gatling gun off his back and then cut the mounting knob the head was set to rotate on. Destroyed one of the vinyl pegs that held one leg on.

All in all Bastion was very easy to assemble and the vinyl was easily gently cut with pressure applied to a pocket knife. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with Bastion whether I’ll turn his head into an armored turret and cockpit or just put something else where he head used to be. The space where the gatling gun was could hold a little cupola for an infantry mini or a cargo box or some kind of JET-BACKPACK thing. Who knows. I may get more of these as they are kind of easy to work with and they cost around $8. Without his giant SD-kawaii chibi head he looks like of like a (Dream Pod Nine)Heavy Gear or an AT from Votoms(the anime).  His (badly posed) gun came out of the arm easily but I was trying to cut it when it did so I guess I got lucky.

Yeah I’m liking how this turned out. Right now he’s just parts so this is probably more “prep” than hobby.

I’m going to find cheap crap and cut it up and glue it to other cheap crap and possibly paint it and otherwise deface it until I think I maybe passes for a sci-fi mini if you squint and are feeling generous.

Toys, models, old minis, plastic thingies, keyrings, gachapon, stuff in a dollar store, stuff in a hardware store…anything that triggers my quasi-pareidolia is fair game. I hope I won’t be lazy or too boring to endure. I have a cheap airbrush, some glue, cutty scraper things, clippers, a file, a lot of magnets, and I may be in a mild manic episode.

But what I can do is buy stuff and do stuff to that stuff and babble about it and take pictures with my phone. If you just end up seeing me color some gundam model a spotty red with a marker and put a “drill” where it’s hand should be, then I’m sorry.

I think what we’ll mostly be dealing with is ” Oh that person glued some popped off DUST and AT43 weapons to that Funco Pop from a video game, and he’s painted about a quarter of it brown he ran out of that brown and tried to remix it but failed so really it’s two browns. Oh and  that’s a Klingon Empire sticker from the original Star trek reruns. Right. Well. Yes.”

I also have several 3D printers but until I have the room to set them up properly that is another story, mostly about some boxes with 3d printers nestled in them.

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STRAIGHT FROM THE JUNK YARD:  ERSATZ KNIGHTS

40K has knights, their equivalent to Battlemechs or mecha, and the standard knight kit costs about $130 US from discount stores and has quite a few pieces. BUT, what if you you were an old school trash-picking proxying sort of person who was around back in 1988 or so and you want something like a knight on your table made of…detritus mostly…what can you do?

1. You can look for used built or partially built knights on sale locally or on EBAY
PROS: Saves you time, maybe some money
CONS: Might need to remove thick paint/glue or It might be a scam or a “Craig’s List ambush”.

2. You can find a good looking stl file online and try to print one which is not as easy as you want it to be but it can be done.  Thingiverse!
PROS: You can learn a valuable skill
CONS: You may be humbled & scourged by a cat -o-nine-tails called frustration

3. You can find something similar/close that gets cleared out in online sales like Privateer Press’s Warmachine Colossals and then build them “wrong”
PROS: Kind of the right shape if a little bit short.
CONS: Not always available. Lots of looking, somewhat less finding

4. Go find a toy or model kit that has nothing to do with your game and glue cool stuff to it and see what you get. Try to find cheap stuff.
PROS: You learn a valuable skill
CONS: You may become a hoarder or disappoint yourself and abandon modeling altogether or enter a scary & socially unacceptable territory where you see some gum under a table that has hardened into an interesting shape and want to build something around it and show to appalled & terrified strangers in a gaming venue of some sort.

I have already done 3, and got stuff like a Cryx & Cyriss colossal on sale for $30 or $40 each, all plastic, and a Cygnar and Menoth colossal for $50 ea. that were resin and metal. I have also got very cheap Dreamforge Leviathans because Mark Moondragon of Dreamforge is cleaning out his warehouse right now and holding a crazy sale to do it with. I bought 9 28mm leviathans and 10 15mm ones and some 28mm plastic Russian WW2 troops from the Wargames Factory lines, a couple of Eisenkern gun emplacements, and some add ons for that halftrack like ATV he was selling. So 3 is good. The big Leviathans are too big for Knights, and the 15mm are a little bit too small but it’s still a nice big robot on the battlefield towering over some teensy little 32mm doofus trooper.

I plan to do 2.  I might do 1 someday but today is NOT that day! I will not be getting shanked by a Craig’s List muderer in a well lit Denny’s parking lot anytime soon! No sir! No Ma’am! No Scary Boston Dynamics Robot seeking to rest control of Earth from the pitiful flesh things! Not me!

And then there is 4.  So let’s talk about 4. 4 is a good place to start because you can get fully assembled one piece stuff in the size you want for maybe $15 a pop. SEE WHAT I DID THERE? It’s already painted. Now it’s not official. You can’t take this to a 40K tournament. It’s just for fun. BUT I can get some of these things for as low as $8 on Amazon. Now you can’t get the fancier or rare ones for that, and you have to act while there is a glut of them or the price will go up.

Stuff I got from Amazon, between last summer and now, that I plan to make into “knights” with scare quotes so far: Funco pops from Titanfall 2, Fallout, and Overwatch, mostly the robotic stuff.

Right now they are 6″ tall vinyl figures in a box but eventually I hope to paint them and pull them apart and glue crap to them to make them….different.

BTW two of these, marked with green dots in the picture, are significantly more expensive now than when I bought them months and months ago, when they were $15 ea.  I got the Wrecking Ball(s) for $12 ea. Diva for $15. The Fallout 3-legged combat robots were $14 ea. Bastian was $9 and Orisa was $12.

I ordered a bunch of Dreamforge stuff on clearance so check out the site if you’ve always wanted a Levianthan Crusader (he’s already all out of Mortis Leviathans) in either 1/56 or 1/72 or some cheap Wargames Factory plastic WW2 russians. They have the weapon arms on sale too for the 1/56 leviathans. None of that stuff has arrived yet but I do have tracking on it so I assume it’s going out soon.