I'm still alive

Shame on me! It's been a long time since I wrote last.

Yes! I'm still alive and still playing Warhammer, so keep hanging on to my Blog :-)

What happened so far?

There have been some 40K matches including my first ever Apocalypse match at our local gaming store. It was fun but took us some hours. It was a 2 on 2 with 10000 Points per side / 5000 Points per person. I made some pics of it that I will post here soon.

I build a deffrolla for my Battlewagon (fully magnetized). These pics will follow as a tutorial.

Finished painting my Big Gunz (kannons). And, you know it, pics will follow.

I've build 15 Kommandoz with 2 Burnaz out of spare Boys and a lot of bits. There is still some work to do, especially some Green Stuff modelling (never did this before). I also ordered a Snikrot model to support these Kommandoz. Hope it will be here soon.

And I bought myself a good digital camera, so the pictures that will come up in the future will be by far better than the ones made with my cell phone.

So long for the moment guys, stay tuned for some updates the next few days / weeks.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Tutorial: Magnetizing Deff Dreads

As I bought my Deff Dreads, I did it because they are very flexible in battle. They can function as battle platforms for heavy weapons as well as fighting in close combat.
What I did not thought about at that time was, that the weapons have to be glued to the model if you do it as described in the instructions. That takes away a whole lot of the flexibility of this piece of wargear.

So I decided to magnetize them, so I can equip them as I need 'em. I searched the web for quite a while but did not find any tutorials on how to do this. So I tried it by myself...and: it worked!

So I decided to post a short tutorial on how to do this (or how I did it at least).

Here is what you need to magnetize the Deff Dreads: a (GW) model drill, glue and magnets of course. There are many other drills, so you don't need the one by GW. It's only important that the size of the drill fits the diameter of your magnets (maybe it should be a half millimeter bigger).
The glue should be designed to glue metal AND plastic, because this is exactly what we want to do.
Magnets can be ordered via the internet and aren't very expensive at all.

The magnets I use are very tiny. The picture above shows a single magnet and my finger for size comparison. The magnets must be small enough to fit in the models joint (as I will show below) and strong enoug to hold the weight of the weapons (which is luckily not that much at this case).

As I thought about magnetizing the Deff Dread, I was unsure if I can drill a little pit in its hull or if I would accidently drill a hole in it, so that the magnet don't fit anymore.
It is a bit tricky but possible. But you have to be very careful not to drill too deep. I drilled the pit inside the already existing pit in which the "ball-joint" of the weapons will come to rest and glued a magnet in it.

Now for another tricky part: drilling a pit in the "ball-joints" of the weapons. It's a bit hard to get the drill to grip. Nevermind if you don't hit the middle exactly, the results will still look okay. But make sure that the pit has a constant edge so that the glue can't flow out. And watch for your fingers while drilling ;-)

Important: watch for the correct polarization of the magnets on the Deff Dread and on the weapons. There is nothing more annoying than glueing the magnet wrong side up so that the weapon is pushed away by it. And getting an already glued magnet out of it socket is quite an ugly work (believe me, I did that mistake).

 And here are the results of the work. The Deff Dreads and all the available weapon options. As you can see, the magnets can not lift the whole weight of the melee arms, so their tips are hanging down. But I think that is not that bad.

I hope this short tutorial will help you to also make your Deff Dread as flexible as it is supposed to be wihout buying 6 of them for every weapon option ;-)

Greetings

Tutorial: Building Ghazghkull Thraka from Waaaghboss

Hello again.

Yesterday I showed you the Waaaghboss model which I found had the Powerclaw of Ghazgkull Thraka. To use it as Ghazgkull, it needed a Mega-armor.
I could not withstand and started converting this model yesterday evening and wanted to share the results with you:

This is the guy before the conversion

Some bits that I'm going to use

First I picked some bits that I wanted to use for this model. These are mostly from a Gargbot and Battlewaggon sprue. The horns are of a Wartrukk sprue. Grenades and jaw are from standard Orkboys.
I used the armor-plates or the Gargbot and the Battlewaggon to model the Mega armor from them

The feet are made of Gargbot feet and again, armor plates of the Battlewaggon. Both needed to be cut to fit the model.

Grenades and horns are just details to cover the look of the original model.

I consider this still work in progress. I think I will close some of the gaps with plastic card and green stuff (especially the parts on its back).
But I think this is useable as a Ghazghkull Thraka.

What's up next?

So, what am I going to do next? Of Course there is a lot of paintwork to do.
But there are some other things on my list:

- I'm going to post a short tutorial on magnetizing the Deff Dread Weapons
- I will build a Deathrolla for my Battletank and will try to post a tutorial about this.

And there is some more. A friend of mine of my 40K gaming Club gave me a box of old orks. There were some nice treasures in it. One of it was this Waaaghboss:

Im not quite sure what this is. Because it has the Powerclaw that looks like the one of Ghazghkull Trakka, but the body and the weapon looks like a standard Waaghboss.
I'm going to try to build a Ghazghkull out of it, but I'm not sure how to make it look mighty enough to compete with the Mega-armor that he wears usually. We will see.

More Nobz

Hello again.

Here are some more Nobz I finished lately:

Nice Family Portrait.

The Doc is in.

Some more Nobz. Nothing special here.

A Nob with pole and Powerclaw for my boyz.

Ultramarines - The Movie

It's done. I just ordered my copy of Ultramarines - The Movie as special edition collectors set. I'm kinda wondering how this movie will be, but as it is the only 40K Movie to get, there was no choice for me.

If you want to buy this DVD as well, you can do this at http://www.ultramarinesthemovie.com/

First Pics

As I promised: here are the first pictures of some of my allready finished orks.

 One of my Nobz.

Group shot of all the by now finished Nobz. 

Nothing more to say about this one....

The Black Reach Waaaghboss (unconverted).

The Deffkoptaz.

 Deffkopta Pilot in detail.

 The Deffkopta Squad-Leader with a "Red Baron" inspired paint sheme.

Another one of the squad leader.

 I hope you like what you see. I'm not a very fast painter and it took me a whole lot of time to get these painted to the state at which they are now.
The pictures aren't the best as I don't have a camera, so I had to take the pictures with my cell phone. But thanks to makro-mode, I think they are good enough to be shown here.

What I got

First of all I think it makes sense to list the stuff I have.

As almost every Ork or Space Marine Player I started with the "Assault on Black Reach" Starter Kit. But I started to buy more stuff very quick as I wanted to participate in the "real" 1500 or 1750 points battles.

So what do I have now?

2 Waaaghbosses (both Black Reach)
1 BigMek with Shokk Attack Gun
10 Nobz (all Black Reach)
1 Painboy
12 Lootaz
12 Burnaz
3 Mekz
30 Shoota-Boyz (with 3 Rokkits)
60 Slugga Boyz (with 6 Big Shootas)
3 Nobz with Trophy-Poles and Energyclaws for the Boyz
1 Wartrukk
3 Warbikers (with Bossbiker)
2 Deff Dreads (magnetized for flexible armament)
1 Battlewaggon (modular build for flexible armament)
3 Gunz (Cannon)
6 Deffkoptaz

I think that's it, that's all I got at the moment. From this arsenal I am mixing up my army lists.

But there is still much work to do with this. Only the content of one Black Reach Box is completely finished (painted and based), so there will be work for more hours and hours.

I soon will post Pictures of my completed models and the work-in-progress ones.

My first Post

Hello everyone and welcome to my Warhammer 40.000 Blog.

I want to use this first post of mine (in my first blog ever) to introduce myself in short:

My name is Stefan, and i'm living in Germany. That's the only reason why I call this Warhammer 40K Blog "German Orks" (and of course because I thought it would be a nice word-play with Sherman Oaks).

I'm not playing a nationalist or in any kind "germany-related" ork clan. I'm simply building a Goff-Clan army. That's why I chose the checkers for the sides of the blog.

I started playing Warhammer in March 2010, so i'm almost as new to Warhammer 40K as I am to blogging, but I think it's a great hobby, as it combines building models (which I did since I was 10 years old) with playing an amazing game.

Hope you (Ork)guys will find some stuff you like on my site. You won't find the masterpiece stuff of painting nor the top-notch conversions since I'm new to this hobby.

Last but not least: It's been a while since I last wrote in english, so I hope you find my spelling / grammar not too annoying.

Greetings