One thing that has always bothered me since I started the hobby back in 2018 is how many spare parts you can end up with after building your miniatures.

With infantry/characters this typically means extra heads, arms/weapons or gear that are useful for customization purposes or to make slightly different forces, but which end up on sprue or on your bits box.

Since I dislike wasting stuff I have decided some time ago to put in practice a self imposed zero bits challenge, with the objective being quite simple: spend all the spare bits on my sprues or bits box.

In theory it is a simple objective but in practice even spending the parts of a single kit can often be time consuming or expensive in terms of materials.

For Imperial Guard scaled kits, in most cases you have lots of spare heads and arms, but the torsos/legs are usually the same amount as the intended box content (e.g. 10 bodies for a box of 10 cadians). One option would be to get the torso/legs/bodies from third parties (e.g. Anvil Industry, Victoria Miniatures...) and obviously most of us have done that at some point for a particular conversion, character or something custom, but for large amounts of spare parts, purchasing so many bodies can be quite expensive.

Obviously with the appearance of 3d printers you could source the parts you need to spend the spare parts by printing what you are missing, but in my case I lack a way to print locally, so I will not focus on that today.

In my case I decided to go a different path, the usage of moulds from the parts I need in order to help spend the spare parts. It is a crude method for sure, but easy to reproduce and I have made moulds of things I sculpted myself or from bodies/torsos/legs I had bought somehow.

In most cases the conversions made in that way are just ways to spend the existing parts, like special weapons, heavy weapons or any other gear, but in some cases I also use this method to create some of the unique characters I have described in one of my books, for which I didn't find suitable representations in models available to purchase (or if I found the models might not have been affordable or easy to get in my location, for example).

One such example is Verica Salacia, a character bound to a wheel chair (description under the spoiler).

To build Verica I used parts from stargrave and frostgrave kits, along with some cadian bits, sprue bits, 2 buttons, greenstuff and part of a mantic building decoration, along with copies made using a mould from some seated legs and a torso based on grognards command/HWT kit.

The self imposed challenge works best in this kind of situation, where my mind is led to search for interesting and innovative ways to spend the spare parts and while most of my conversions built in such a way are crude or rough, they fit rather well with my varied army, although they are certainly not appealing to those who desire more detailed miniatures or conversions.

Obviously most of the crude aspects should disappear with a bit of paint, but I feel like my concepts improve as I gain more practice with this sort of work.