I'm headed to Nova in a couple of months, and wanted something new to bring to the tournament. I'm exclusively a kill-team player these days (if you haven't checked it out, do yourself a favor), and Nova is holding a compendium-only tournament which sounds like a blast. Compendium teams are the original, essentially underpowered/beginner teams that launched with KT2.0/KT21, and are almost all teams made up of models you likely already have if you play 40k. I decided this was a perfect opportunity to return to my first true love...Orks. 

I've wanted to do an(other) orks team for a while now. I played Kommando's for the first year+ of KT 2.0 (I'll make a post with their display board at some point) and I've been itching for another ork team since then. Since GW hasn't pulled the trigger and given me what I want, I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to knock out a few "someday" projects at the same time. 
I've wanted to make another beginner team for a while to pair with my white-scars team for learning games for a while, and compendium orks are the perfect fit for that. I've had an idea for a "chrome" ork force for a couple of years, but have been too daunted by learning NMM to pull the trigger on it, this was a good opportunity to force myself to do it. And finally, I've always liked the Felgores Ravagers kill team, but also always thought they should have been an ork team...there is some mild overlap in the models required for both teams, and I'm impulsive, so I decided to replace my felgore's goat-men with a proppa orky team...and the scope of my project exploded. Unlike my previous posts this project is an active work in progress. I'm bad at taking pictures mid-build, and I'm under a deadline so we will see how diligent I am about updating this until after the fact. 

I decided to work with beast-snaggaz as my "base" for this project because they fit the madd max/desert vibe I wanted for the team. I've seen people grouse about them being mono-pose and I get it. It sucks losing easily customizable models, but all that whinging is just puny 'ummie talk for "not wantin to work 'ard". The beast-snagga models looks great imo. The arms are largely interchangeable, and even though they're locked in their poses...they are some cool poses.

Compendium greenskin teams have options to take lootas...but beastsnaggaz do not, so the first bridge I wanted to cross was making some of my own. I had a bunch of spare nob bitz from a box I got years ago which provided the gun-bases and arms I needed to get started. My design inspiration was Rictus Erectus from Fury Road...cause he rules, the movie rules, and it absolutely fit. 

I had some spare bits from a bruna-bomba to plus-up some of the gun barrels, but I wasn't satisfied with a lot of the looks of the regular kombi-weapons+bits. It wasn't until I ran out of big barrels that I finally hit on using plasticard...something I'd only dabbled in before now, but occasionally buy at a store because I'm a hobby-goblin. 

Nob arms are a bit too big, BUT with the guns being bigger they look fine to me.
Beastsnaggas all have singluar shoulder plates, and using those you're able to hide a lot of the gaps, the other arm is usually pretty easy to get set right. I used poster tack to hold them in place while I was working on them and that may have been a bit of a mistake, since when I was adjusting arms to fit, I did so with a huge gob of tack under them and when I went to glue...there was a void space. Oh well, greenstuff exists:. Adapt and overcome 'ummie. 

This particular ball was way too big, but after I got the arm up there and could smash it into place I just took a knife to cut/pull away the excess. End results look pretty good. Gonna need to do some more gap-filling and whatnot, but overall I'm really happy with the lootaz. I'll take some better photos of them once I get the heads and shoulders on.