Had a few peaks and valleys in the Khromeboys project since the last post. Started in on modding the rest of da boyz. 5 models for the compendium team are in their vanilla configurations with no kit-bashing, but the rest are all proppa kustom. I wanted my Felgores proxies to be easily identified WYSIWYG comparisons to their beastmen counterparts, fortunately since the majority of them are some version of "melee weapon and pistol" its an achievable goal. I didn't take great photos during the whole process, but I took a few of the better one's and I'll get more at later phases. 
 

1 - Vandal. The only model on the team with a 2-handed weapon. Beast-snagga boyz don't have any, but fortunately I had a few laying around, my favorite among them being an extra Ax from the kommando nob. The ax itself is one-handed, but the nob arm was WAYYY too big to fit. After trying it on a few different models I pulled one with a pose I liked. I clipped the ax along the haft and pinned it to what was left of the hand after removing its pre-fixed one-handed choppa. 
 

I clipped and cut away the slugga from the hand, and drilled in a small hole both to get rid of the lingering grip in the hand, but also help sell the clenched fist look. I used superglue for the connections because of the pins, caused some extra work to clean up the joints due to the excess leaking out, but I love the final result. 

2. Gnarlscar - The felgores model features the only bionic arm on the team, and is core to the unit's attack profile. Snaggaz have plenty of bionic's, but all of them are holding weapons. This particular model is fixed with the slugga in the right hand and choppa in the left (without a bionic). It was a problem, but one that was pretty easily solved with a sharp knife. I found one of the left-handed bionics and chopped it up till the hand held nothing. I clipped the mono-pose arm off at the bionic connection point and it made for a pretty easy glue-up. I went back later and added the top of the thumb back with a little greenstuff nubbin later but didn't get a pic of that


3 - Mangler. The Felgore model is bare handed with big-ol claws on each hand. A barehanded ork didn't seem all that imposing, but the beast-snagga powerclaw looks plenty imposing. Unfortuantely there's only one per kit and I'd already put one on a leader for the compendium side, and all of powerklaw bits were for Nobs so didn't fit. Oh well, Bluestuff exists. I got ahead of myself and didn't set up a proper mold for the claw before trying to clone the piece, the end result left the center portion looking pretty good, but the actual claw pieces were way too thin and off-center. I could have re-cast the mold and done it propperly, but since ork weapons aren't uniformly made I decided to go ahead and push that by making the claws on the copied piece from blades clipped off of other power-klaws.
 

I had some more cleaning to do after taking the photo, but the end result is two nasty looking powerkaws and a satisfactory proxy for the mangler

4. Herd "goat". This was the easiest bash by far. Id already bought a box of grots when I started the project entirely by incident (I just like them). Turns out the perfect arm was in the kit. Simple as. 


5. Toxhorn. Goat version has a plague-grenade and a corrupted blade. None of the snagga models have a "standard" ax, or a grenade, so I had to dip into the bitz box. Ax head comes from a nob ax, scale is a bit off, but I like how big it is; grenade is standard stickkbomb arm. Most of the plague look is going to come from the painting on this one, but bashing it up to have the appropriate look was fun

I decided I wanted some additional flavor on this model, and wanted to add some more stikkbombs to ol' boy. I didn't have any in the bitz box to make a bandoleer out of, but I did have the tops of some from a grenade launcha-attachement from some vehicle. My plasticard rods were either too big or too small, so I figured the best answer was a pouch. I attached the rods to fill out the look in the pouch, and used a fur-texture pad to create the bulk of the bag. 

Once I got the fur rolled out I cut out an appropriate sized portion, and layered it atop a thinner, flat sheet with the grenades sandwiched between them. The rods helped give it some dimensionality while hiding their diameter from site. I'm really proud of the results. 


6. Deathknell. AKA Gong-Goat. I struggled with how to represent this one. A gong didn't feel super orky, I initially wanted to feature a drum, but I couldn't find an arrangement that passed mustard. I rounded back to the idea of a gong after a lot of trial and error. I clipped out a hand that would work to hold the gong, clipped out hafts of unused choppas 1/4" at a time until I had a mallet long enough to look right. I decided to cap it with a "head" and after trying a few different necron heads that we all too small, settled on a marine helmet that looked pretty good. 
I grabbed a few different icons from the bit-box and used some plasticard for the base of the gong
 

I thought it would be fun to green-stuff the rope for the gong, but after putting it together decided that I didn't like the look...and didn't like the idea of how easily it would break off. These models are intended to get used, and a greenstuff tie just seemed like it was begging to break the first time it got mis-handled, let along dropped. I ended up grabbing a small piece of wire that suited just fine. It runs through the hand easily and actually lets the gong have some flex. 


There are 4 more models in the team, I'll feature pictures of them later, namely because two of them are pretty boring, and I don't have the bits/model for the other two yet. 

To close out, I mentioned in my last post that the nob-arms felt fine for the lootaz, but left big gaps. Well sprue-goo is here to the rescue. It takes a few layers at times, but having a fluid gap-sealer is huge. I wish I'd made this stuff years ago. 

*I'm going to get the hang of this formatting one of these days