BCK's Thread of Stuff: Super Heavy

[Pandoras Bitz Box]

Uuuuuurrghhh.... its been tooooo looooong, I forgot how jealous I am of your precision green stuffing. epic chest work on the Maesteros and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with Varko.  I've been doing a lot of green stuff reccently but a lot more organic, but I think soon I'll be taking my hand to some Inq28, and I feel like thats going to test me. This sort of "manufactured" green stuff I feel like is what I'm missing and a gap in my ability. Only one way to improve it I guess, glad to see your work is still as inspirational as ever.

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

I had been working on some Escher stuff for the Liberalia Martiale, but my already busy food service job just exploded with the Covid thing several months ago and with how physically and mentally exhausting it's been, I just haven't been too motivated to work on anything. The last few days, however, I've been looking at the other Macharius I have - a bad recast I was given a number of years ago - and decided I either need to try to do something with it or just toss it. Looking like something made of wax that had been left in the heat too long, there's hardly a single part of the of the model with a straight line or detail that doesn't look misshapen and awful.

 

Here's a pic of it I put up a while ago as a reminder of how bad it is. 

 

http://i.imgur.com/eCaRLDO.png

 

 

So, out came the safety glasses, my respirator mask, and the Dremel with a very long extension cord to use outside. No way in hell was I gonna be throwing out this much resin dust and flakes indoors! (I was so in the zone I forgot to take pictures immediately after the Dremeling was finished, but here she is with the beginnings of the corrective block sanding underway.)

 

 

The view from the front. 

 

 

And one of the side panels with the terribly malformed armored plate completely removed and you can also see how the back of the tank where the exhaust goes is now completely flat instead of concave. 

 

 

Some of the armor panels will be rebuilt with sheet plastic and others might not get rebuilt at all because, honestly, there's a lot of weird design decisions on the Macharius I don't really like or understand. Big armor panels in weird spots, little doors that would seemingly open to nothing, etc.

 

Oh, and the track sections? They're in the trash because they're beyond saving. The tank kit I originally bought to use the rubber tracks for the Macharius will now be chopped up and its road wheels and such will be mated to the sides instead of having the big armored track sections like every other 40k tank. 

 

 

**Edit**

Safety tip for anyone using resin and sanding on sections this big, I highly suggest you either do it outdoors and wet sand (you should be wet sanding resin at all times anyway), or fill up a sink and do it underwater like I am on this thing to make sure you get as little resin dust in the air as possible. I drain the water about every 20 minutes, rinse it out thoroughly, and then fill it up and start again. 

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

With a few more hours of sanding -- along with removing the fingerprints on my right thumb, index, and middle fingers -- those previously blurry angles on the hull are looking nice and sharp. 

 

[Augustus b'Raass]

Oooooh lala, this is a project that is right up my alley. Please continue, good Sir! :D

[Naryn]

Lovely work, and the tip to work in a full sink is incredibly valuable. Excited to see where this project goes!

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

Uuuuuurrghhh.... its been tooooo looooong, I forgot how jealous I am of your precision green stuffing. epic chest work on the Maesteros and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with Varko. 

 

I just noticed this reply, PBB, sorry! Maesteros and Varko? That's the first page of the thread. O_o  Maesteros was the only one of those 4 guys I was planning that got finished, sadly. 

 

Oooooh lala, this is a project that is right up my alley. Please continue, good Sir!

 

Thanks, Augs. Maybe it will be possible to polish a turd? We'll find out!

 

Lovely work, and the tip to work in a full sink is incredibly valuable. Excited to see where this project goes!

 

Yeah, I take that resin dust toxicity pretty seriously and don't feel that a lot of the miniature companies that produce resin products cover the safety issue well enough. I filled up my bathroom sink and to make it easier on my back, pulled up a chair while I was sanding away.

 

I've got a little more progress to show off today, but I really overdid it last night and only got about 20 mins of sanding today before my thumb started bleeding.  I might need to do something to prevent that in the future. Anyway, pics!

 

Sheet plastic covering up the broken left side (our right) of the tank hull section and reinforcing and the extending the crumbling edge on the right side (our left). 

 

 

A side view of how bad the right side of the hull was and in need of fixing. It's not finished yet, but I was just getting started on it when I sanded a hole in my thumb. 

 

 

As I mentioned several years ago on my last huge block sanding project, you always want to check your work by using low light and shifting the model around to check for imperfections. 

 

 

Man, the crisp edges on those angles are soooooo satisfying. And this is with 180 grit! I can't wait until I can break out the higher grit stuff.

[Naryn]

Man, those angles are lovely!

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

Sanding, sanding, and more sanding. While taking a break last night, I was flipping through a book I have about modeling Tiger I and II tanks accurately (and just found out what it's going for an Amazon, wow) to maybe stir some ideas for my Macharius, and there's a model of a Tiger I "vorpanzer" prototype that looks remarkably different from most other Tigers in two ways. 

 

 

First, is the "vorpanzer" hinged armor plate just below the driver's viewport that could be swung down to provide additional armor to the lower glacis plate, which didn't make it past the prototype phase. Second, is the incredibly clean lines and lack of stuff covering most of the tank's outer surfaces. No tools, tow cables, spare tracks or road wheels, fire extinguisher, smoke launchers, gun cleaning gear, crew stowage, etc. It was a prototype after all, and didn't need all that stuff. 

 

Neat, but what's that got to do with my Macharius? Well, I think it solidified the feeling I've had that I was really starting to like the sleeker look of the tank without all of the 40k gubbinz on it. The tank hull had a good amount of these extra details but the turret is even worse and the contrast between the two is quite striking now. 

 

 

 

Now, I'm not going to leave the tank body this, um... nude? But I certainly won't be cluttering it up like how it was originally and I'm strongly considering de-cluttering the turret as well. Maybe it's a little known variant that dropped all that heavy armor from the track sections along with the sponsons to be a fast tank-killing ambush predator. Fast being a relative term for a vehicle this large, but I'd bet all that armor, the sponsons, and two less crew members would bring its weight down quite a bit. 

[Augustus b'Raass]

"[...] two less crewmembers [...]" ?

 

Ahem. 

Please don't overdo it with the decluttering. This is a 40k board after all, and we don't want things to get too realistic. I'm serious. Cluttering detail is what rocks so much in 40k. 

ALso, DAMN those angles are sharp! Can't wait to see the higher grit results. In fact, I can't wait to see you do your magic on this entire project.  

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

Fewer. My bad. In my grammatical defense, it was 4:25 in the AM and I was quite tired. 

 

I hear ya though, about the gubbinz being a big part of 40k. You can blame my scale modeling adventures at a young age for always wanting to bring a little more realism to the fantastical and soothe the voices in my head. At the very least, I'm probably going to remove the outlined section here from the turret so that I can add another hatch for the loaders and gunner.

 

 

 

Even real tanks that are much smaller than this with smaller crews had two hatches in the turret with the T-34/76 "Mickey Mouse" being a well-known example. The Macharius is supposed to have 4 people in that tiny turret. 

 

If I was going to get super scale model realistic on this thing, I'd be talking about how there's no way in hell that a mass-produced, cheap knockoff of a Baneblade stand-in would have room in that small turret for the breeches of two massive battle cannons and four crewmen. To give a real world example of something like this, when the British got hold of some US Sherman tanks in WWII, they put a longer, upgraded gun in it to take out the newer, more heavily armored German tanks and called it the Firefly. Problem was that the larger breech and recoil system of the bigger gun traveled so far back into the turret when fired that the radio equipment had to be mounted on the back of the turret in an armored box. Oh, and they also put a second hatch in the top so the gunner could get out of the tank faster in case of emergencies.

 

Considering how small the Macharius turret is, not counting the stowage bins on the back of it mind you, it's kinda ridiculous. But I'm able to clamp down on the OCD enough to let that go. 

[Augustus b'Raass]

haha no worries man, I just couldn't resist to use that GIF so appropriately. ;)

I hear ya re: the ridiculously small size of the turret - and on top of that, half of the turret is stowage! Just absurd. But we cannot expect much more from designers that haven't any real world experience or knowledge of real tanks and armament. And even I - who only knows the very basics - have only come to realize the asburdity of teh scale after years and years of looking at the 40k tanks while slowly gaining more knowledge. :D

[Gederas]

haha no worries man, I just couldn't resist to use that GIF so appropriately.

 

I hear ya re: the ridiculously small size of the turret - and on top of that, half of the turret is stowage! Just absurd. But we cannot expect much more from designers that haven't any real world experience or knowledge of real tanks and armament. And even I - who only knows the very basics - have only come to realize the asburdity of teh scale after years and years of looking at the 40k tanks while slowly gaining more knowledge.

To be fair, tanks, especially heavy and superheavy tanks, range between "hilariously cramped" to "why do we have all this space?".

 

Using WWII German tanks (because that's what the Macharius seems to be based on, aesthetically to me), the Tiger was very cramped for a tank of it's size with all the ammo and extra stuff stowage, whereas the Tiger II/King Tiger were quite roomy. The Maus was even more roomy (to the point where, iirc, they could have fit a decently sized coffee table for the crew inside of it)*

 

Also, if we're bringing up the turret size, it's even worse. As the fact that it has two barrels is the biggest issue for the turret's sizing. There's actually no space for the gun mechanics in the turret at all on the Macharius there because of the dual gun set-up. It'd be fine if that's the lascannon one, but that looks like the regular cannons. So the loader and breech for both guns would have to be in the turret.... Which uhh.... Doesn't work :lol:. For a dual-gun set-up that would work, you'd actually have to have a turret of a similar size to the Fellblade, scale-wise.

 

 

*Note: This is ignoring the Tank Destroyers based on Tigers, as the Jagdtiger was actually roomy enough for the crew of 6 to all be inside it comfortably, and I've read reports of it being big enough to fit multiple sleeping bunks inside of it.

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

Yeah, there's so much wrong with the gun design across all of 40k it's maddening, but the tank guns are especially bad. What do these 4 tanks have in common?

 

 

They all supposedly have 120mm main guns. And I even used the FW Vanquisher for the Leman Russ, which has a smaller barrel than the plastic model. 

[Quixus]

When did GW actually publish barrel diameters?

[Yosef Hausakluif]

And what did you use/ where did you get those shiny metal barrels for your project??

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

When did GW actually publish barrel diameters?

 

FW published the 120mm barrel size for the Battle Cannon main guns on the Macharius Vanquisher in the Siege of Vraks books. 

 

And what did you use/ where did you get those shiny metal barrels for your project??

 

The scale model world - models of real tanks and airplanes - has a vast array of 3rd party upgrades with tanks in particular getting real metal barrels for the guns, metal tracks that actually work and you have to assemble with a piece of wire holding each track link to the next one, and fenders and side armor skirts made out of thin brass sheet that are the correct thickness for the scale of the tank being just a few examples.

 

The barrels I have on this thing are specifically two of the 152mm ML-20SM L/29 gun for the Soviet Object 704 tank destroyer prototype in 1/35 scale. Not only were the gun barrels on this recast mess completely unusable (hopelessly warped with terrible mold slip), but I thought they were way too big for the tank and the size of the turret. The metal replacements were dirt cheap, around $5 each. I had no idea if they were even the right size for the Macharuis when I bought them, and it was a nervous 2 month wait on shipping from Poland, but was pleasantly surprised when the fit was just about perfect. 

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

At long last, the first trial run of the new track mechanics from the Panther kit, chopped up and rearranged to resemble the original Macharius. 

 

 

I immediately saw a possible problem that, for some reason, didn't occur to me while I was cutting and reassembling these parts. In this next pic, the red circle is where I plan on having a return roller (or several) to mimic the track layout of the original, and the orange is obviously the track. The green is where the track sits on the normal model. 

 

 

I knew the track arrangement would be different on my conversion but this is quite a bit more than I imagined. I'll come back to it in the morning with fresh eyes to see how I feel about it. 

[Majkhel]

Hmmm, with the current placement of the wheels, it seems like a lot of weight ends up at the back of the tank. It looks as if it might flip backwards, if you know what I mean.
Would you be able to add more wheels? Alternatively - place the existing ones higher and move them a bit to the rear, but I think you would still need at least one more wheel.

EDIT: Looking at the original Macharius, I see it has similar problem although the WWI-style shape of the tracks that slope down towards the rear helps a bit with this.

Edited July 21, 2020 by Majkhel

[Ryltar Thamior]

Very, very cool effort bringing both realism and aestheticism to 40k/a recast respectively. 

I must say, the breech issues in 40k tank turrets are a serious problem for me as well - it's lead to such a significant impairment of my suspension of disbelief that I've just straight-up found myself pathologically unable to actually complete any armour builds as a result. The Taurox, for all its *considerable* faults, at least attempted to remedify this ... by placing the battle-cannon etc. in an exterior-to-turret mounting. 

As yet, I've been unable to find a really workable solution. Contemplating a Chimera, the best I could come up with was a remote-operated turret - removing the man affording *just* about sufficient space for an autocannon 

As applies th section on the turret you're contemplating removing - is tehre any indication what it is supposed to be there for ? Targeting mechanism perhaps ? Might be useful for an ambush predator 

[noigrim]

Virgin realist microgun

Vs

Chad thundercannon

[acrowsperch]

This looks sweet

[Yosef Hausakluif]

Thanks for the heads up about the barrels!

Looking forward to the next steps in your project.

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

Next up is making a larger block sander! The one I've been using for years was a leftover piece of plastic scrap and is a rectangle approximately 2 3/4" x 1 1/4" (72 by 33mm) and 3mm thick. Until this project I've never had a need for a larger block to sand with, but out came the old plastic scrap box and and we're on the way. 

 

 

I didn't need something immensely larger, but for proper sanding technique and keeping those angles sharp on the wide, flat panels, I went with 3 1/3" x 1 1/2" (85 x 38mm) with the same 3mm thickness. Here's the new one dressed in 400 grit wet/dry. 

 

 

And the low-light check after an hour or so of sanding underwater last night. 

 

[Hungry Nostraman Lizard]

I heard tanks, I came barging in. I love what you've done with the macharius so far. 

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

Fixed a new armor plate to the superstructure and filled in the majority of the space where the sensor thing was with superglue. 

 

 

Tamiya putty will be put over the top and sanded smooth, and after that, I'm going to start adding some of the details back on.