Down and dirty hobby tips.

This week in Down and Dirty, i will discuss a few things that I do to make conversions.




One thing I do is not throw much out, usually when I am finished making a kit, i either retain the sprue the parts came on if there are a lot of parts remaining, or i cut all the remaining parts off. When an experiment in converting does not work as well as I wanted, I don't throw out the model, but carefully strip it down to components for reuse. This habit has meant that in the past, I have been able to give friends starting warhammer 40k a 1500-1750 point army made from my leftovers. These were not armies that looked like they came from someone's bitzbox either, but ones that got compliments, and gained more after those complimenting found out that they were mostly spare parts.

When you scratch build, you can find that you have an odd amount of material left after a cut, this is a more valuable resource than it appears.

Often, I have found that sometimes, components do now want to mate right, or that the base model has holes that need filling, or you want to add some small details, those off cut pieces of plasti-card work well for these situations and more.
For example, when you want to give your Ork battle wagon some extra flair, take the plasticard and cut it into irregular diamond shapes, add to a plow blade from an imperial tank, and you have a reinforced ram that is also a waaaugh mouth.

Other times, you have a good idea, and the scratch build comes out flat. Take some strips of offcut, trim them to uniform sizes and lengths, and add them as reinforcing bands, then add rivets using your preferred method, and you have a quick and dirty way to mask the scratch built parts of your model. this is enhanced if you add reinforcing bands to the base model too.

If you want to make a new vehicle entirely, having spare track, wheels, and " engine gubbins" will help immensely, especially when you have the main components built, but are stuck on details to add.

Well, that's about it for this week. Thanks to all of you reading our blog, please tell your friends about us, give suggestions for improvement/ things you want to see, etc.