1/10/2008

Gathering Materials

More on building the Warlord Titan: Unfortunately, in the late 80's I never picked up "Battle Titans" from Games Workshop. If I remember right, it came with sprues to make at least 6 Warlord Titans! The reference would come in handy now. Research online has had very limited results, and old catalogs and codexes I have only give a glimpse at the original form of the Warlord.

I'm not very fond of the most recent titan models for Epic, and even the majority of the illustrations. Their lines are too clean. There's something less 40K about them and more BattleTech-esque in my opinion. But the illustration in the the Apocalypse rules seems to be a happy compromise bridging the old and the new so I've been using that as a rough guide. My circumstances prevent me from doing actual workbench/workshop level crafting of this Titan, so out of necessity, my Titan's final form will no doubt lean more towards the older models.

So looking around the bits boxes, the garbage, the hidden corners of smashed and broken things at work what do you use to build a Warlord Titan? Things like this:


Legs: The legs I lucked out on as far as a decent set of parts. I had a Star Wars game from '99 that replicated Darth Maul's probe droid on a stand. The legs of that stand have an industrial, landing gear look to them, so I married the four of them into two and made them the basis for my Titan legs. For the lower greeves, yup, Folgers Coffee cans. It'll make sense later if you can't see it. For the beginning of the hips, again Star Wars TPM came through for me and I used these old candy containers that were available at the time. I just had to pop off the sculpted images of Palpatine and Jar Jar.

WEAPONS: The Volcano cannon and the laser blaster made the most sense to me for the "arms" Again, hurray for Darth Maul. I happened to have a broken Maul light saber that I couldn't bear to throw away and lucky thing. After attaching it to an archaic dashboard cell phone holder and with minor detailing, it's now the basis for my volcano cannon! The cell holder has an awesome articulate arm on it that will make fixing the weapon to the body a breeze.

The Laser blaster was deliberately made to resemble all the other lascannons in the game using various sizes of pvc pipe and mounting in a used motor oil container. The one pictured here has been modified already with a much shorter barrel; in this form, I was on my way to making a Catachan Las-carbine.


The Hips: Wooden slats I found on a pile at work which glued, screwed and stacked fit well into the candy holders. The Blue crotch? That's an old mushroom container from the produce section. And they call me mad...


Not pictured, the head: The head gave me real problems and was my first stumblng block. I looked at cyborgtrucker's blog a hundred times, and looked at illustrations and pics and art, new and old models... I just don't have the time, and mostly the skill to to do some of the things I've seen out there. But digging through one of my bits boxes, I figured it out. When I started collecting Orks my buddy gave me an old Humvee model he wasn't going to use. The curves on this thing are very reminiscent of the illustration of the Warlord head's many variants. So I carved the hummer in half and folded it on itself, kit-bashing like crazy to hide the holes and gaps.

Can I bring this pile of garbage together and make something table worthy out of it?