Back to Basics With Ralph

I have spent most of the new year trying to figure out out which of the multitude of Ideas I started last year to work on. I figured out I wasn't happy with many of them. So it is back to joyful Styrene basics, and conversions. Here is a conversion of GZG's 6-wheeled Utility Trailer for the Mini-Mule into a APC for Rebel Mini's "Sons of Thunder" and idea I have been kicking around for a while. I am inspired by some of Niklas Jansson's Art from the StarSword section of his website ANDROID ARTS, StarSword is his hommage to 40k. In the picture indicated it is the Squarish APC thumbnail.

In the Picture series we have Bob's cousin Ralph standing in as our Standard 15mm figure (note the base he is on is a 1.5mm thick 15mm round from Litko and he like Bob are left over from GZG's Assault Team pack.) and a leader figure from the "Sons of Thunder" infantry pack (Well, his base is a penny. I am slowly standardizing my core basing to pennies, which are cheaper than bought bases, and just a bit under 20mm in diameter).

The Vehicle (actually two Identical builds) is shown here being bulked up with pre-scribed Evergreen sheet and then sheeted with bits of the same. The next step is to clean-up the over hangs and joins in preparation for the detail layers. Clean-up consists of trimming down to the core desired shape then using a little of Squadron Green to fill any gaps. Followed with a rough sanding to even out the core shape. 

I use pre-scribed sheet as my base material in that it is fast to do core shape build up with it. Evergreen's "Sidewalk" comes in 1/8" through 1/2" increments, so each layer can be roughed out quickly with just a few snaps, with minmal tool work each layer. Sheet thickness is approx. 1mm and 3 layers is a approx. 1/8" thick. So in the core build resolution is generally 1/8" square pixel. Tools used here are fingers, clippers, Xacto knife, straight hemostats and generally a bit of emory board.

Choice of model was mostly the failure of another project, I got the Mini-Mule, the two trailers and a Wheeled MAWP to build a starport armed baggage train. It sounded neater than it looked. after a year of sitting on the paint desk in failure mode, the new idea struck. The MAWP will stay as-is, the Mini-Mule will get it's conversion once the APCs detail shapes are finalized.