Friday, April 19, 2013

Scratch Building Rhino Tanks is Hard Work

     I've recently had some inspiration to work on my space marines. I'm going to need some Rhinos and Rhino chassis based tanks as well as a drop pod or two. I don't have a ton of cash to throw at miniatures and in all honesty 40k is a bit second rate for my priorities gaming wise. I've decided to try my hand at scratch building some Rhinos.There are plenty of templates on the internet for such things but I haven't really come across some that were detailed enough for my liking. Last year I picked up a Space Marines Rhino kit with the intent to use it solely for reference in scratch building and possibly to mold a few bits from it. I'm finally getting around to building something. I'm using foam core for the "skeleton" and plastic for sale signs as well as a bit of thicker plasticard that I had laying around. I started by getting all my foam core pieces and the plastic pieces for the tank sides cut for all 4 tanks and then assembled each side like this.



     After that I took all my foam core pieces that I cut for the tank's hull and assembled them with the tank sides to this point.




     At this point I decided to focus on a single tank so that I could learn from any mistakes I make and order of assembly problems in order to speed up building on the other three. I used some pretty thick plasticard to make the sides on this one. It was very tricky to cut and took way too long. I may come up with a different solution for the other three.



     Here are some pics of the first tank up to current progress. Most of the plasticard pieces are cut and glued into place but I have a fair bit of gap filling to do and some sanding. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the way it is coming along but not so pleased with how long it is taking me. Sheesh, I still have three more of these after this one's done.




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