Tabletop

This has been a week with a lot of painting, a little casting, and a bit of thinking about future projects.

Painting

Finished Tank

Early in the week, I was able to wrap up my Schrek tank build, which gave me a chance to get some experience in basing. The base seen above was the third iteration, where I finally got the spacing between the dirt piles right. This allowed the tank sat on the base instead of floating above the rocks. I tried to match the base to the dirt on the bottom fenders, which helped paint the picture of this thing rolling through the mud during a battle.

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It’s been a pretty productive week, and I got a chance to try out a bunch of new things and get some ideas for future projects a bit outside my norm. Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to this week:

Magnets, Painting with Vallejo, and Basing

To make my growing Battletech collection a bit more modular (and to keep from making/buying too many minis) I have been toying with the idea of swappable turrets and weapons for my pieces. My recent Schreck Tank cast seemed like a good candidate to test this out.

Today, we’re going to take a 3d printed tabletop miniature and replicate it with a two part mold. This will speed of production of a part that would normally take two to three hours, and give us the freedom of different materials and colors.

Two part molds allow us to cast more complex shapes than a one part, or open-face, mold. This open face creates a flat surface on the piece we are making. Sometimes this is desirable, in the case of the hex base seen above. However, the tank base and turret have detail on both the top and the bottom, and the only way to preserve this detail is with a two part mold.