I Knew There Was Something

...that I'd forgotten to take into account when planning to modify all those cars to create matching sets of four.


At the moment I only have two of most weapons/turrets. I do still have enough machine guns/gatlings/tribarrels to make up one set of four, probably the "Fast 4WD" cars. Speaking of which, I realised last night that the plastic windscreen/windows insert from the one white car was a smoky colour whereas for the other three they were blue. So, I decided to take a quick look in the Hotwheels bin I'd found the others in on the way home to see if I could find a fourth silver car.

Success! Another homeless Hotwheels car successfully rescued and adopted into a loving home.

I might have adopted one of his friends as well...

The new silver Fast 4WD has been disassembled and stripped. I took this pic of the nine cars that had already been stripped:

As I said earlier, I can probably do a matching set of four Fast 4WDs. I should also be able to do the fifth (with different armament) and the pick-up. That should actually be more manageable for a weekend of painting.

The rest (and future cars) will have to wait until my orders from Sgts Mess and GZG come in.

More Oil Slicks & More Goodies

I was right. The red card of frustration was for my Figures in Comfort order. As well as the foam trays, I had also ordered some FiC and Litko tokens:

These will be for marking vehicle fires and "kills" during games.

During my lunchbreak today I sprayed the bases which came yesterday from Warbases. That allowed me to do a little bit of work this evening - I've splatted ink/gloss gel mix to make up another 21 oil slick markers.

I've also carried on with stripping the eight cars I disassembled yesterday. The nail polish remover seemed to be working very slowly on the silver and black cars. Frustrated, I decided to try something different. It worked spectacularly well, but I did wonder if it had been helped along by the initial acetone bath and scrub. So, I decided to conduct a little experiment - another car got disassembled and the metal body was dumped into the new product without having first been exposed to the acetone. Here are the results of a 90 minute soak and a gentle scrub (and rinse):

"What is this wonder product?" I hear you ask. It's this:

It's meant to be used neat, but that's for stripping household paint and varnish. For my purposes I've diluted it to about 50%. It's more of a suspension than a solution. It's much quicker and more effective than the nail polish remover, so I'll be using this from now on.

Of course, this means that I've now got 9 cars to mess around converting tomorrow and painting over the weekend.

Things That Go Crunch

That was the title of the scenario that Simon had dreamed up for our game of Gruntz last night.

The background:

NSL Exploratory Station Wolfgang had suddenly gone offline 4 weeks ago. A routine resupply vessel landed there 2 weeks ago and had also not been heard from since. Frau Hauptmann Pfeiffer has been tasked to lead an investigatory mission to find out what had happened and to recover the data core from the station. Leading her elite grenadier troop, she landed just outside the station perimeter and found...



.."Xenos Ma'am, farsands of 'em!"

The station was overrun with big and small bugs. Simon also had 6 spawning points and every turn another big bug or pack of drones would appear at one of them.

None in this pic - a pack of drones wiped out by heavy firepower and some good old HE

But another pack took out one NSL squad in a close assault...

Oh crap - huge bugs with huge bioweapons! But my commander has rushed to the station to download the data core

Another pack of drones almost obliterated

and another

The problem with games like this is that you get so engrossed that you forget to take pics. By this time, my commander was dead, as were her two bodyguards who had retrieved the data and made it to the VTOL pad only to be wiped out by a giant bug.

The dead pile

About to be dead #1

About to be dead #2

About to be dead #3

"Frau Hauptman Pfeiffer ist tot. Unser zug ist tot. Nuke! Nuke! Nuke!"



With hindsight, taking a platoon of power armour troops, mainly specialists and no vehicles wasn't the wisest choice, but it made for a fun game. Equipping them with full-auto capable SAWs, grenade launchers and heavy missiles was a good idea; having some with plasma rifles wasn't such a good idea. Besides, it was about time Simon won against me.


Purchasing Update:
1) The Warbases order came today. I'll be taking them to work to hit with texture spray during my lunchbreaks.
2) I got a red card of frustration today as well. I think it's the foam trays and Litko bits I ordered from Figures in Comfort. I'll be collecting it on the way home tomorrow.
3) I've placed an order with GZG for some more 6mm turrets and a couple of their 25mm figures to see how they work with the Hotwheels size cars.
4) I've also ordered some machine guns and bits from Sgts Mess.


Workbench Update:
This evening I've drilled the rivets out of the four Fast 4WD cars and the four black ones that I bought on Saturday. The metal bodies are in the stripping pot at the moment. I'm hoping to get them stripped, modded and primed before the weekend so that I have plenty of time on Saturday and Sunday to do the painting. That will give me three sets of four matched vehicles for Car Wars "Amateur Night" or Divisional events.

Saturday Workbench

I've had a reasonably lazy day today, but still got some bits done on the various counters I'll need for 3X Car Wars.

Some more paint-spray markers and the first batch of oil slick markers.

I've also placed a couple of orders:
* more 3" x 1.5" bases from Warbases
* some foam trays and Litko flame markers from Figures in Comfort
* somethings from Amazon, one of which was inspired by a comment from Dannoc

Some goodies I'd bought on Ebay arrived this morning:

These are Micro Machines and should scale well with the 3X cars.

Oh, and I might just have bought some more cars this morning...

The four black cars will be for another set of "Amateur Night" vehicles; the three silver ones will also be for an "Amateur Night" set (I've got a white version already - these were a very lucky find while rummaging in the Hot Wheels bin). The odd three will be for "Team Pink".

I forgot to mention yesterday that I'd received a delivery from SnM Stuff of Model Air and Game Air paints (including pink!) and a crown cap for my Iwata Neo airbrush.

A lot of my day has been spent printing out various Car Wars PDFs.

Smoking Is Bad For You

No, not a public health warning - this post is to show the smoke markers I've made up for 3X Car Wars:

I'll probably need a lot more of these than the paint-spray markers. I'm going to need to order some more 1.5" x 3" bases from Warbases...

This weekend I plan to do up some oil slick markers and try to find some bits to use for mines and spikes.

Paint Spray Markers for Car Wars

Just to fill you in on why I've been a little quiet since the weekend:

Monday night - Went to see Mad Max: Fury Road after work. No real plot and not much dialogue,, but who cares? There are trucks, buggies and spiky cars; explosions and flame throwers; pretty much non-stop action in the post-apocalyptic wastelands. Did I mention trucks, buggies and spiky cars; explosions and flamethrowers? I did? Well, it's worth mentioning again. Especially the totally mad truck with a Humongous (did you see what I did there?) sound system with drummers and a guy in a leotard playing a guitar which is also a flamethrower.

Tuesday night - felt off-colour so didn't do anything workbench-wise.

Wednesday night - went to my first Labour Party meeting for a few years as it was nominations for the Party's London Mayoral candidate. It was good to catch up with comrades I hadn't seen for a long time and amazing to see how many new faces there were. When I got home it was too late to do anything on the workbench.

This evening - I'd been suffering streaming eyes and running nose all afternoon, so I picked up some hayfever tablets (Loratidine) on the way home and took one. They're not meant to be thr drowsy ones, but they did knock me out for an hour or so when I got home.

However, I have finally managed to get some workbench stuff done - gluing the pink-ish stained cushion stuffing onto bases for use as paint-spray markers.

I think they've come out quite well. I've made up a black/grey ink mix and dunked some stuffing in that to stain overnight. That will be for use as smoke markers.

I'll need more smoke markers than paint markers (they hang around for much longer in the game). I'll also need some to go on flaming oil slicks. I'll also want some smaller bits of smoke to indicate cars that are on fire.

Four More Autodueling Cars

My Hopes were fulfilled - I did finish the four Mercs just before midnight. Here are some pics of the finished cars:

I'm not sure about the black-lining, particularly on the lighter colours. I might try something different next time - doing the black lining after the primer and before the basecoats as a form of pre-shading.

That being said, I've got four very nice identically armed cars for sponsored pro autoduels or maybe amateur night at a generous arena.