What follows is a step-by-step report about building and painting my VSF Galvanic Lightning Cannon, entered in the Lead Painter's League Season 1 in July 2008. Yes, it's pretty long since I announced a report, first I had some delay due to other engagements, then I might just simply have forgotten it; my age shows again.
Anyway, better late than never, so let's start with
MaterialsThe tractor started as "Stormtroopers's Water Tanker" from the Disney ATLANTIS toy line shown below. My construction was heavily influenced by a similar conversion made by the great
Herb Gundt from
HG WALLS, unfortunately no longer online with his massive site of beautiful terrain making and conversions of all kind.
For the gun I used two sets of these laboratory things by Ral Partha, don't know the exact name; it could be used to build kind of a Dr Frankenstein laboratory. Two of the blocky things on the right were used for the gun body, filed flat and glued together back by back.
Another item provided the idea for the smaller tractor gun: I had scratchbuilt this little gun years ago for a colonial steamer project which was never realized (till now at least ..). As you see, it was constructed from many parts of my scrapboxes, among them some 1/72 scale 8.8 gun parts. I really love this kind of
"creative gizmology" as a fellow modeller called it once.
Construction of the gun tractorThe following pics show the main conversions of the Atlantis toy and building up cabin and main body from plasticard. The rotating open gun turret was constructed over a leg part from AMT's StarWars AT-AT walker (a plethora of useful parts, might be a bit blasphemic for collectors ...
) and decorated with rivet strips cut from the very handy riveted sheet of plasticard from Antenocitie's workshop.
http://www.barrule.com/workshop/products.htmlDriver's compartment and body were designed quite square and bulky, as I was after that destinct WWI-look of heavy and clumsy looking machinery, and also riveted heavily, as you never can have too many rivets on VSF-vehicles, can't you?
At a later stage I added a lot of details like tools and tool boxes, ammo boxes and an ammunition rack for the turret gun, the front smoke stack (from a gun barrel and a scale ship's part) and, yes, you guessed it; more rivets.
The machine gunner from Foundry's Boer War MG set was slightly modified to change the head position at bit, the weapon converted to fit into the MG-mount on the cabin top and a bullet belt added.
Construction of the Lightning CannonI had some nice looking white metal heavy wheels laying around, got them from a UK trader who always has his booth at the Intermodellbau (one of the largest modelling shows in Europe). The gun carriage was cut from 3 mm styrene, detailed and heavily riveted, this time with my trusty punch-and-die-set. I used some brass rod for the axle and decorated the gun's body with etched brass parts from scale railway accessories. This gives the gun a nice victorian touch.
Main construction problem with the gun was to get all the quite heavy white metal barrel parts straight amd in line, and on top everything had to be build sturdy enough to stand the usual wargame handling. In the end I pinned just every piece with long pieces of silver wire and glued with two part epoxy. Till now the gun had seen some handling through our games at shows and the barrel kept straight. I added some more handrails and smaller details, and the gun was ready for priming.
One of the gunners got an extra long (for keeping electrical hazards away ...
) firing mechanism into his hands, and then everything was primed a light grey colour and painting started.
PaintingPainting was a quite straightforward process: the tractor got some light airbrushed coats with Vallejo Model Air colour, using two different greens, the gun was airbrushed black, followed by brass hand painting. Then some washes with sepia and dark brown mixes with some added future-like fluids and alcohol for better spreading, some drybrushing and pastel work for that grime and dusted finish. Before adding pastels the pieces got two coats of varnish, one gloss and one flat. I let the pics speak for themselves, and if you would like to know more about any detail techniques or colours, please just ask.
I really enjoyed building this VSF artillery set and had the first time opportunity to test the Vallejo Model Air line of airbrush colours. I was quite impressed about their good flowing abilities and colour range, and just use them currently for my next VSF project ...
This time it's no tank, gun, robot or airship, but a steam-powered victorian harbour crane! So stay tuned ...
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April 25, 2024, 10:18:10 AM
July 12, 2008, 02:20:18 PM
