No game night this week seeing as how Al has the lurgy and him being one of Pappa Nurgl’s special one’s no one wants to go near him. So this has given me an extra night to work on finishing off the Grot Bots before I head off across the pond next week. The main thing that I needed to get completed was to get the heads built and I was pleasantly surprised how smoothly this seemed to go. Like everything else on this project it’s been a fiddly job but as I’ve not really made any changes to the design it was just a case of cracking on with the work. Some quite fiddley elements to these with the jaws taking a bit of balancing to get them to line up properly. Then once the build work was complete it was time for the soul destroying job of adding the jags / teach to the heads. This was a case of cutting oblongs out of platicard and then cutting these into the requisite shapes so that they could all be glued on.
The heads were the final part of the build process that I had planned in and it was then time to start adding the final details in the form of bolts, lots of bolts. I played around with a couple of options and in the end decided less was best for the heads in that I only used one bolt for each tooth. Then a couple to attach the jaw to the rest of the head along with a couple on the top of the head. That turned out to be twelve for each head that I think has worked out quite nicely, with a good balance of adding the details to the model but not having it looking to cluttered.
With the heads complete the last step was to add the final details to the bodies, in the form of yet more bolts and the drilled out piece of the chest vent. Again this all seem to flow very nicely and much to my relief I didn’t run out of bolts. I’ve tried to keep the balance between adding detail that breaks up the very bland plasticard whilst not making everything look to cluttered. I’ll let you be the judge of how well I succeeded on that front but I’m happy with how things have turned out.
They were the last piece of the puzzle and with them complete I had all of the key pieces I needed to be able to put things together. Now I’ve not looked back to see just how many weeks this project has been running over but I have to say when I look the number of parts it’s resulted in, all bagged up on my work desk, it certainly comes as something of an anti-climax. On an initial look all I have to show for all that time and effort is four small plastic baggies. Yes, that’s right just four baggies, one for the heads, one for the bodies and then one each for the arms and legs.
Granted that once you open them up and put everything in one place for a close look you can see the amount of detail there is. Just glad I’m not planning on trying to make a whole army out these guys or I’d never be finished. Although I may try and make a few more just to try out some more ideas I’ve had whilst building these.
Now as I said at the start I was planning to head across the pond to the good old US of A for a break in Chicago followed by my trip to Adepticon. But unfortunately that is now not going to happen. The first nail in the coffin was that my flight was due to go from Manchester to the Amsterdam and then on to Chicago. With a travel ban on anyone traveling form a Schengen country that meant I could use that flight so I have spent a few day trying to work out an alternative route as travel from the UK is still allowed. Then yesterday I got the e-mail for the event organisers to say the they had taken the decision to cancel the event for this year. Now whilst I’m gutted that they have had to do this I would like to give them my support and understanding about why they have done this. The whole aim of the event is for people to meet up and have a good time not to meet up and the possible get very ill and pass that illness onto others. So they have done the right thing for all concerned even though that puts lots of people, both attendees, exhibiters and staff in an awkward situation but they rightly point out that this is for everyone’s benefit. I’m just hoping that my insurance will cover this but I’m not going to worry about it at the moment and just enjoy the rest of the weekend. I have a bottle of spiced rum to take the edge off things and will work it all out next week.
So that brings this eventful week to an end. I hope you have all had a better week and that you have good things planned for the week. For me I’ve decided to start a new Warcry band so if they turn up in time I may have something to show you all next week. Or I may just spend the week feeling sorry for myself and not get anything done. Either way will have an update for you next week, even if it’s a short one, so until then keep safe and have fun.
