Scratchbuilding

This last couple of weeks have been a bit manic for me at work so not really found time to sit down and paint, I ended up working all weekend so didn't really have time to finish off the savage orcs I'm currently working on.  But because of the nature of the work I was doing I did have some downtime as things were getting pinged back and forward with a client so I put that to use constructing a pump wagon for my O&G army.

GW have only really made 2 pump wagon models, the current one which is all big spikes and massive wheels and doesn't really make any sense to me and the old 3rd ed one whith the spikey roller and 2 stories (though you could get it as just 1 level) of wooden platform.  I much prefer that model as it seems far more likely that it'd be something snotters could actually construct, it doesn't rely on anything particularly complex unlike the new one which looks like a serious bit of engineering.

The decision to scratchbuild was largely driven by the prices on EBay, the old style pump wagons kept consistently rising about £10 which given the simplicity of the model felt a little bit excessive for me.  So I pulled out some plasticard and some balsawood and started bashing one together.  A quick raid of my bits box turned up a number of wheels and I slapped these on the side and then went looking for bits to make up some shielding for the crew and also some stabby bits.  This brought me to my savage orc sprues I'd got a load off as part of some purchase (just the spares not actually any models) So I took the head of the big stabba as a nice large pointy ram and a couple of the spear heads as assitional blades.  These also have the benefit of being made of stone so felt more appropriate for the model again.  For protection there are a nice bunch of wooden shields which don't have any parts of the arms attached so I used a load of these off 2-3 sprues worth to add some protection all round the lower level of the wagon leaving the top deck open for the snotters to throw stuff off.  Possibly it could have done with a bit of something up there but this was in keeping with the origial model which was bare up top.