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Thursday, August 28, 2014

6mm Scratch Building WTF?


Hello there gentle readers.

If,like me, you love scratch building you might be thinking "well 6mm is to small to do any scratch building so it's not for me."
Well I'm here to tell you nothing could be further from the thruth. To be honest I used to think the same thing. But then, once I tried it, I found that it's actually easier to create something for the smaller scales because you can afford to be a lot more fuzzy with your details. Now I'm not saying you should just glue some matchsticks together, squeeze your eyes halfway shut and call it whatever you like. But it is a fact that in 6mm if you want to make say a door,you can just cut a small rectangle and not bother with a doorknob or hinges and it will still look good.
Suddenly projects which I wouldn't even have dreamt of tackling in 28 or even 15mm  seemed a lot less daunting and I actually found myself building more things more often.
I think I've built more 6mm stuff than any other 2 scales put together in both terrain and vehicles.
But don't take my word for it, here's some pictures.

Basically everything but the 2 buildings in the top left corner was scratch built



A set of watertowers from some bits 'n bobs

a VTOL-dropship

This force of quad legged walkers was also completely scratch built / kit bashed together in about an afternoons time.


Still don't believe me?
Here, let me throw in a little tutorial for one of the walkers for you then.

First we'll start with a list and picture of the materials used.

- One 15mm backpack from National Cheese Emporium.
- a length of iron wire.
- some plastic tubing(from a q-tip).
- a toothpick.
- an old giftcard.
- a piece of 2mm scrap plastic(5mm wide).
- a gatling gun from my bitsbox.



Cut everything down to size. The only things I really measured were the grey plastic bits which, together with the backpack, are going to form the main hull of the walker.The rest I just sort of measured by eyeball.



Next bend the wire pieces into a kind of a flattened S-shape and thread on 3 pieces of the cottonbud tubing. Glue the backpack, piece of thoothpick and the three pieces of 2mm plastic together...             ...realise the smallest piece shouldn't even be on there, remove it and cut out the 2 small pieces you see lying underneath the main hull.



Now it is just a matter of glueing the giftcard bits onto the sides of the main hull and, when that's dry, insert the leggs into the slots thus created. Finish by glueing on the weapon and add the q-tip tubing rings to the back as jumpjets.



So there you have it, one 6mm walker ready for a coat of paint and then off to battle.
As usual I'd love to hear what you think and if you've done any 6mm scratch building yourself be sure to drop a link in the comments below.

Game on,
Stroezie.

6 comments:

  1. Very nice stuff. I like the buildings quite a lot. I really like the water towers.

    Thanks for sharing.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the compliments.
      The water towers are some of my personal favourites too. It was one of those builds where all the bits just naturally came together and at the end of it , without any real effort, in all humility you get that feeling "Yeah, I'm good!"

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  2. Great work! Love the scratchbuilt walkers!

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  3. "and not bother with a doorknob or hinges and it will still look good." The horror of such a thing!

    :P

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  4. Just found your blog, friend. Have to say, that quad-walker scratch build is truly inspiring. Hope to adapt the method to making gundam-style mechs for use as fighters in full thrust. Well done!

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  5. Your walkers are amazing. I love scratch building in 6mm myself. I recently made the decision to mainly do 6mm wargaming. I dabble in 15mm though. Check out my blog for some of the 6mm conversions I have done.
    Www.nerdwargamer.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete