Master of the forge / Techmarine

I am not to far along but I started finally painting this guy he is the old metal model that you used to have to order from GW's website exclusively. Not sure if it is still that way but I would assume there is a fine cast of this as it is still a nice looking figure. 

Terrorgheist

Yes I know this looks a lot like a zombie dragon... in fact it is. When I bought the kit I knew it would be unlikely that I would buy a second due to cost so I decided to build the zombie dragon as I liked it better look wise but still play it in game as a terrorgheist. Given the chance  I would jump on building a proper terrorgheist but at all most 60$  its low on my list of things to buy. anyway there is much painting to do on this still but the skin on the wings is mostly done I may add a little light gray drybrushing to the black parts to define them a bit better but I will have to see when the bones get there final color and see if they wings still need a bit more excitement.  

Fantasy ahoy! Vampires VS. Lizard men

Ok due to recent interest among my circle of friends it's off to fantasy land we all go. The plan is to start playing Warhammer fantasy and we are starting at 1000 points. Witch is a nice step up from the 500 - 750 or so we used to play. The above twelve models are what I need to paint to get my self to a fully painted army at the 1000 point level. 

I must warn you we have not played for a LONG time so you will spot A TON of rules we messed up. For this first game you will see below my buddy mike and I messed up  more rules then we got right but it was still a blast!   

 I forgot to take a picture of the set up so in stead I got the end of the first half  the only thing you miss seeing is a 5 man unit of saurus cav it was right in fount of my terrorgheist but they got wiped out from the death screech attack from the terrorgheist. my vampire also managed to blow him self and some skeletons he still has one wound but damn magic can really mess over even your own army.   

 the second half of the turn had one of the large saurus blocks charge the terrorgheist they then lost combat and where driven off the board. I also lost a few zombies  from some shooting and I believe some skink priest magic. 

 Ok I admit my recall of some of this is fuzzy I should have written it closer to when we played.... Oh well I believe I charged the skinks on the right flank I then challenged his skink chieftain with my vampire. I thought this was going to be a smack down I mean hell I have the vampire power dread knight so my weapon skill was eight so how could I loose.... needless to say I lost so I spent the rest of the game crumbling my army at the start of every turn.  I think the terrorgheist screeched at the other block of saurus and I don't think it did much this time. 

 This turn the lizard men turned it around quite a bit the saurus charged my zombies and the skinks on the left flank charged my corpse cart. I lost both of those combats but I did win the ongoing combat with the skinks on the right flank and almost had them run off the table.

 Crumbling is starting to really damage my army now on top of that zombies suck and are only good for holding up a flank for a few turns. This is the turn I learned that lesson by charging my hex wraiths into the rear of the saurus block and still loosing the fight because killing 10+ zombies a turn and wining combat that way is rather easy 

 This half the lizard men wiped the zombies out and causing the hex-wraiths to die to loss of combat 

 I charged my skeletons into the back of the saurus and won the combat and run them down also the terrorgheist finished off the skinks that rallied right at the board edge.   

the last unit of skinks got my flank seance I over ran the saurus 

 I moved my terrorgheist up to ready for the flank charge on the next turn

ongoing combat....

 and the terrorgheist crumbles due to the general being dead  and so died my hopes..

the last half of the last turn saw me finished off and the lizards standing victorious with there kroxigor and three skinks. It was a great game that came down to the wire at the end and we had a blast working our way threw the rules for the first time.     

Space Marine breaching squad

An idea struck me as I was paging threw the new codex. Well more accurately a way to use an old idea came to me. I have wanted to run a breaching squad seance reading the Horus heresy books and seeing how the Imperial fists fought ship to ship with squads of men with large shields and bolters. It's something I thought I  would do with vanguard vets at one point but they can't take bolters and they can't take special or heavy weapons. But reading the new codex opened my eyes to a different path. Legion of the damned! I don't know why I never thought of it before but they are armed like a normal tatical squad but have a 3++ save like they have a storm shield and seeing as they can't take anything that would give them a additional weapon to get the 2ed melee attack I don't see any rule conflicts with WYSIWYG.

these are the forge world breaching squad models not my own but they are smiler to what I plan on building . I think I will out fit the squad with a melta gun and a heavy flamer prehapts even a powerfist for the Sargent.

so what do you all think? am I insane or am I on the right tract to fielding a really well  themed unit?
   

How to light up your tanks!

(Sorry for taking so long posting this I had this half written last week but it's just crazy around hear right now and I don't have as much time to do this stuff as I used to. At some point soon I will have more time for the blog again)

OK I am not sure how is best to present this so I am going to start off with how to set up a LED circuit then I will try to show how I mounted my lights in my rhino.

when you are setting up your lights you need to look at what you want light wise and what parts you can get as there is no pre set voltage all LED's need and if you don't know you cant order the rest of what you need.
so for the example I am using I will be using two 3mm White LED that uses 3.4V and two 3mm flashing red LED uses 3V at 20ma  we should also look as how we want to power this and seeing it is a cheep hobby project one nine volt battery should do (nice 9v connectors are cheep)  the only down side is that in choosing this supply you have to make sure you are running in parallel not in series.
if you hook them up in series you have to add up the voltage from each LED and sense we have four that take up three volts or more they would need a 12V or greater power supply.

 But by hooking them up in parallel they each get the full 9v from our battery.  

any way now that we know our power supply will work and we know what we are powering we can start on our Ohm's law equation...   Behold the mighty Ohm's triangle!! with it we can balance out our circuit and find out what our missing piece is

OK we know we are useing a 9v power supply and we are using LED's that need 3v or so at max. To make sure we don't shorten there life lets run them with 2.5v that should make sure they never burn out in our carefully painted modal. so 9-2.5= 6.5 so we need a resister that will eat up 6.5V 

and we know we want to have a flow of 20ma to the led's from the battery so we need to see how much we need to resist the flow

Now we do the division and get 325

so we know we need a resistor of 325 or slightly better these are 330 and will do just fine

(NOTE: if you don't want to do any of the above calculations there is an app you your phone called ElecrtoDroid and it has an LED resistor calculator you can just punch your numbers into. But I would jump what ever it says up a bit as it is giving you the absolutist minimum resister you can get away with if you want your LED to last go up one or 2 standard resister sizes to make it last)

    last but certainly not least we need a way to control this little circuit. you could just disconnect the battery when you don't want the lights on but who wants to do that when you can hide a nice little switch some where and make your set up a little more slick. I like These dip switches they are easy to hide  you will also need a bit of wire this works and a place to hook everything into is also help full I like these and you can trim them after you build your circuit later  I suppose it bares mentioning that you need a soldering iron get something with higher wattage it is only a few dollars more then the low wattage ones and will work better for you if you want to keep doing this kinda thing.
you also need solder  thin is better you are making small connections so if you want any control you only want a small amount flowing into you're connection at a time.

Now you have a small pile of junk lets turn it into something useful for you 

first set your switch into the back of the board then add in the 2 resistors set them so that one end connects to each switch and the other is off set to a different row to make it easier to solder the wires to them.

Next solder the connection for the resistors that connect to the switch and also solder the red positive wire from your 9v snap connecter across both of the other connectors for the switch.

  Now its time to add some wire to your LED's the length of witch will be determined by where you are using them for a Rhino  4.5 - 5 inches works well if you wanted to get them down to the end of say a Valkyrie wing you will need more just look at where you want to mount your switch board and how far it is from where you are mounting your LED's  you should also note that the longer bit of wire of an LED is always the positive side so keep the wires the same as the rest of your positive wires (red normally) it just keeps things simple that way.

Well this came out a bit blurry but the idea is that you need to clip the LED leads short so that you can both keep them from touching and let them flex when installed in your tank or plane or what ever you are adding them into. 
 

seance this is one of the shots that actually shows the solder fairly well it will be a descent example of what your solder connections should look like they should be shiny and smooth if they are lumpy you added to much solder and if they are gray and rough them you got a cold joint and should remelt it to ensure they make a good connection. If you added to much solder you will need either Desoldering braid or Vacuum Desoldering tool. I use the braid because well that is what I have on hand but basically you just lay the braid over the joint that you wish to remove solder from and press the soldering iron onto the top of the braid and it will wick the solder into the braid and away from where it is currently 

Bam! all four done

I am placing my LED's together seance that is how they fit into the headlight bracket so I have the chance to save some space and wire by soldering the negative wire to both LED's at one time and it has the bonus of making them form a nice solid line and less likely to touch each other and short out if there is any chance your wires will touch make sure to glue the wire down to keep it from moving or add some heat shrink tubeing

hear is both set of wires finished and blurry as hell.....

 find your self a good place to connect all the negative wires together you don't even have to add them to the perm board technically but I find that it keep's things cleaner if they are all in one place.
I poked all three threw the board in a row then placed them down across each other and soldered them all in the line you see above.

 The next step is to connect all the positive wires from the same color LED's to each of the two sides of the resistor leads that are left currently unsolder-ed  this one I believe is the 2 white lights

now repeat with the red blinking ones on the bottom with the last resistor lead  make sure both of the red wires from them connect cleanly and wile you are at it check all the other connections to ensure nothing is touching that should not be. if you don't you might have a short that could fry your battery or your LED's or both.

All finished

yep the white LED's work fine

and so do the red ones

     Now its just one to normal modeling stuff that your guys are all ready good at I wish I had something to install it in as an example but I lack  anything that would work so hear is some shots of my completed rhino  that should give you some ideas on mounting the switches and lights

  

 
   

    

Space Marine preorders are up go get em!

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/armySubUnitCatsLarge.jsp?catId=cat440160a&rootCatGameStyle=wh40k

well after looking over what we actually got  I am surprised by what I want from the list and what was kinda disappointing.

     The command figures look nice but both the captain and the librarian are mono pose plastic and 30$ so you can count me out on them.

    As much as I like seeing the Imperial fists on the cover of the codex I cant see paying 115$ for a book that has no more content then its 58$ "normal" counter part

    Ok enough with the negative the rest of the release I am loving the new sternguard they are nice looking and come with  two of each combie and both a heavy bolter and heavy flamer that is plenty for me I am not the kind of person that spammed 10 combies in a squad so i will have plenty with this kit. The new tactical squad is all i could want minus a few more heavy weapon options . Tho this kit raises the question with the sternguard kit if the tactical Sargent can have a combie that is a base bolter half with 4 different tops why where the sternguard ones done as solid pieces?

    Ah I all most forgot the the new vanguard vets they look great and have nice options in the kit the only question for me is can I find a place to use them in my army....


   any way that is my two cents now to wait for next week and actually getting my hands on the book.... 

Light up Imperial Fist Rhino

 all lights off

 just head lights

 

blinking turn signals (you will have to trust me they blink nicely)

next to the old one 

one last shot with the old rhino