Lab of Absurd MADNESS: Converting trash & toys into minis & also minis into other minis possibly

I’m going to find cheap crap and cut it up and glue it to other cheap crap and possibly paint it and otherwise deface it until I think I maybe passes for a sci-fi mini if you squint and are feeling generous.

Toys, models, old minis, plastic thingies, keyrings, gachapon, stuff in a dollar store, stuff in a hardware store…anything that triggers my quasi-pareidolia is fair game. I hope I won’t be lazy or too boring to endure. I have a cheap airbrush, some glue, cutty scraper things, clippers, a file, a lot of magnets, and I may be in a mild manic episode.

But what I can do is buy stuff and do stuff to that stuff and babble about it and take pictures with my phone. If you just end up seeing me color some gundam model a spotty red with a marker and put a “drill” where it’s hand should be, then I’m sorry.

I think what we’ll mostly be dealing with is ” Oh that person glued some popped off DUST and AT43 weapons to that Funco Pop from a video game, and he’s painted about a quarter of it brown he ran out of that brown and tried to remix it but failed so really it’s two browns. Oh and  that’s a Klingon Empire sticker from the original Star trek reruns. Right. Well. Yes.”

I also have several 3D printers but until I have the room to set them up properly that is another story, mostly about some boxes with 3d printers nestled in them.

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STRAIGHT FROM THE JUNK YARD:  ERSATZ KNIGHTS

40K has knights, their equivalent to Battlemechs or mecha, and the standard knight kit costs about $130 US from discount stores and has quite a few pieces. BUT, what if you you were an old school trash-picking proxying sort of person who was around back in 1988 or so and you want something like a knight on your table made of…detritus mostly…what can you do?

1. You can look for used built or partially built knights on sale locally or on EBAY
PROS: Saves you time, maybe some money
CONS: Might need to remove thick paint/glue or It might be a scam or a “Craig’s List ambush”.

2. You can find a good looking stl file online and try to print one which is not as easy as you want it to be but it can be done.  Thingiverse!
PROS: You can learn a valuable skill
CONS: You may be humbled & scourged by a cat -o-nine-tails called frustration

3. You can find something similar/close that gets cleared out in online sales like Privateer Press’s Warmachine Colossals and then build them “wrong”
PROS: Kind of the right shape if a little bit short.
CONS: Not always available. Lots of looking, somewhat less finding

4. Go find a toy or model kit that has nothing to do with your game and glue cool stuff to it and see what you get. Try to find cheap stuff.
PROS: You learn a valuable skill
CONS: You may become a hoarder or disappoint yourself and abandon modeling altogether or enter a scary & socially unacceptable territory where you see some gum under a table that has hardened into an interesting shape and want to build something around it and show to appalled & terrified strangers in a gaming venue of some sort.

I have already done 3, and got stuff like a Cryx & Cyriss colossal on sale for $30 or $40 each, all plastic, and a Cygnar and Menoth colossal for $50 ea. that were resin and metal. I have also got very cheap Dreamforge Leviathans because Mark Moondragon of Dreamforge is cleaning out his warehouse right now and holding a crazy sale to do it with. I bought 9 28mm leviathans and 10 15mm ones and some 28mm plastic Russian WW2 troops from the Wargames Factory lines, a couple of Eisenkern gun emplacements, and some add ons for that halftrack like ATV he was selling. So 3 is good. The big Leviathans are too big for Knights, and the 15mm are a little bit too small but it’s still a nice big robot on the battlefield towering over some teensy little 32mm doofus trooper.

I plan to do 2.  I might do 1 someday but today is NOT that day! I will not be getting shanked by a Craig’s List muderer in a well lit Denny’s parking lot anytime soon! No sir! No Ma’am! No Scary Boston Dynamics Robot seeking to rest control of Earth from the pitiful flesh things! Not me!

And then there is 4.  So let’s talk about 4. 4 is a good place to start because you can get fully assembled one piece stuff in the size you want for maybe $15 a pop. SEE WHAT I DID THERE? It’s already painted. Now it’s not official. You can’t take this to a 40K tournament. It’s just for fun. BUT I can get some of these things for as low as $8 on Amazon. Now you can’t get the fancier or rare ones for that, and you have to act while there is a glut of them or the price will go up.

Stuff I got from Amazon, between last summer and now, that I plan to make into “knights” with scare quotes so far: Funco pops from Titanfall 2, Fallout, and Overwatch, mostly the robotic stuff.

Right now they are 6″ tall vinyl figures in a box but eventually I hope to paint them and pull them apart and glue crap to them to make them….different.

BTW two of these, marked with green dots in the picture, are significantly more expensive now than when I bought them months and months ago, when they were $15 ea.  I got the Wrecking Ball(s) for $12 ea. Diva for $15. The Fallout 3-legged combat robots were $14 ea. Bastian was $9 and Orisa was $12.

I ordered a bunch of Dreamforge stuff on clearance so check out the site if you’ve always wanted a Levianthan Crusader (he’s already all out of Mortis Leviathans) in either 1/56 or 1/72 or some cheap Wargames Factory plastic WW2 russians. They have the weapon arms on sale too for the 1/56 leviathans. None of that stuff has arrived yet but I do have tracking on it so I assume it’s going out soon.