I love the smell of Prometheum in the morning

While I am happy with the water effect, in hindsight I wish I had used a lighter shade of blue for the base and added more brown to the water. The last pour did have brown mixed with it but I don’t think it’s visible. Lesson learned for next time though and I certainly don’t think it spoils the piece.

And here it is combined with some of the Mantic Battle Zones scenery. I think it actually works really well with this, especially given that some of the battle zones stuff has a bit of height so the rig itself doesn’t look too out of place.

There’s been very little progress tonight but it still feels like there’s so much to show.  When I got home from work tonight, the PVA was completely dry.  This means I can start adding water effects! This is the exciting bit, even if it can take up to 48 hours to cure 🙁

Before pouring into the crater I poured it into a cup where I added about 4 drops of Citadel Incubi Darkness to the fluid, mixed it up a bit and poured it in.  At the moment the swirls look a little weird because it’s quite milky,  they will hardly be visible when it dries because it dries clear.

As there’s nothing much else to see beyond the manky water, I thought I might take the opportunity to show you just how big this thing is.

At the bottom you can see a 40k Imperial Knight.  On the lower walkway, locked in a duel to the death, are Darth Vader and Obiwan Kenobi.  Finally atop the platform on the heli-pad is a 1:48 scale HIND

Well, it’s been over 24 hours, 8 of them directly under a heat fan, and the PVA still hasn’t dried.  I wouldn’t mind but I didn’t add that much, it was a small enough amount that I still had to use a brush to spread it around and get coverage.  It’s starting to dry and you can really see the green swirls on the dark blue background.  However the water effect I am planning to use will need to wait until tomorrow.

So with progress on the crater not possible I decided to finish off the pipe structure. The pipe was made out of plastic pipe from a DIY store, the tank is half of a cistern float and the end pieces are one of the many connector types available for that type of pipe.  I glued the pipes to the upright using contact adhesive and then filled all around it.  The tank and ends of each pipe were painted Warplock Bronze and washed with Nilakh Oxide and the pipes with Leadbelcher, Typhus Corrosion and a Ryza Rust drybrush.  When you put the platform atop the legs the tank appears to be suspended from it.

With the drilling assembly glued in place it’s time to start building up a nice water effect.  To try and flatten the textured surface of the hardboard, I poured a layer of PVA glue into the crater.  Hopefully once it dries it will mask some of that texture before I start adding water effects.  To make it a bit more interesting I also added some splashes of Hexwraith Flame using a pipette and mixed it in to the glue to leave a swirly pattern;  this should be visible over the blue background when the PVA dries.

Update:

It’s now 18 hours since I poured the PVA glue into the crater and it’s not even close to dry.  It has started to dry a little because I can see where it has contracted.  I suspect that the temperature in the loft has dropped considerably since yesterday which is why it’s not drying properly.  Heat has now been applied.

Because the project was started so long ago, the first 8 parts are pretty much playing catch up.  However part 8 effectively brings the project up to date so I will switch format. Future entries will be progress updates as opposed to describing an entire sub-build.

It’s really starting to come together at this stage but that gaping hole in the middle needs addressing. After all it’s a Prometheum Rig and that massive crater didn’t happen on its own. When GW released the Tectonic Fragdrill decided that was a perfect fit for what I was looking for. I didn’t really want the platform it came with, aesthetically it’s not a good match with the rest of the pieces, I just needed the mahoosive drill. However I do have a sizable sector mechanicus collection so they can just be added to that. But the drill can’t really just float in mid air, it needs to be connected to the rest of the platform somehow. So I decided to build my own drilling assembly. To do this I bought some plastic pipe from the plumbing section of our local DIY store. I then used some of the wall clips for said pipe and onto that I glued a series of ladder pieces to create a sort of track. On the other side I glued the track for the Fragdrill. When assembling the drill I didn’t add any of the extra attachments because a drill doesn’t work so well with a smaller drill and a mechanical arm hanging off the side. However I did assemble the smaller drill. I then fastened the small drill to the home made track and put the parent drill onto the official one that came with the kit. To paint it I primed it all with Plastikote Special Primer because that plumbing pipe doesn’t take acrylic paint. Then I undercoated it all with leadbelcher and then gave it a couple of coats of nuln oil to really darken it down. Next I washed the drill with Mournfang Brown, very diluted, to give it a nice oxidised look. I picked out a few details in Ironbreaker, such as the pipes. The red is all done using Vallejo Black Red with some of the, Mournfang Brown wash added to key areas before being washed with aggrax earth, the gold is Balthazar Gold highlighted with Gehennas Gold before also being washed with aggrax earth. Finally the central pipe was wash with Typhus Corrosion and drybrushed with Ryza Rust. This was then glued into the centre of the crater using contact adhesive.

The Eagle Eyed among you will also notice I painted the floor around the base of the assembly blue.  This isn’t the finished article, it’s just a base coat on which to build up a water effect.

After the buildings I painted all the flat, platform areas, including the roof sections. The main platform was given a filler wash before being primed with a medium grey (I used Mechanicus Standard Grey). Next I drybrushed everything up using Dawnstone and Longbeard Grey. The last step was a thin black wash to help blend the colours and also to bring out the tiling pattern etched onto the roof sections. It’s quite important to thin the wash for such large flat surfaces, I find you get a very patchy, streaky finish using something like nuln oil straight from the pot. Apart from the doors which I will do later, that pretty much completes the platform

With the buildings now ready to be painted the first step was to give them a filler wash to try and fill some of the joints. Once dry these are primed with Zandri Dust and drybrushed up using Tyrant Skull, Terminatus Stone and finally Wrack White. I don’t wash the buildings before drybrushing and this gives them a much paler look – you can get a deeper, yellower look by using a thinned sepia wash but I prefer the paler finish

The finished piece is set to be part of a desert themed board so the rocks were painted in a sandstone scheme to match some existing rock formations. First step, because it’s all extruded foam, was to give the entirety of the base a coating of wall filler. Once dry, this was sanded to get rid of any unsightly lumps before priming it with Army Painter Fur brown. As you can see this ended up all over the “feet” at the bottom of each leg – a risk I had to take really and I accepted an amount of repainting would be required. After that I gave the rocks a wash using a dark brown wash (I mixed it myself because aggrax earth is expensive when used in the quantities I go through on scenery builds). After the wash dried (several hours because it was applied liberally) the rest is all drybrushing. I drybrushed them in 3 stages using GW dry pajnts, first a very heavy drybrush of Golfag Brown followed by Tyrant skull and finally Terminatus stone.

For some finishing touches I added sand to the flat areas where it would be able to settle, this also helps delineate some areas as normal terrain (sand) or difficult terrain (bare rock). And at the bottom of the legs with the Iris hatches, I painted loads of Nurgle Rot to imitate some kind of toxic waste out flow

Lastly, to protect it I coated the whole lot in Mod Podge Matt. When using Filler on scenery this is really important because the filler can be quite brittle and the mod podge dries solid and really helps to protect it

At this stage, something had been concerning me for a while. Whenever I needed to work on it, I was required to pick it up and move it around; it is too big to stay out when not being worked on. I noticed that the walkways were the only real means of picking the piece up without permanently fastening the platform to the legs (something I don’t want to do to make it easier to store and transport in the future). Even with the platform removed from the top, the walkways do not feel like they are comfortable supporting the weight of the entire piece and this is the point that what was originally going to be a simple kit build turned into a major project.  I didn’t want to take the risk of it breaking in the future so I decided to build a base for it to reinforce it and make it easier to carry. He base consisted of a piece of hardboard cut into a 50cm x 50cm square onto which I built a frame using off cuts from an earlier joiner project. I then glued the feet to the corners of the frame, raising it up off the hardboard by an inch or so. Then I used expanding polystyrene foam and sprayed all around the frame to hide it, leaving a large hollow section in the middle. When this had dried it was then carved into shapes resembling rocks. The intention here is to create the impression that the rig sits over a drill site and at some point, the hollow section will be filled with a water effect and possibly a large drill platform will be built into the middle. I also added two wooden handles to the frame, prior to spraying the foam so that it is incredibly easy to lift and carry.

Before you can paint MDF you have to seal it. Now, I have some dedicated MDF sealer purchased from TTCombat which is absolutely amazing – If you’re painting a small building. As it comes in small bottles and is also a brush on medium I looked at the Promethium rig and decided there were better uses of my time. So I experimented and I used a few cans of cheapo spray varnish purchased from my local DIY shop (can’t even remember the name or brand now). I sprayed the entire model, probably twice in some places just to be sure (because you can’t actually tell once the varnish has dried). I then primed all the walls using Zandri Dust, all the metal using Army Painter Gun Metal any flat surfaces on the platform with Mechanicus Standard Grey and the chimney stacks were primed using Army Painter Chaotic red. Using the varnish as a primer worked a treat. To add a bit of texture I coated the legs of the structure in PVA and sprinkled some fine sand on before priming. However before I finished all the drybrushing I realised something about the entire piece that would require additional work so I stopped painting. The first issue was structural integrity – it was really flimsy. Second was the gaps in the joints of the wall sections – par for the course with MDF builds.
Because the chimney stacks aren’t fixed, I decided to finish them before doing any rework. To complete the chimney stacks I gave the edges (they’re octagonal) a drybrush with Mournfang Brown and then a lighter drybrush of leadbelcher to give them a worn, used look. Then around the vents at the top I used some black weathering pigment to create a sooty look, I also used this extensively on the inside of the chimneys. Then, to disguise the joints around the top, I painted them a bright red to look like altitude warning lights commonly seen on tall buildings.

Once the frame structure is in place, the buildings and other structures that sit atop the rig can be built. This bit is relatively straight forward, although the sliding doors were a bit of a pain in the arse – they’re a nice touch but they’re a bit of a faff. I also seemed to have one set of sliding doors less that the number of doorways so I ended up using one of the fixed door inserts for one door. It’s also pretty cool that you can remove the roofs for each building and access the interior. The top was a lot more straightforward than the structure, although again with some of the pieces they were hard to identify because they were loose in the box and the differences between some of the wall sections is incredibly subtle (and yes, it is possible to assemble it incorrectly). After the buildings were done, I Went back and fastened all of the railings on – my god that was painful. They’re not very complicated but there were 200 supports to be glued in place, which takes rather a long time using PVA glue. I did consider other adhesives however Superglue tends to be a little too brittle, gorilla glue takes almost as long to dry (and expands), epoxy is a faff as it needs to be mixed in small amounts and contact adhesive doesn’t readily allow pieces to be repositioned. So this took 2 nights to complete.

Following the instructions provided, the first pieces to build are the legs and walkways that make the frame on which the rig will sit. The instructions weren’t perfect and at times I did regret choosing this kit as my introduction to MDF kits, especially as the kit seemed to be supplied as a box of bits with very little of it still on the sheets. Some of the pieces were a little hard to find.  If you haven’t had any experience with MDF kits opening that box is a little overwhelming.

Anyway, I decided to crack on regardless and just sort if learn as I went.  One of the options when building the kit is to glue the walkways in place to give the structure some rigidity. If anyone is building a similar kit, I don’t recommend doing so I will go into more detail about the pros and cons of doing so later. However for now just be aware it doesn’t actually give it a great deal of rigidity and it remains quite fragile after you glue the pieces in place. Also, when you build the platform to sit atop the frame, just be aware that it doesn’t have a great deal of load bearing capacity, if you leave something heavy resting on it after gluing it will bend/bow in the middle.