"They have a Cave Troll..."

Brute strength and bad attitude, the humble Cave troll... wielding a scavenged dwarven heavy spear, or trident, most probably designed to try and deal with these huge beasts... and flailing its chain lash in front...

The model was actually part of a bulk figure haul I picked up some years ago... but it was in a poor state... its a plastic kit and had noticeable gaps in the joints, the plastic chain was hanging on by a 'thread', the trident was missing a prong, the back end of the spear shaft looked like something had chewed it, and it had no base... As I already had a metal painted up cave troll, I was in no hurry to do anything with it, so it languished in the bitz-box, unloved...

But with recent success using the Instant Mold, on the gyrocopter repair... I thought I'd dig it out and and see what I could do...

So I took a mold of the good side of the trident head, and cast up the prong with some Milliput... and filed it and glued it into place...

I had also sourced some model chain from local store, some time ago... one of those things you think will come in handy... for 'something' someday... well it found its use on this... I trimmed away the busted plastic chain and replaced it with the model chain... Greenstuff to fill the gaps and a new base, and we're ready for paint...

Painting was fairly straight forward, only a few colours to worry about... some shade wash and drybrushing and a little detail work, and job done... Simple base detail to reflect its rocky mountainous home...

So I have another Cave troll, to add to my Moria or Angmar forces... 80 points of brutish nastiness...

Cave trolls have decent Fight and good Strength and Defence and 3 attacks and wounds... but no Might, Will or Fate... in past scraps using one cave troll, they invariable get immobilised by some dratted spellcaster and then chopped up by a plucky hero, shot up by a barrage of archery or just mobbed by troop numbers...

Now that I have two, that hopefully will mean that while the enemy deals with one, the other can cause some mischief...

I sincerely hope so... plus if combined with some Might wielding heroes, then some Heroic moves and Heroic combats may be the order of the day,... and those new Monster Brutal power attacks my get a use after all :-)

A top down view just to show the cast trident prong... not perfect but pretty darn close and you probably wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't owned up on it!?

Looking forward to squashing a few men, elves and dwarves with this big fella, just so long as the sun don't shine, otherwise he might be needing some of that factor 1000 sunblock! ;-)

Instant mold to the rescue... dwarf gyrocopter... repaired.

A little while ago, I learned of a new product called Instant Mold... past blog post here. I ordered a pack as it seemed a very useful product...

Well I tried it out over the weekend...

Whilst going through my old warhammer dwarf stuff to sell, I came across one of my old broken gyrocopters... now back in its day, over a decade ago if not more, I was mighty pleased with this piece and even though I rarely played the game, I had this piece on display in my lounge, riding atop my CD stacking unit...

One day I came home from work and noticed it missing from its usual perch...

A quick search round the room found it just under the sofa... the base of the flying base was missing and part of one of the rotor blades had been broken off... it looked like it had been bent back and forth until it snapped!

I never found out the culprit but I had my suspicions... with various cats, dogs and people the potential suspects!

Anyway that's ancient history... since then its languished forlornly in a box...

So coming across it at the weekend, and remembering the Instant Mold, I thought I'd see what I could do.

The Instant Mold is fairly easy to use ... just put it in some hot water and wait a few minutes for it to soften, then press the item you want to copy into it, then drop it into cold water and it sets firm though malleable enough to get the copied item to pop out of the mold... so it's effectively a single side press mold. You could get clever and copy both sides of an item and put the two halfs together, but for this test I just did it single sided.

Basically I copied the top half of the intact end of the rotor blade. Then I mixed up some regular milliput and pressed it into the mold, and let it set for 24hrs...

Next day I popped it out of the mold, trimmed and filed it down, and glued it into position...

It came out like this...

Sadly the light glare has hidden the copied detail, but the mold and milliput have taken the detail of the copied rotor blade well, including the surface detail...

With the fixed blade in place, I was able to repaint up the model sufficiently enough to make it sale-able, and made a new base out of 3mm MDF.

Et voila! Good as new again, and will hopefully net me a few dollars in auction sale...

Personally I think this style of gyrocopter looks far better than the current 'flying boat' model GW have released as a gyrocopter... it looks bloody horrible!

Must admit I did ponder keeping it and converting it for Empire of the Dead... but I think its just a little too warhammer-ish and substituting the dwarf with a human would be a tall ask... so happy to sell it on and use the funds for some more LOTR goodies...

Market goods, and some mold making.

A couple of parcels arrived at Easter, so I guess they are Easter prezzies to me! First up was a set of Supplies and Groceries from TabletopWorld.

These are wonderfully generic enough to suit many settings including LOTR (Hobbiton), and both Empire of the Dead and Pirates gaming for a town square market area. I just need to build some market stalls out of balsa and drape over the top some striped awnings...

The next up was some InstantMold ordered from "CoolMini-or-not"...

I watched a how to on Google plus showing the instant mold in use and thought it would be great to try to copy 'single surface' pieces...

 Put the above two pictures together and I guess you can see where I am going with this...?

I also hope to do some more shields for my various LOTR troops... the uses are endless, as is the mold material; being re-usable!