Cast Molding with Super Sculpty

Some background first... I have these metal chaos shields I bought is Vancouver, BC from an *actual* GW store, roughly around 1990. That trip was a big deal for me. You see I live in Portland, Oregon and we just got our FIRST GW store in the area. In 1990, Vancouver, BC was the closest store to us (about 320 miles). We have always had plenty of FLGS near by (well over 10 in a 20 mile radius) but at the time they only ever stocked the GW basics.

A friend of mind and I rented a car and drove up north for some big event (a sale I think). We arrived at the GW storefront about an hour before it opened and got in line with heavy anticipation. The most amazing to me at the time was that they sold bitz and sprues out of jars!! (Kids, it wasn't like today where you could hop on the interwebs and type your way to your precious treasures) I am not sure I bought anything else but a variety of metal shield (all chaos themed) and weapon sprues (IG, Eldar, Ork and SM). 

Fast forward to about five years ago, where I tried my one and only attempt at casting. I had 8 Chaos Warriors that were sporting this one style of shield and decided to add another 8 Warriors (a mixture of old and new figures).  I only had 9 of the shields. At the time I was using shields to distinguish different units, so I needed 4 more shields to fill out the bigger unit.

Since I couldn't find more shields, I went about casting them. I had never made a mold before. Instead of investing money into all the equipment needed to do resin casting I tried a novel (IMO) and cheap approach--Super Sculpty molds using 2-part epoxy as the medium.

I took a large movement tray and filled it with Super Sculpty. Then I greased the shields with olive oil and pressed them down into the putty creating 4 negatives. Lastly I mixed up some 2-part epoxy and poured it into the molds. I could see a few bubbles develop, so I tapped on the table to get them out.

The next day I pulled out the pieces and scrubbed them with a toothbrush under the faucet.

Overall they turned out really well. The copies wont have wood grain texture on the back, but that is fairly easy to paint on. I applied an ink wash to one of them to show the detail. I didn't get out all the bubbles, but the damage is not too bad and easily fixable.

I will likely continue to (re)build my chaos army using the same notion with shields. I realize that is not very "chaosy", but I like the look.

The Chaos Fleet Enters Dry Dock

After the move now the damage assessment begins. Breaking out my Chaos fleet for Battlefleet Gothic, after a number of years and perhaps far too many moves, I have begun to see what it takes to bring them back up to fighting trim. There seems to be minor damage at least all around: masts snapped, pegs broken off of flying bases, turrets now falling off, paint chipped, etc. It looks like the only choice for a flagship at the moment is the Quietus, a Murder-class cruiser you can just make out in far upper right. Not shown are some escorts still in the box, and a couple of the more badly damaged larger ships. My Repulsive-class grand cruiser is in pieces but looks eminently repairable -- I'm afraid I'm hesistant to say the same about my Despoiler-class battleship, that seems to be missing some pieces for her bridge! I shall have to redouble my efforts to locate those pieces and hope that I didn't just dismiss them as a general bit of left over somewhere.

I'm not quite so confident when it comes to figuring out what to do for the flying bases. For my Necron Destroyers in 40K, I'm going with a modified version of a magnetic flying base that I first saw mentioned on Fritz's blog. I will cover my version of that in a future post (dealing with the Destroyers), but the basic idea is a small machine screw in the model and a replacement post bearing a magnet on the flying base. Should work fine for most of the jetbike-type of models, as they're fairly light and made of plastic. But what about the heavy metal ships? I don't think the same method is going to work quite as well, and, of course, they're the ones most likely to snap their flimsy stock flying pegs. Any ideas?


If you'd like to check out the Battlefleet Gothic rules, including the descriptions and stats of the various ship classes that I've mentioned, you can view the rules and supplemental PDFs here.