With my initial 500 point list behind me, I turned my eyes onto what I could add to this army, to bring it to 750. I crunched numbers and, after a few days of debate, decided to go with the following:

warbiker squad w/nob

Battlewagon w/deffrolla

Big Mek on warbike

The battlewagon would take the place of my trukk, for now, until points allowed for both. I had already briefly brainstormed what I would do for everything, while working on the initial 500 points, but now it was time to start cutting plastic.

Today, we look at the Big Mek on warbike.

This took me a lot longer to think up than my previous conversions; about a week’s time. I knew the general gist of what I was trying to accomplish, but finding the right means saw me almost putting this guy on hold. Originally, when working on my other models, I had the idea to create something similar to the beautifully cinematic scene of the Bullet Farmer in Fury Road.

I loved this part, and thought it would be cool to have an ork weirdboy, standing on the pedals of a bike with his arms out and head tilted back, energy coursing through him. If you know 40k ork rules, then you’ll know what I quickly found out; no weirdboy on warbike! No matter… because you CAN give a bike to a Big Mek!

A conventional warbike would be too small, at least as-is. Many of the additions I looked at just didn’t fit it right, especially  grot tank treads, servohauler treads (I really wanted treads!). In the end, while surfing GW’s site as I often do when I am looking for inspiration, I remembered the Skaven Doomwheel. It would be perfect for a weird looking Mek Bike, with a little bit of work and a few cuts.

I started by cleaning and assembling the outer wheels. The skaven model has a lot of wood to it, so we would have to fix that. The Citadel mold line scraper made short work of the wood grain and made it nice and smooth, to go for a metal plate look.

I cleaned up the center piece and removed the support for the seat, as well as the wiring and warpstone (as seen on the right). Taking a warbike, I trimmed down enough to allow a snug fit into the center. I chose the warbike with petals already attached to the body, to allow something for our Big mek to stand on.

Next was the big guy himself. I used the legs cut from a Shokk Attack gun Big Mek and a torso cut from a savage orc; one of the two orcs in the kit holding the huge spear. While I could use the arms from the savage orc, I needed to do some small greenstuff work and reposition them, adding some muscle work. To cover the gap created by joining the two body pieces together, I made a belt from greenstuff and bits from the Shokk Attack Mek, as well as added some muscle work to smooth the transition. For the back, I mounted the big battery from the mek gun, using one of the platforms from the same kit. A warbiker wheel was swapped for the original, in the back.  For the wheels, now that they were all smoothed out, I added rivets and diamond plate patches to both.

This was as far as I could go, with the kit segmented into three pieces. I glued the main three together, adding the gears to the bottom of the back. My whole idea for this character, was to have him crackling with energy. It started as a weirdboy, moving to a big mek with kustom force field. I pictured him holding two jumper cable ends together, an arch of electricity going over head. This was all before the doomwheel came into the picture, however. The wheel seemed far too big to achieve this… but what if, since it was to be made from metal, the electricity went into it and not over? I clipped off the mek’s arms at the elbows, using the prong ends from the shokk attack gun as the rest of his arms. Wrapping thin strips of greenstuff around the joint, I used tweezers and pulled at the putty until it looked like ripped flesh covering parts of the metal. I left portions of the electricity in tact, on the ends, lining them up as if to lash at the rim of the bike.

With our Mek in place, it was time to wire this bad boy up! I rolled greenstuff into two very long, thin strands and carefully looped it through the bottom of the bike, over each shoulder, and draped it slightly before connecting it to each orb end of his…..hands? Sure, we will go with hands…

Only thing left to fix was the front. I clipped off the front knobs to smooth it out and make way for my additions. At the top, I used the plate that came with the kit, connecting the two larger gears, but shaved off the skaven icon. Instead, I sanded down the back of the warbiker boss pole and fixed it atop. I created a cowcatcher using small bits of plastic rod, the large plate piece from the Ogre Kingdoms Ironblaster kit, and two claws from the Gorkanaut kit for the ends. I secured two dakkaguns from the warbike kit on each side, right above the cowcatcher, and placed a horn from the gorkanaut above it, covering where the top most knob was.

Lastly, I trimmed the top of the flag that came with the doomwheel and replaced the skaven icon with the sideways orruk banner from the orruk boar chariot kit.

Another conversion using bits from eight kits total; seems to be my magic number. I am extremely pleased with how he turned out and cannot wait to paint and field him in a couple weeks.

Next time, we will look at more bikers and a Battlewagon. Please drop me and comments or questions you may have. Thanks for reading!

❤

Soph

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