Half A Job Harris Rides Again!

You may of noticed that I've slowed down on the postings here, to be honest, that's because I have finished the project and haven't thought to update here. Half A Job Harris rides again! And here it is in ,almost, all it's glory!So the tank is finished at last, painted up and has been used in battle and looks great, no negative comments, just jokes about over compensating for something...I do have another picture on my phone at the moment showing the size difference between the Poxy Proxy Predator and the real sized thing and will do the technomancy required to get it up. So on to my next project, not sure what that will be yet, have to log on again sometime to let you know! I took my time i know but here it is, Poxy Proxy Banesword next to a Rhino APC.

Size really does matter.

Well today I'm filling some time while sorting out my re-education.

So I've mentioned size being an issue with the Poxy Proxy Predator, and said I'll bring this up later, well now is as good a time as any.

As I said the Land Raider is the biggest tank you can buy that's made by Games Workshop, and it is rather large, but not as big as mine. We found this out the other week at the Coppull and Chorley Knights, the game club I attend, when I fielded my Tank against a Deathwing Army with 2 Land Raiders. My tank was a little bit larger than the Land Raiders. This did lead to some barracking about how mine's bigger than yours, even if it is by accident.(On the plus of this argument is that my army, The XIX Chapter, now has a great centre piece to from around and with a bit of tweaking I can use some in game rules that apply to one of the Space Wolves Dreadnoughts to represent what the Predator means to the Chapter.) But overall everyone seemed to like my efforts so far, at the game I'd actually painted it black and bleached bone, the colours of my army, and even the none gaming friends that saw it said that it looked a hell of a lot better just for that simple coat of paint.

As you can see orange and green don't quite work together. Since this was taken the tank commander has been removed from the model as it didn't go with the look I was after, and the turret itself is now moved slightly backwards from this position, but as it's held on by blu tac, that is only a minor detail. Also the side weapon mounts have been drilled out and with the addition of some more Lego & grey stuff now sit level with detailing on the track mud guards.

So 2 tracks and an orange/black plastic box and a dollop of blu tac are in front of me waiting to be used. I tried a couple of different ideas, but (again) the result was huge, far to tall to be used in game. So I tried the box without the lower black half and this looked to low, and was difficult to place, and would of been a bugger to set if I'd tried to glue it like that, (the Lego plastic is very resistant to glue). So I was sat wondering if I could get something else to use as a bottom hull, when the thought came to turn the top hull over and try that as a bottom hull, it looked like this

This also gave me something to glue my upper hull to.

Poxy Proxy Predator the beginings

Seeing as I can't get more than 1 photo per post, I'm doing this the long winded way!

So below is the donor tank

This is a model of, I believe, an American Abraham's tank. I removed the turret, the the engine cowlings and some other bits was left with a shell, I tried sticking the box on the top but this looked daft, and far to big (more on that subject later!), so I got out my trusty cutters and set to work trimming down the body. After 10 minutes not so careful cutting I had the tracks off and the upper hull set to one side, ready to bin. The hard part was getting the engine out, this had to be done with some care, I planned on giving this to a guy at the club, thinking that it would look okay built into his Necromunda set.

The root of the idea

So at long last someone has actually asked where the idea for this project came from. And well it is rather easy to explain, disappointingly.

In White Dwarf, the games workshops own magazine, there was once an article on the Predator Battle Tank, with an exploded diagram and a lot of fluff on the tank itself. How it was based on the Rhino APC which is built from an ancient Standard Template Construction, and at the bottom of this article was a small paragraph, relating to a some redundant design features that show that between the Land Raider and Rhino there exists another type of tank. This one throw away line has lead to me spending hours working on this project to build what I'm calling poxy proxy Predator.