The Tragic Breaking of a Titan

Here is a picture of my titan in action at a 12,000 pt game down at the LA Battle Bunker. My Eldar and a friend's Dark Angels versus the Orks, controlled by two other friends. This picture was taken before the game started, as we deployed our heavy armor up front, right on the line.

My friend needs to paint his stuff. I need to finish painting mine. The titan's paint job is not complete and his basing is certainly not done. I would be finished painting it by now, but tragedy befell.

Anyone who has driven on the 405 in LA knows how the road is bumpy and uneven. I had my titan on my lap (my Dark Angels friend was driving), guns facing up because I didn't have a case for it. I was reading the Apocalypse book (pictured in the background) when we hit a big bump, and the inertia of the book dropped it straight down on the tip of the right gun. Because it is slanted, it twisted and snapped the arm right off.

When we got to the bunker, I whipped out the superglue and managed to get it stuck back on temporarily. I'm still not sure how I did it, clay doesn't normally work well with superglue. The game began. On the first bit of movement, my friend reached past the Titan to move his stuff. He hit the barrel of the left pulsar and the side jets, knocking them right off. This time I couldn't get it glued back on. We continued the game though I was upset that my ally was destroying my own Titan!

On the second turn, he reached for some dice near my Titan, and broke the other pulsar off, in a different place than it originally broke! My now armless Titan was a mess. We finished the game and I plotted how to fix it.

It took me a while, but it's fixed now. I braced the arms with bronze rods, and put large rare-earth magnets on the ends, as well as on the guns so they're detachable now for transportation and clumsy hands. I braced all the protruding parts with tons of epoxy. It's a lot tougher now, but now I'm beginning to regret building it in clay, in case some other accidental brushings occur.

When I finish painting it, I'll post the pictures. Might be a while. I've got an autarch to paint.

Scratch-Built Revenant Titan, Part 2

Here's what it looked like totally put together. I used heavy epoxy to glue everything together. Looking back, I should have drilled holes in the wet clay so I could pin the joints.







I spray painted it roughly black before gluing, to make sure that black got in all the hard to reach areas. I used a lot of spray paint, because fired clay is so absorbent. This lets the nice acryllic paint coat the surfaces easier.




Next up is the semi-finished product, and the tragic story of its debut.

Scratch-built Revenant Titan

I made this a while ago, but here's my scratch built Revenant Titan. I'd love to own the actual Forgeworld model, but this will do. It was quite the undertaking. I started building it in February of 2008, after playing my first Apocalypse game. My friend had two scratch built Stompas which wreaked havoc, and I wanted to join the fun and show him up.

I have a lot of experience working with clay, so I built it out of that. Clay is wonderful but has some limitations. Once it has been fired, it is very very difficult to drill or do any other post-construction. Also, when it breaks there's not a lot you can do to fix it. No pinning, only glue and you'd better hope it's in a glueable spot. This came back to haunt me after the first game I used it in, but more on that story later.

Here's the starting stages:



You can see that I started out with a round clay base, but I abandoned that idea after I realized I wouldn't be able to drill holes in it after the fact, so I'd have to know exactly where the feet would go, so I bought a 7" round base at Michael's. I messed up on a few parts, after the fact it was obvious. I used printed out pictures for my references, but they messed up the detail slightly because some were so light. I should have referenced the computer more often for accuracy, but ah well. Next update will be the construction of the titan.