Vaaish does Battletech

[Vaaish]

So I recently acquired a large collection of plastic battletech mechs and books. I'm in the process of fiddling with them and the plastic quality is pretty crappy. Not to be bested by crappy plastic I've set out to try converting and cleaning them up to an acceptable level. Most won't need much conversion but this guy, the Griffin really did need it to match the specs. Anyway it seems only GS actually sticks to this stuff although that needs to have the surface roughed up to work.

[mangozac]

Jon will be excited to see this - he's a big Battletech fan! Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you trying to mod the "crappy plastic".

Oh and your image link seems broken...

[Vaaish]

fixed. don't know how I missed that. Anyway, I'm almost tempted to just send them off to a friend and have resin casts made.... at least then I could glue the critters. However that goes against my sensibilities of trying to conquer the ornery material.

[mangozac]

Hahaha yeah I'd take the easy way out. Just think how easy resin is to work with

What scale is it? I'm assuming that's a 1" hex base?

[Vaaish]

heh... trying not to think how easy it would be. Anyway, three of the 6 are almost done. Just have to fill a gouge that appeared in the battlemaster, add in missiles, and base. I have no idea what the scale is, but it seems something close to 6mm or 15mm.

[paulson games]

Sweet....

It's funny I was in the process of taking pics of my new Battletech projects last night. The old Btech plastics are beyond horrible, If you would prefer to work with some resin casts just let me know. The newer plastics they have in the 25th aniversary box are considerably better but it's just no substitute for the metal models.

Battletech is something like 1/300 scale, the infantry is 6mm. Mech sizes are all over the place some of the "small" light mechs are as tall as the largest mechs in the game, the newer mechs are even worse in terms of staying on scale as they have had a major amount of scale creep. Battletech doesn't adhere to a hard scale as it's meant to be representational as in the rule book they state that if they went with a realistic scale you'd need to be playing on a football field to accomidate the weapon ranges.

One interesting thing about the game is that multiple units can share the same hex locations (but not mechs)

Anyways I'll be watching this for sure as I always love your painting.



ps plain old model glue works best for that cruddy plastic, supeglue doesn't seem to work all that hot on it.

[Vaaish]

Basically the same scale as Epic then. With as much effort as cleaning up the plastics has been with their horrible concave plates, vent holes and miscasts, your offer for the resin casts is looking mighty good. I've still got a Warhammer, Wasp, Wolverine, Shadowhawk, and Archer to go with a Rifleman being listed as unsalvagable due to the difficulty of modifying the plastics. I've tried several attempts and with the old 3rd edition plastics, plastic cement just doesn't affect it. I've had a bit more success with roughing up the plastic and using greenstuff or superglue.

Anyway, slight update, I finished the hole fixes and other adjustments like adding missiles in the launcher to the Battlemaster which gives me the first three ready for painting.

[paulson games]

That came out great, I could have sworn model glue worked on them but iut's been years since I fiddled with those. I think my brother and I ended up throwing ours away due to frustration of working with the material and we already had metals to use.

I do remember that the plastic takes very poorly to acryllic paints so it'll probably be best to hit them with a coat of spry paint as it'll bond much better.

Excellent job on cleaning of the battlemaster, the should pads on all those plastic all seem to warp inwards as I don't think they sprued the model die with enough vents and they all seem to have sunken depressions in the same areas.

[Vaaish]

Nah, I did a several test runs before I started in on the models I liked and nothing held it. Some later tests with superglue, roughing up the plastic, and holding it tight for a few minutes seem to have had better results and the Marauder and Cicada models seem to have stayed glued properly.

My tests with primer show them to be fine for hanling but as soon as something scrapes the primer it comes off even worse than metal. I'm hoping that it will be alright after I get them sealed.

[mangozac]

I really wouldn't take the risk and just duplicate in resin.

[Vaaish]

With the stuff Paulson is doing on the resin ones, I thought I'd go ahead and see what I could do with the plastics. After most of the weekend, here are the warhammer and woverine.

[paulson games]

These are looking good. Nice work restoring the panel lines in the greenstuff once primed you won't be able to tell the areas that have been repaired. I have a heck of a time doing straight panel lines like that.

[Vaaish]

Thanks, I usually have a hard time with them myself. This time I cut a piece of plasticard to size and used that to press in to make the lines before lightly burnishing it to sharpen the edges.

[Vaaish]

Minor update. I'm hoping to start in on these tomorrow now that I picked up the turquoise paint so I don't have to remember a 4 or 5 paint mix for each of the three using this color scheme. Actually, that was just a reason to post that in more cleaning tonight I stumbled upon what looks to be an even OLDER set of battletech minis. These were in two boxes of four mechs each, all labeled as omnimechs and cast in a mix of blue plastic and metal. This time around are 4 assault and 4 medium mechs. Soo... that adds another Daishi and Blackhawk to the hoard of clan Daishi's and Black hawks ( 4 Daishi and 5 black hawks.) as well as a Gladiator, Masakari, Man o' War, Dragonfly, Fenris, and Ryoken.

Looks like the clans are getting a good selection of mechs. Still no light mechs for them though.

[paulson games]

Those are the second generation plastics if I recall correctly.

The lance boxes of omni mechs were mostly a mix of metal and plastic where the innersphere lances for some reason are almost all plastic. From what I recall they don't seem to have the major voids and concave areas that the grey plastic do but a lot of their detail lines are kinda wavy and some have a fair amount of mold slip going on.

I always found the blue plastic to be very oily feeling and didn't take paint well.