Battle Wagon á la Iron Hills

But before we look at the early beginnings of this battle wagon of mine, we shall take a moment and remember that there has also been a lot of great stuff from my blogging pals. As I am unable to comment on most blogs nowadays, I just post these links instead:

Werner Kellen's Radagast on Sleigh. Wow! It literally made me salivate, love the base!
Dalauppror's ship building project. Very inspiring - especially considering he just visited the Vasa Museum, which I made a post about a while ago. That is one inspiring museum, albeit a tad too dark for this llama's eyes.
Karavati's hot dwarves.
Dramatic Katases keeps going, year after year, producing habila models. This time a squadron of Knights of Minas Tirith. There is a rather amusing little picture there as well, which made me chuckle.

Again, take a look on these blogs, they are all filled with great content. With that out of the way, here are the Iron Hills Battle Wagon, phase one of this build/sculpt:

This is where I am at the moment, two days before Christmas, and incidentally the day I am taking at least eight days of rest from the hobby, what with getting a far away visitor and also spending at least two days renovating my ugly kitchen [ever so slightly, but anything is better than nothing].
     Below, some WIP-pictures. Beginning from the start, as they say:

Collecting pieces. The wheels are under way.

Small pieces for the repeter crossbow, parts from WWII-vehicles in 1:48.

Random pieces that may or may not be used. And a dwarf, awaiting conversion. The plan here is to convert two dwarves and sculpt another two, although I am not sure I am wholly up to the task. I hope I am.

Measurements are based on the movies. I saw that the wheels are roughly the same height as a noble dwarf and from there I could deduce the measurments further, although I had to game-ify said measurments in order to get a playable model.

Wheels attached to the wheel box, whatever it is called. This was when I realized the model is too long. which is why the first image (above) shows the wagon split into two pieces.

The driver's lectern (can't remember the correct term) is under way. This is all made in artist's card and the pictured pieces are just try-outs. The wheels are plastic bases, one from Renendra and one from Mantic, glued together and with a plastic card rim and plastic card details. I'll work some green stuff in there later.

The first pieces of the driver's thingie.

Some Dark Elf Indian-inspired knives became the scythe-blades on the wheels.

It is a low carriage, reminding me of Mexican jumping cars a bit.

Two pictures instrumental in creating this thing. The extended versions of the Hobbit-movies are too messy to get good screens of.

 I took another route with these blades. And the wheels. This image comes from, I belive, a Total War-mod.

Oh, bother... Four or six of these guys will have to get sculpted... some way... and by someone. Probably by myself. But I had hoped some Chinese guy had made something that would be readily available in the kids-stores, but alas.

Another picture from the Total War-project. This design took me a while to wrap my poor, fluffy llama-head around and only after abstracting the design into a boar's head I finally got a grasp of it...